Bates Dance Festival: Train and Create/NYC

Friday, January 9th – Sunday, January 11th

9:30am–11:00am Post-Modern Moves with Jennifer Nugent

11:30am–1:00pm Contemporary Practices with Kyle Marshall

1:00pm–2:00pm LUNCH

2:00pm–4:30pm Making/Composition

Friday with André Zachery
Saturday with David Dorfman
Sunday with Cara Hagan

 

Post-Modern Moves with Jennifer Nugent
Fri–Sun 9:30am–11:00am

Dancing
During this three day workshop we will move within improvisational and set technical concepts and phrase work seeking an experience of movement that is personal and felt. The base material for physical tuning and practicing will explore sensation, instinct, and the inherent musicality inside the body in order to investigate what is movement language; to consider technique and our own movement desires as languaging – as a conversation with dance. We will reorganize material daily and layer learned material with challenges that help us consider physical disorientation. The work we will do together holds an intention and an invitation to experience conversing intimately with movement, with dance, and with each other.

What to expect: In this class we will improvise and learn phrase material. This class is advanced and beginning all in one. I am interested at how my ideas and concepts mingle with your ideas and concepts, finding a way of dancing together.

Contemporary Practices with Kyle Marshall
Fri–Sun 11:30am–1:00pm

Train
Class will combine traditional modern dance alignment, post-modern curiosity around momentum, with Black dance traditions embracing rhythm, power and musicality. Improvisation will be used to build a student’s capacity for spatial awareness and self discovery. Stretch and strengthening exercises are approached somatically to focus a student’s integration, agility and injury prevention. Phrasework at the end of each class is often sourced from KMC’s body of repertory. The material encourages the inner groove, memory, precision and power of each dancer. My emphasis on physical rigor, powerful playfulness, and ease of movement creates a positive, challenging space for students from diverse backgrounds, dance experience and cultural exposure to learn and build community.

What to expect: Improvisation might begin class to build a student’s capacity for spatial awareness and self discovery. This will be followed by center warm up exercises that combines traditional modern dance alignment and post-modern curiosity around momentum. This is informed by my work with Trisha Brown and Tiffany Mills. Stretch and strengthening exercises are approached somatically to focus a student’s integration, agility and injury prevention.

Sourcing my own history of tap, marching band and work with Doug Elkins, I use rhythm, footwork and body percussion in my movement class to hone a student’s sense of musicality, groove and coordination. This might appear as tags to more traditional exercises, across the floor or within phrase material.

Phrasework finishes each class often sourced from KMC’s body of repertory. You can expect movement that is full bodied, expansive, and rigorous. This course for the Bates Dance Festival will be an advance college, professional level.

Making/Composition with André Zachery
Friday, January 9th 2:00pm–4:30pm

Futuring Actions: Recasting Modernity through Movement, Sound, and Semiotics
This workshop invites participants to explore how artistic practices can recast and resist the frameworks of “modernity” through embodied practice, speculative mapping, and collective creation. Grounded in readings of Black Atlantic scholars of semiotics and decolonial thought, the session emphasizes the role of Black sonic and movement traditions as sites of meaning-making and as “futuring actions.”

What to expect: Participants will begin by introducing themselves through their artistic practices and explaining who their work serves beyond themselves. Together, we will engage key theoretical concepts through short readings and dialogue before moving into practice: mapping artistic signifiers and experimenting with how these meanings might live outside the body through sound, media, and gesture. The workshop culminates in the creation and sharing of a collective performance score, activating improvisation, call and response, and play, to devise ways of knowing and shaping the world through performance cultures.

Making/Composition with David Dorfman
Saturday, January 10th 2:00pm–4:30pm

making dances as social and personal commentary
This class will regard choreography as social and personal commentary. Working in class on solo and/or small group projects, students will be encouraged to find compositional means for exploring areas about which they are passionate that also embody socio-political essence. Issues such as the creation of the delicate balance between meaningful form and meaningful content will be investigated, as well as the coexistence within a dance of highly technical to pedestrian movement and the possible inclusion of spoken text.

What to expect: We will create a welcoming environment in which we will improvise, create movement, respond to prompts and celebrate our bodies via kinetic play – finding new ways of making dances.

What to expect:

Making/Composition with Cara Hagan
Sunday, January 11th 2:00pm–4:30pm

Making Art Sucks (and other useful reminders)
Based on the anecdotes found in the zine, Making Art Sucks, by Cara Hagan, this workshop will focus on what Hagan calls, “creative agility,” the ability to adapt, pivot, and hone our abilities as fierce collaborators as we face inevitable, unplanned occurrences in our creative process. Part dance composition class, part devised theatre class, this session will encourage participants to approach the unknown with curiosity and joy. Each participant in attendance will receive a “Making Art Sucks” zine.

What to expect: This session will involve a series of prompts that participants will be asked to respond to creatively through movement, text, sound, and object work. This workshop is for intermediate and advanced practitioners of movement and/or theater, and should be ready and willing to try new ways of approaching their work from theoretical and embodied perspectives. Wear comfortable clothing and bring a notebook.

For Train and Create workshop-related questions, please email programs@movementresearch.org.

• This intensive includes auditive guidance.
• This intensive includes printed materials and digital readings.

For access-related questions and requests, please contact accessibility@movementresearch.org, subject line “BDF Train and Create.”