MELT: Technique
The class is influenced by Nelson’s 20 years of continuing study with Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein, and by more recent studies in the Alexander Technique, Contact Improvisation and Body-Mind Centering®. We begin with a warm-up that focuses mostly on our skeletal structure to access the deep supporting muscles of the body, allowing mobility and suppleness in the superficial muscles and emphasizing the connection to and use of the floor. The class builds from simple exercises to phrases of movement that involve moving boldly and covering space, and finding a strength, specificity and ease in our dancing.

MELT: Alexander Technique/ Spontaneous Performance
An improvisational performance lab exploring function, form and presence vis-à-vis the Alexander Technique with Shelley Senter and Ensemble Thinking with the Lower Left Performance Collective. As longtime collaborators, these artists aim to refine the organization of the performing brain-body-mind as an integrated system for a more efficient and complex embodiment of the skills called for in spontaneous performance. Concepts such as direction, inhibition, solo and group improvisational strategies will be investigated.

MELT: Making Dances
Making Dances is an expansive process of observation and inclusion; a journey away from the narrow social constructs created to standardize human behavior. I see choreographic thinking as a research methodology and feel it could be applied to many other disciplines as well. My choreography finds its logic outside the realm of “translation� and it is this lens that I try to offer students as I assist them in locating their own creative voice. My method for “teaching� choreography grew organically out of my own auto-didactic research. I guide artists as they create problem-solving systems based on the structure of their own thought processes urging them rigorously pursue the “science� of their poetics. The class rejects a “good/bad� system of assessment. Through the daily creation of little dance works, the artist focuses his/her attention on developing an analytical eye for the fundamental metaphors in the work. The process involves locating, through a hyper-personal investigation, the seeds of a universal voice. Time is spent considering the elision of personal reference with common human themes and philosophies and the unique way in which these co-exist in dance. We examine the interrelatedness of elements such as the emotional body, internal music, structure, history, culture, aesthetics, and more. The goal is to gain the objectivity necessary to scrutinize the referential arena of one’s work resulting in dances whose legibility is found in exactitude of structure - detached from the denotative interpretation of “symbols�.

MELT: Technique
This movement class will develop from simple skeletal mobility sequences to full-out movement forms. Emphasis will be placed on the joints, examining how their range of motion relates to alignment, support, weight and pathway in the course of movement. We will also focus on how the inherent lines in the body's anatomy can offer movement material in a full range, from abstract to dramatic.

MELT: Body of Sound
Join an inspired and nurturing week focused on voice-movement principles and practices. Warm up to vibration and waves, liven to impulse, sample vowels and consonants, tap into rhythms and bones, stir the soundbody and its yearnings. Intention, story, memory lay the ground for in-depth sharing in a heart-centered circle. What unfolds? Our true being in voice-movement vignettes, gateways to personal balance, horizon, and performance reach.

MELT: Dance Making
The workshop will rely on discourse, both choreographic and verbal, as a means of critical reflection of our own taken-for-granted assumptions about dance and choreography, as well as the assumptions of the traditions in which we each participate. Participants will develop palettes of materials�movement, ideas, questions�via directed improvisation, then experiment to find different strategies for organizing the materials. Points-of-departure for investigation include: how the audience builds a theory while watching a dance, what constitutes dance-events in each artist’s work, how events are framed, issues of consonance and dissonance, and participation or non-participation in existing traditions.

MELT: Lighting Design for Dance (schedule can be found in times on schedule page)
Full schedule and description link to your left! This classroom and practical workshop will be a technical tutorial and discussion about the process of creating lighting designs for dance. All efforts will be made to demystify lighting in order to promote informative decision making and more easeful discussion in future collaborative processes. Participants must be present for all workshop dates. No prior experience needed.

MELT: Technique
This class seeks to prepare an articulate, alert and neutral body, ready for precise dancing with intricate coordinations that we will work on together. There is a simple, straightforward, continuous warm-up that relies on the use of release, alignment, momentum, weight and strength. Clarity, simplicity of movement, attention to detail and concentration will be our goal.

MELT: Spirals
Learn a choreography which mobilizes all our freely moveable joints and exerts all our major muscle groups from their most elongated to their most shortened lengths. While moving through arcing pathways, each segment of our body volume is constantly changing its relationship with each other segment, as well as with gravity and our performance environment. This type of continuous change provides a stimulating warm-up for our sensorimotor nervous system as well as our musculo-skeletal system.

MELT: Re-Education of the Body- Klein Technique as Taught by Barbara Mahler
Klein technique first began its devolvement by Susan Klein in 1972, as a means of understanding and healing an injury. I, Barbara, began to study in 1977 as a way to discover my own body, as well as to heal and understand my movement possibilities as an individual, and to heal. The work continues to grow and develop with my teachings, that of Susan Klein, and the outreach of our students. It is a dance/movement technique. The purpose of the work done in class is to re-educate one’s body with an interweaving of theory and practice on a physical level. The result is a clarity and sureness of movement, efficiency, fluidity, and a new level of understanding the innate intelligence of one’s body. The class is open to all levels, dancers and non-dancers alike. Everyone works at their own level, from a deep internal understanding of ones’ unique body. This workshop will focus on the deep internal musculature that lies closest to the bone within the pelvis, for the experiential understanding of the connection between the pelvis and the legs – the deepest and most supportive connections.

MELT: Dance-Making
Known for creating a new movement vocabulary with each new work, Uchizono guides a composition class, delighting in ways to develop material from a specific idea while exploring how one looks at work. “I am interested in offering opportunities for the young choreographer to be able to find frameworks or mental structures with which to make dance, experience it, look at it, and critique it. I believe that by doing so they will develop an understanding of the aesthetic and conceptual concerns that drive their own work. I see the nature of choreography as a practice that employs both the formal and the expressive, both the sensory and the intuitive.� Sections from the company’s repertory relating to the ideas explored in the lab add to the experience.

MELT: Your Dance - Your Technique
Each session will be organized around a specific point, or points, of technical research. These explorations will range from functional anatomy: "How is the spine’s energy centered in the body? And how do I use this experience of “centering� as a key to release and support for movement?" To observations about awareness: "How can/does the “inward eye� project outward� "How can I use my emotional self as a source of letting go?" To larger theoretical questions about dancing's relationship to the rest of life and the universe! We will use shared hands on information, exploratory exercises and improvisational movement to find personal relationships to these questions. Individuals will be guided and encouraged to apply and bring these technical discoveries into their own deep, passionate, physical movement explorations; to enrich and expand their personal vocabularies through them.

MELT: Contact Improvisations - "We have ignition"
Skills, practices, and investigations of pure contact improvisation using raw physics, reflexive exchanges and sensorial responses. For beginners who want to acquire basic knowledge of falling, rolling, catching, jumping, listening, and following flow and resistance; for intermediates who want to deepen their experience of transitions between horizontal and vertical play; and for the advanced who want to explore the subtlety of intention, touch and direction.

MELT: Fundamentals of Finding and Using Powerful Props
As a warm-up to the prop work we will have a chance to work with basic Authentic Movement as well as explore some advanced partner work. First, we will embark on the intense journey of dreaming up a potent prop(s) to work with. Following, we will give great attention to find the most original, possibly unusual, and powerful use of the chosen prop. We will leave room to detect a complimentary, interactive partner prop. A supplied score list will not only supply us with an ideal dance score, but it will serve as inspiration to create a personal score ourselves.

MELT: Technique
Using improvisational and set warm-ups we will focus on the volume and weight inside the body and its relationship to the floor. Exercises that bring awareness to the sternum and pelvic floor encourage the feeling of release in the limbs from those places of support, allowing us to fall and suspend off-center. Using these physical tools inside technical patterns and phrase material, we will work towards a more grounded and direct approach to movement.

MELT: Improvisation. Doing It.
What is your first impulse? Can you trust it? What happens when the judge falls asleep? Can sight be a handicap? Can you know too much? This is a workshop about Improvisation.

MELT: Composition- In Between States
In this workshop we will research individual approaches to composition and form through perceptual experiments with space, time and energy. We will isolate improvisational activities such as making transitions, creating locations, and sustaining energetic states; and other strategies to bring a deeper understanding to our personal and intrinsic improvisational and compositional logics. From this process we will create small pieces and scores while looking at the potential of dance to actively engage contemporary issues through perception and embodied practice and form.