Deepening Technique, Explorations in Body-Mind Centering®
In this participatory workshop, RoseAnne Spradlin will introduce explorations of the embryological origins of human development to explore core concepts at the heart of dance expression and technique: the formation of the body's midline axis and the development of the spine; the relationship between the front body, middle body and back body; the spiraling development of the limbs; and the cellular source of the body's breath and strength. All concepts will be explored in relation to both form and expression, feeling and perception, through guided somatizations, partnering and individual improvisations.

Technique
The classes are influenced by Nelson’s 25 years of continuing study in the work of Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein, and by more recent studies in Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais® and Body-Mind Centering®. We will begin with simple exercises and stretches that encourage mobility and suppleness in the superficial muscles, establish clear connections and directions through the bones, and create a dynamic and weighted relationship with the floor. We will take this information and apply it to phrases of movement that involve moving boldly, covering lots of space, taking chances off balance and finding a strength and ease in our dancing.

Making Dances: Using dance as the question and answer
Making Dances explores our relationship to dance as a viewer and a maker through observation, dialogue and making. Known for creating a new vocabulary with each new work, Donna Uchizono revels in sharing the process of revealing one’s artistic voice. “I am interested in offering opportunities for the dance maker to look, experience, dialogue, create, so called ‘fail’ and succeed; discovering frameworks or structures derived from one’s own concepts, history, embodiment or through the work itself while interrupting habitual patterns that no longer serve. Through the daily practice of dance making, we journey through the creation of methods from one’s own thought process, explore ‘interruption’ and ‘distillation’, develop awareness of the concerns that drive one’s own work and identify concerns in the work of others, discourse dance’s potential to engage in contemporary issues, examine the possibility of ‘universal’ magical moments and lean towards a more informed artistic voice using ‘dance’ as the question and answer verbally, physically and philosophically.�

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 musculoskeletal system.

Technique
Using the luxury of five continuous days of dancing together, we will take the time to investigate different states of awareness. Each class will be three-fold, beginning with a guided improvisation to inspire the imagination to expand into the unique life of different parts of the body, followed by dancing within technical forms to support our range and work as dancers, and concluding with a phrase that integrates concepts of weight, lightness, initiation, and intention. The technical forms and phrase will be specifically structured to build our knowledge of individual physical patterns that may be blocking us from deepening the use of ourselves as artists. In the process of learning a phrase, we can observe how we retain “set� material. The merging of the unconscious life of movement through improvisation and conscious attention to the physical imagination is part of the energizing practice we will explore in each class.

Contact Improvisation Practices
Contact Improvisation, begun by dancer Steve Paxton in 1972, is a dance of improvising/partnering based on physics of touch, weight, balance, momentum, stillness, flow, resistance, and perceptual play. In this workshop, we will learn specific lifts and rolls and practice developmental patterns, body puzzles, and forms which shape the body and space with odd timings and unusual perspectives. We will create duet dances that are dynamic and alive in the moment. We will become more tuned to center and subtleties of touch, direction, and intention, and explore musicality and phrasing.

for bodies and other stuff...
A composition workshop for choreographers balancing the presence of the body within a performance environment of ideas, sounds, objects, and imagery. Consisting of strategies both physical and intellectual the workshop explores trans-disciplinary collaboration, audience participation, and media use through group and individual activities and dialogue. It attempts to enhance the ability of artists to consider and navigate the multiplicity of lenses through which their work is seen.

LD4D - Lighting Design for Dance
Please Note: This workshop is 6 days long. Schedule: MON TUES WED 6:30-10pm, THURS FRI 5:30-9:30pm, SAT 10am-6pm. Optional: TUES WED 10am-5pm. 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. This class is designed for anyone interested in dance lighting including dancers, choreographers, and stage technicians. Participants must be present for all workshop dates (unless noted as optional).

The Alexander Technique: A Critical Practice
The Alexander Technique is a means of identifying habits that may interfere with the ability to attend to the moment and make conscious choices as we carry out our intentions. This workshop aims to introduce principles of the technique and examine common assumptions (and their accompanying sensations) of such dancerly concerns as strength, support, stability, subtlety, and power, opening the body and brain to new information. Through observation, dialogue, and hands-on work, we'll examine and refine how we organize ourselves in time and in space and address the unconscious things that we "do" when we're "doing" dancing.

Choreographic Thinking
In this class we will focus on elemental aspects of choreographic process and the attendant metaphors and philosophies implied through practice. We will initiate the construction of a highly individualized set of tools to find ways of locating meaning in dance on its own terms. Each student will create problem-solving systems based on the structure of his/her own thought process and pursue the application of these. We will question the assumptions or choreographic “default settings� of dance history and present-day tropes, re-contextualizing these through the dual lenses of personal research and contemporary culture. We will discuss ideas around abstraction and narrative, intentionality, our internal sources’ exertion on the surface of our work, and many other concepts born of our exploration.

Technique
This class will focus on alignment, weight, clarity of momentum, and breath, using influences from Qi Gong, Alexander, yoga, modern and postmodern movement constructs to release the joints, connect to the floor, lengthen the spine, activate the senses and warm the body. We continue the exploration in the second half of class through a combination of improvisation, phrase material, and other choreographic structures to expand the experience of dancing.

Technique
This class aims to systematically ready an alert body and mind for intricate and robust dancing. Through a progression of activities, we will try to increase our self-awareness, level of articulation, strength, technical facility and focus. The warm-up is simple and straightforward, with an emphasis on alignment, physical mechanics, and release, leaving space for sensation and feedback from our bodies as we work collaboratively to arrive at dancing. It is through the practice of doing phrase work that we can hone our skills and apply our varied training.

Systems/Scores: practice/process
In this workshop we will investigate how me make scores out of the systems that we live in, observe and are attracted to. A score is an open structure that creates improvisational choices for a particular context. We will create systems for movement that can be layered into performance scores. This will be our practice. How does the practice influence our approach to performance? How do we observe and shape this process? How can our practice of making scores help us to observe the possibilities in movement and choreographic systems? We will work on presence, states of moving and scales of sensation and time. We will perform our scores daily.

Touch Move Talk Write
This workshop involves four basic practices – touching, moving, talking, writing. The practices are immediate, and organized in different sequences and durations, producing new contexts and results each day. It's up to each participant to bring their experience to these structures. Rather than learning a collection of compositional tools, this can be a place for conversation about what is happening in dance, in choreography, and in our studio practice, right now. Please bring a notebook.

A Re-Education – Klein Technique (TM)
Klein Technique (TM), in development since the mid 70's by Susan Klein, is a cohesive integration of body and mind, based on the principles of change, possibilities, efficiency through process. In order to move most efficiently it is necessary to release or let go of the muscles that hold us back from moving and fix the body into a set and locked configuration. The aim is to release the muscles so we can get down to the deepest tissue, the bone. When the bones are aligned we become connected; the body becomes efficient and alive. We will work on the deep internal musculature and supportive connections that move and ground us - between the pelvis, the legs and the earth and back up to the head. The result – a clarity and sureness of movement, efficiency, fluidity, and a new level of understanding the innate intelligence of one's body. Open to all levels; all styles.

Dancing or Trip The Light Fantastic
Through warm-up into dancing. Class consists of both set and improvised material, building on a movement phrase. Along the way, we will mess with the material, re-organize, add, take away, destroy, repair, consider nuance and gesture, and sharpen the viewing eye when looking at movement detail. Lots of dancing.

Dance Making Strategies
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.