Technique
This class encourages moving into spatial extremes outside of imagined boundaries. The warm-up, using elements from Yoga, Ballet, and Release Technique, focuses on discovering and strengthening connections within the body's structure and maximizing the effects of gravity and momentum to move into space. Through phrase-work, we will explore the tension between secure, grounded placement and a sense of being out of control, as well as learning to use breath to maintain a center from which to explode.

Releasing
Through spatially designed images, we will enable ourselves to let go of hidden tensions and realign with the natural forces of gravity and counter balance. Through the releasing process, we will learn how to move with more freedom and economy. Spontaneous movement explorations will allow us to creatively integrate these changes in our bodies. The experience of seeing into our bodies will give us a wonderful tool for improvisational dance.

Composition
Beginning with highly structured improvisations, this class will explore how to begin, how to continue, how the mind helps how the mind hinders, how to feel/know the "yes" when the body, mind, and heart are alive and in agreement, how to keep working when the "yes" doesn't come, how the here effects what you do, how what you hear affects what you see. Through solo, duet, and group forms, we will explore different ways of unearthing and structuring the voices waiting to be heard through movement, ideas, sensation, deep feeling, and memory. Music, words, and environments of all kinds will be explored.

Technique
Using the luxury of five continuous days of dacing together, we will take the time to investigate different states of awareness. Each class will be three-fold, beginnig 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 are designed to build our knowledge of individual and physical patterns that may block us from deepening the use our selves as artists. In the process of learning the 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.

Improvisation: The Athletics of Intimacy
This intensive will combine applications of Body-Mind Centering, skills and practices of contact improvisation and tunings of improvisational approaches in solo, duet and ensemble dancing. We will make the invisable visable, learning more about the interior of the body and our ideas and find pathways to external space, time and place. We will play with structures for improvising where we can both witness and participate, discovering new challenges and risks in our movement vocabulary. Body-Mind Centering is an eclectic and dynamic approach to somatic training and re-educatin developed by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Contact Improvisation is a duet dance form initiated by dancer Steve Paxton in '72 that investigates balance, trust, momentum, gravity, stillness and perceptual play.

Composition: Composition/Physical Relationships
Through a series of improvisations and choreographic sketches, we will explore making dances as the process of creating a series of physical relations, both between performers and within time and space. We'll begin by cultivating internal bodily states through the use of images and partner work, manifesting these states in movement. From there, we'll reverse this process, starting with various sources including memory, text and our cultural environment, to structure physical situations which in turn effect our bodily states. With information moving in both directions, we'll set out to mix and (mis)match our materials, using limitation as an integral part of composition, in our search for dance that exhibits a personal movement language, an evocative aesthetic sensibility, intelligence and guts.

Technique
This warm-up and movement class will develop from simple skeletal mobility sequences to full-out, spatial movement forms. Emphasis will be placed on finding weight and fluidity in the arms and torso, while generating a complimentary pliancy in the legs. The class will culminate in phrase work and traveling sequences.

Orbits
Learn a warm-up choreography designed to lubricate and warm-up the inside of the hip joint itself, strengthen and lengthen the muscles that move the hip joint, and organize the complex and variable coordinations of these muscles required for performing rotation (turning-out and turning-in), leg gestures in all directions, turning and jumping.

Composition in Improvisation
In this workshop we will research our individual approaches to composition and form. We will isolate various improvisational activities such as making transitions, creating locations, sustaining energetic states, and other compositional strategies to bring a deeper understanding to our own personal and intrinsic improvisational logic. We will create scores that access our deeper layers of consciousness and challenge our assumptions about how we dance, uncovering both raw and sophisticated compositional patterns. I am curious about how meanings get affixed to particular moments in performance both willfully and not, and our agency to reclaim and reenergize meanings and mistakes in the act of performance. We will dance for each other a lot.