Performance Technique
Concepts of body architecture, locomotion through space and body centering are explored. The focus is centered around O'Connors dance language, which incorporates ballet, modern, ethnic and historical forms, both real and invented, combined with his unique system for frame structures derived form a physical stream of consciousness. This system is characterized 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.

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.

Composition: Making Dances
O'Connor's teaching methodology 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 based on the emotional range in the body, internal music, dramatic structure, history, culture, and the inter-relatedness of the elements in the work. The goals are 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; gain the objectivity necessary to scrutinize a work; and bring clarity to its thematic center.

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.

Alexander Technique for Dancers
The Alexander Technique is a means of identifying and modifying the mental and physical limitations (habits) that interfere with one's full range of possibilities, as well as honing one's ability to make choices (take responsibility). In this workshop the principles of the Alexander Technique will be explained and explored, including "inhibition", "direction", and concepts such as "non-doing". Anatomical information, observation, and the cultivation of awareness are the tools at hand for investigating limitations, possibilities, and ultimately more clearing manifesting one's intentions.

Composition: Movement Implications and Uses
I teach with the point of view that making is an endless quest with ever shifting ground. I encourage an attitude of fueling work with one's questions, not regarding plans or themes as pre-requisites. I regard teaching as a conversational mode; my exercises are proposals in action. My own interests have to do with the nature of movement and its communication, how it operates as phenomena; this fuels my aesthetic and methods. I present composition initially from this point of view. My exercises propose ways of perceiving and proceeding that engage these ideas. At the same time, I am interested in creating a situation on which each student can locate her/his aesthetic and goals in the larger picture of dance's many mini-cultures. I am also interested in giving students the ability to recognize and access states necessary to making work, such as intuition, perception, cognition, interiority, emotional distance, spontaneity, pleasure, will, reflection and humor.

Technique: SWIFT/FLOW
Arthur Aviles will be teaching his technique, SWIFT/FLOW created with his dance company, Typical Theatre. This new technique explores the arms' important relationship to the back and the joints of the body. The arms act as the primary source propulsion, which gets the rest of the body moving through space. The class will begin with exercises that will channel the body through flow and continuous motion initiated through the arms and will take the dancer swiftly from air to ground and back again.

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.

Composition
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. Layering these activities, we will explore complex and simple structures for creating short dances that access our deeper layers of consciousness and challenge our assumption about how we dance. Exploring unconventional performance territories outside of a theatrical context will also be a point of departure for engaging our dancing with specific interior and external landscapes.

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.

Movement Material
The work we will do proposes initiation and release of movement and rest in relationship to mass, gravity, momentum, falling and recovery, encouraging thorough and experiential movement research. The material utilizes skeletal imaging and initiations, with particular focus given to the pelvis and spine as root and limb for extending dimesionally towards space. This workshop encourages sensation, responsibility, and the use of the dancer's own form in rlationship to motion and the physical world.

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 and aesthetic point of view. 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: 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 the sublety of physical adaptation and self-transformation. Class starts by invigorating the body's natural rhythms and tones through breath, vocalization and moves of buoyancy. Exercises that dive, dip, spring, and lunge are then used to pair a strong supple use use of the limbs with a soft dramatic approach to the floor. Center work continues by embodying twirls, swirls, and spirals in the attempt to connect "grand" positions and poses with stunts of strength and flexibility. Through a combination of guided dancing, scores and channeling states, we will then work towards integrating the build up and break-down of rhythms while releasing the somatic pluralism that can drive Vogueing's improvisations. The experience culminates in large athletic phrases that play form against fluid, flight against floor, while trying to express the physical poetics of "battling" gracefully.

Coming into Center
The purpose of this class is to re-educate the dancer's body, interweaving theory and practice on a physical and organic level. From this comes the potential for students to discover a range of intelligence in their dancing, as well as to help them discover and develop their own choreographic vision. Initially inspired by the work of pioneer kinesiologist Dorothy Vislocky, and then continuing for upwards of 20 years with Susan Klein, Barbara Mahler has learned to see, feel, and teach each person/body individually to help their body function at its highest level of efficiency and function.

Composition: Dancing Text/ Texting Dance
In this workshop we will use several improvisation strategies to open a free flow of immediate, spontaneous and automatic writing, speaking, and dancing. We will use the resultant dance and text to construct impromptu group pieces as well as a means toward broadening self expression in solo work.