MELT: Choreography For Warming-up to Dance
Participants will learn a selection of choreographic materials created by Irene during her ongoing interactions with professional dancers and dance teachers. These choreographies can be used as a very efficient warm-up for dance, as well as a musculo-skeletal conditioning program, neuro-muscular fine-tuning, and mental preparation for the greater awareness and expansiveness required of us all as creative performing artists. Areas of focus might include: dynamic trunk/pelvis stabilization, foot sensitization and articulation, hip joint mobilization, freeing the chest and shoulders.

MELT: Technique
This summer we will take the time to let our bodies and minds explore what we need, what we want, and what the moment calls for. Class will begin with improvisational structures to allow our minds to expand into the possibilities of our physical imaginations. We will then work with technical forms and phrases to freely explore how our patterns may be blocking us from more deeply experiencing weight, lightness, initiation and intention. The luxury of dancing together for five continuous days will allow the possibility for pleasure, rigor, inquiry and change. The merging of the unconscious life of movement through improvisation with conscious attention to the details of dancing is part of the energizing practice we will explore in each class.

MELT: 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, subtleties of touch, direction, and intention, and explore musicality and phrasing.

MELT: Choreographic Shift
In this workshop we will engage evolving definitions of choreography to generate tools for making dance and performance. With the current backdrop of inter-disciplinarity in contemporary art as an assumption, we’ll explore how immersion in a single discipline might also create multiple lenses for creation. The constant renewal of ideas generated through choreographic thought transforms my work. The manner in which disparate ideas coexist in the poetics of dance already suggests a multivalent system. We will try to harness its nuance and its complication. 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. This workshop should be a launching pad for new investigations in your work, processed through the knowledge of intuition.

MELT: Experiencing 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 feet, spine, and pelvic floor encourage the feeling of release in the limbs, allowing us to fall and suspend off-center, simultaneously finding a grounded flexible base of support. Using these physical tools, we will explore sensation, instinct, and, the inherent musicality inside the body, phrasing. All the while dancing, we will work toward a more grounded and direct approach to movement.

MELT: Advanced Releasing into Scores
Utilizing a deeper knowledge of somatic techniques, we will dive into advanced releasing. Releasing will give us room for expansion and the power to explore emerging improvisational scores. Some scores stay as purely physical phenomena, extracted from releasing work, while other scores will be transformational, emerging and working from the base of the "empty" body.

MELT: Making Dances: Using dance as the question and answer
Reveling in the process of revealing one's artistic voice, there will be opportunities for the dance maker to look, experiment, fail/succeed, create, and experience. The workshop explores our relationship to dance as a viewer and maker through observation, dialogue and making. Through the daily practice of dance making, we journey through the discovery of frameworks or structures derived from one's own concepts, history, embodiment, or from the work itself; explore the concepts of distillation and interruption; examine the possibility of universal moments; discuss dance's potential to engage in contemporary issues while leaning towards a more informed artist voice using dance as the question and answer.

MELT: fantasia.5 sessions
We will consider together what it could be that July 2016 requires of us – and spend 5 afternoons. working. Thinking.

MELT: Technique
The classes are influenced by Nelson’s 30 years of continuing study in the work of Barbara Mahler and Susan Klein, and by more recent studies in Alexander Technique, Body-Mind Centering® and the Feldenkrais Method®. We will begin with simple exercises and stretches that encourage mobility 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 awareness and ease in our dancing.

MELT: Antonio-Krais
Each day will begin with gentle floor work based on the Feldenkrais Method®. It will be followed by a slow movement exploration affording each individual the opportunity to listen to what is within themselves and to discover their own innate movements. From there we will explore movement phrasing through improvisation. Adding music, I will encourage the participants to decompose the phrase given and experiment with discovering their own dance in the space.

MELT: Systems/Scores
We will investigate how we make scores out of the systems that we live in, observe and are attracted to. In this work, 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.

MELT: Deepening Technique, Explorations in Mind-Body Centering®
This participatory workshop will introduce explorations of human embryological origins to investigate core concepts at the heart of dance expression and technique: midline axis; front, middle and back body; spiraling development of the limbs; origins of breathing, and new this summer, working with the brain, heart and other body organs, all taught through guided somatizations, partnering and individual improvisations. Repeat participants welcome; the class material will expand beyond what was taught in the last three Summers.

MELT: Functionality and Perspective in Dance
SÃˇnchez Ruíz’s class has been an investigation in release technique for the last ten years. Focusing on the importance of being grounded, dancers work with initiation and arrival, visceral and organic movement. The technique training is about understanding the shifting of weight, clarity of movement, attention to detail, precision and dynamics in a multidirectional approach.

MELT: (SELF) DIRECTING PERFORMANCE
How does self-direction function in your creative practice and performance work? Are there different approaches, choices to be made? All solo, collective, choreographic/directorial practitioners interested in “inter” disciplinary processes of creating and performing are welcome. The workshop is designed to expand your awareness, experience and skills in self-direction. We follow a sequence of questions, explorations, performance, reflective action and conversation, drawing on different modes of art making. Please bring in 1-3 minutes of your own material for starters. www.kyledecamp.com

MELT: MAKING WORK
We focus on the creative process in making body/movement based performance. Through unequal parts making, discussing, improvising and watching the work of other workshop participants, we uncover and deepen your individual interests, your process and your work. Inherited notions of dance and performance are critiqued, absorbed or discarded in the service of creating performance that comes from a vital, necessary place and that speaks to a contemporary context. I am interested in harnessing the various fictions that we already construct unconsciously and using those as a frame for examining other possible frames for performance. There is no one way to make work.

MELT: Klein Technique
Klein Technique™ has been in development since the mid 70s by Susan Klein, originally a response to the formal training of dancers during that time. Through its development, it has grown into a cohesive movement system that connects the body and mind. It is firmly grounded in the principles of change, possibilities, and efficiency through the tools of process, theory and practice. We work on "letting go," letting go of muscles, thoughts and habits that hold us back from moving in our own unique way, or that fix us in set configurations. As movers we learn to be articulate, clear, and self-knowing, connected and grounded, efficient and alive.

MELT: Technique
Class with a desire to promote spatial and corporeal awareness through clarity and precision. Inviting ourselves to observe, welcome, enhance, abandon and rediscover movement patterns, qualities, focal points, personal habits and preferences in order to stay alert in the present moment. By using walking as a physical neutralizer and awareness stimulator, through a gentle warm up of set exercises, we will transition to a pre-conceived phrase to share experiences while encouraging individuality.

MELT: The Art of Not making Dances (We reap later than we sow)
We will practice listening and waiting for the work to grow in its own time. We will develop tools to let our voice be and not get in the way of it with our overzealous egos. We will work and think together and alone in a lab-like situation.

MELT: LOVE|FORTÉ Workshop on Composition
As a collaborative force L|F have agreed to disagree! Our attempt is to find difference as it sits inside of the power to reframe our “...inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate [those] differences” (Audre Lorde). As groundwork in our “composition” class we are not interested in “dance making” but rather in the clarity of a thing as it is free and unbounded. What is clear and containable about freedom? L|F offers a composition workshop sharing our approach to scaffolding work with research, imagery, and scoring. Rigorous reduction and reframing movement exercises, prompting and building improvisations, and drawing and journaling are the meat of this class.