Technique
This technique workshop investigates the relationship between how and what you dance. The development of physical and expressive range is encouraged by a simple, function oriented, sense based warm up drawn from innate physical patterns that emphasize ease of movement and heightened awareness. Considering the implications of body image (and/or the act of perception as the content of performance for both the viewer and the doer), broadening physical range, and playing with various approaches towards perfroming set material are the primary concerns in this workshop.

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

Composition
This workshop is for choreographers and others interested in dance-making processes, with the goal of exposing, distilling and magnifying each artist’s individual voice. 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.

Performance Technique
Concepts of body architecture, locomotion through space, and body centering are explored. The focus is centered on O'Connors dance language, which incorporates ballet, modern, ethnic, and historical forms, both real and invented, combined with his unique system for phrase structured derived from a physical stream of consciousness. This system is aharaterized by an exaggerated density of steps, extreme tempo change, and inorganic sequencing transformed into logic. O'Connor concentrates on developing the dancer's ability to interpret the abstraction put forth by a choreographer. His belief that the performer is not a tool, but a peer in the creation of dance informs his teaching as he encourages the student beyond the kinetic experience to aspire to artistry.

Horizons
Learn a warm up choreography designed to enhance visual focus, hand-eye coordination, articulation of hands and feet, freedom of the spine, and the dancer's own phrasing. In addition, this sequence can be used as a physical and mental preparation of performance.

Making Dances
O'Connor has created a methodology for teaching based on his own auto-didactic research into choreography. This process, which discards the prevalent methods of teaching composition based on the reinterpretation of musical forms, concentrates on ways to deepen a personal choreographic voice and how to read the underlying message in one's creative impulse. Through the daily creation of phrases, the artist focuses his or 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. To facilitate a method for developing a "vocabulary" and to extract meaning from it, a series of questions are posed. These are based on the emotional range in the body, internal music, dramatic structure, history, culture, and the inter-relatedness of the elements in the work. O'Connor's desire is for the artist to internalize a system of problem solving based on his or her thought process and develop the ability to bring it into the realm of theater. The goal is to gain the objectivity necessary to scrutinize a work and bring clarity to its thematic center.

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

The Athletics of Intimacy; Improvisations
This workshop combines skills and practices of contact improvisation, applications of Body-Mind Centering, and tutoring of somatic improvisational appraoches in solo, duet (strong emphasis on partnering) and ensemble dancing. I am interested in the very physical, very sensorial, abd the very imaginative, and in discovering new challenges and risks within our movement.

Making Work
Tis workshop focuses on the creative process in making body/movement-based performance/dance. A variety of approaches to creating-instinctive, improvisational, analytical- is exploited to uncover your individual interests, your process, and your work. The workshop consists of unequal parts making, discussing, improvising, and watching the work of other workshop participants. My interest is in creating a space in which traditional notions of dance are critiqued, absorbed, or discarded in the servivce of creating performance that comes from a vital place. An ongoing question throughout the workshop is how to make work that is located in a contemporary context.

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.

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.

Improvisational research/ knowing the will
In this workshop we will research our individual approaches to improvisation as a performance 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.