Technique: Sissy Vogue Vop
Sissy: a timid man or boy considered childish or unassertive; Vogue: the popular taste at a given time; Vop: a high-spirited kick tossed into the air. This workshop will borrow from the aesthetics of vogueing to investigate extreme physicality, "fierceness or attack," and attitudes as an approach to movement. Exercises derived from the voguing culture such as dips, twirls, and spins are used to connect poses and postures in large athletic phrases that express the physical poetics of battling gracefully. Through guided improvisation, we will also explore the culture behind the movements in an attempt to channel somatic pluralism that derives voguing's improvisations.

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

Improvisation: Dancing
In these classes we will have an opportunity to explore and extend our sensitivity to our own energy and movement potential through the use of creative, internally motivated or self-directed approaches, such as Skinner Releasing and Authentic Movement, as well as other movement/energy practices. An underlying motivation is to examine personal liberty in relation to dance practice.

Composition: Making Dances
Tere O'Connor's choreographic workshops grew organically out of his own auto-didactic research into the form. Rejecting a "good/bad" paradigm, his desire is for artists to create problem-solving systems based on the structure of their own thought process and to rigorously pusue the "science" of their poetics. 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. We will look to create dances whose legibility is born of internal systems- detached from the denotative interpretation of "symbols".

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.

Klein/Mahler Technique: Re-Education and Respect for the Body
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 and organic level. Movement efficiency and postural re-education begin with detailed work on the key structural supports of the body, the pelvis and the Sacro-illiac joint. Our movement work will define and make a reality of "bringing the pelvis on top of the legs". The result is clarity, sureness of movement and a new level of understanding the innate intelligence of the body. The class is open to all levels, dancers and non-dancers alike.

Composition
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 be asked to collect palettes of movement and movement ideas via directed improvisation, then experiment to find methods to organize the material so that it has the greatest potency to the dance-maker. Some points of departure for investigation and discussion include: how the audience builds a theory while watching a dance; what constitutes dance-events in each artist's work; how events are framed within a dance; how each artist creates consonance and dissonance; and participation, non-participation or transgression of existing traditions.

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 differnet 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.

Spirals
Learn an eight minute warm-up for dance, which mobilizes all the joints and exerts all major muscle groups from the most elongated to the most shortened lengths. While moving through arcing pathways, each segment of the body's volume is constantly changing its relationship to each other segment, gravity and the performance space.

Releasing
Through spacially 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 howto 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.

Contact Improvisation
In this workshop we will research our individual approaches to composition and form. We will isolate various activities such as making transitions, creating locations and textures, sustaining energetic states and other strategies to bring a deeper understanding to our own personal and intrinsic compositional logic. We will compose 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 and not in our agency to reclaim and reenergize meanings and mistakes in the act of performance. We will dance for each other a lot.

Technique
This warm-up and movement workshop 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 articulation. The class will culminate in phrasework and traveling sequences.

Improvisation: Foundations of Improvisation: Researching Movement and Mind
We look at the ordinary movement from our daily lives as a source for our dancing and study how the mind and body work together to compose our actions. The primal patterns of locomotion that umderlie and support our physical action are a foundation and warm-up: rolls, spirals, crawling patterns, crouching, sitting, standing, walking, running and the transitions between. We learn one specific exercise that is a key for researching our own movement and mind and a tool to focus on the details of our sensory experience and perceptions. Areas of focus are: gravity, touch, vision, rhythm and sequence.

Improvisation: The Athletics of Intamacy
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.

Alexander Technique: Dance and Alexander Technique
This class will guide you to more fluidity, ease, balance, sense of direction, movement flow and awareness in your movement through exploring the principles of Alexander Technique. You will discover how you think about your movement now and how your thinking and seeing can adjust to enhance your movement, making it more connected and efficient. You will learn more about the immediate connection between your mind and body- how your thinking impacts your movement. Classes will include working in partners, individual awareness movement, full body dancing, and time to address the movement concerns of the course participants.

Composition/Repertory
Known for creating movement vocabulary with each new work, Uchizono conducts a composition class, delighting in ways to develop material from a specific idea while exploring how one looks at work. Sections from the company's repertory relating to the ideas explored in the lab add to the experience.