Class Descriptions

Feedom in flight -Saturday 3 - 5 (Intermediate/advanced level)

In this class we will play with spherical space by exploring the buoyancy and ease through the air and softly back down to the ground. To support the loft, we familiarize ourselves with our ever shifting centers of gravity. We listen for the nuance in weight exchange, playing with modulating tone, pressure, counterbalance and counter tensions of support. As underdancers, we investigate the multitude of ways our bodies provide surface, offering structure and agility for our partners to willingly and harmoniously perch or hitch a ride.

Embodied Dimensions / An exploration into the felt experience of our dancing self- Sunday 6-7:30

This class will blend practices of dance improvisation, contact improvisation, and somatic movement approaches. The underlying curiosity of this class looks to tune our senses and attention in order to more fully map our inner experience of our physical self, uncover obscured perceptions, yield to our discoveries, and articulate the intricacies of expression.

The Evolution of Flight: Technique Class: Friday 11:30 - 1:00

We really can fly. Timing, ease and levity are our wings. With patience, deeper listening and alignment with our earth to core connection, our contact dance takes flight. In this class we will learn specific techniques , “tricks of the trade” you could say, that will deepen our awareness of the principals that allow for effortless flight.

*You must have at least 4 years contact experience or equivalent movement practice to participate in this class.

Flow: Perceptual Dynamism: Saturday 1 - 2:30

What is flow? Does to flow mean we never stop? Does it mean we make everything look seamless and graceful? Or is flow a state of body/mind? And how does it relate to our contact dancing?

In my experience flow is a state – a state of deep immersion – in which we ride the currents of change and complexity with greater and greater degrees of sophistication. Flow comes when we align our attention to the present moment, let go of any judgments, notions or interpretations of ‘good and bad’ in our dancing and simply rest in the dynamic flow of perceptual change.

Open to all levels.

Be Seen and See, be Heard and Listen, Friday 10 - 12

This will be a class to strengthen the recognition of authentic impulse, both within our bodies and with our partner. We will develop and hone our listening skills by starting small and narrowing focus on our sensations. Then we’ll take these beautiful cultivated listening states outward and play with some mirroring games, tell our physical stories to each other, and have a nice long cypher to let the distinction between our solo dance and our connected dances really land in our body.

* What is it to clearly express our own self? and what is it to be moved and influenced by your partner, the floor, the light in the room?

* And can we hold our centre while being in relationship? Can we listen somatically and find clear self-expression at the same time? Or do we lose our solo plot and cave to the other?

Be Seen and See, Be Heard and Listen Sunday 1 - 2:45

This class will further the exploration started Friday about the notion of balancing self-expression with listening skills. It’s not psychotherapy but as a Somatic Embodiment Practitioner Joni’s fascinated with the ways Contact Improv can teach us in an physical/felt way about our tendencies in relationship. Put reductively: Do we talk too much without listening? Do we listen too much without talking? Can we really turn towards our partner’s invites without self-abandoning? Can we offer all the invites clearly without taking “no” personally. Let’s play with this question physically! Get some insights into our body — they bubble up — those insights.

* by moving through statue games, then the enlivened statue.

*listening to the floor with our body and

*listening to our partner at all kinds of different layers: listening to the bony body, the muscle and sinew body, and finally the skin body.

Sunday 3 - 5:00

For this after lunch session we will share some led partner body work to release and unwind.

From this softer place, we will explore how reduced tone and speed can invite deeper listening to the more subtle and nuanced movements in ourselves and our environment.

Sunday 10 - 12

Our process will integrate and mobilize the whole body and will include set movement material as well as exploring the physicality engendered in your own movement.  We will focus on embodied presence and improvisational choice making in the moment  via the support of the breath, the light release of the skeleton, the sinuous vitality of the musculature and the emotive nature of the organs. 

The somatic processes of the Bartenieff Movement Fundamentals and the developmental movement patterns are the basis of the work. 

Open to all levels.

Class 1- Friday 11 :30 - 1 Beginner

"Tuning the body awake"

We got a few days of dancing in front of us so let's take a moment to arrive, meet, warm up and see what emerges when we show up with curiosity to engage with each other. We’ll say hello to the gravitational pull and rise into a playful levity. We’ll explore floor work, ethics, jam skills, and set a container so we can access a feeling of belonging and safety in this body, this space. We’ll focus on what’s important to attune our body to dance Contact Improvisation.

Class 2- Sunday 6 - 7:30

"The Waves And The Shore". Marrying the elementals of water and earth. Sand shifting, irregular tides yet an expectancy of meeting. 
In this workshop we will be working with patience, centre to centre connection, subtle weight shifting, varying tone, and readiness to ambiguous invitations. 

Dancing the layers in the Basics: Friday 6 - 7:30

Depth and clarity that can support both the beginner and the experienced CI practitioner to access themselves and their partner in relation to each other, the movement principles and the richness of the dances. For the experienced practitioner, the phenomenal experience we first encountered as beginners of 'sharing the dance' with another, can expand to less familiar states, qualities and the imagination in the dancing. The simple yet complex practices of 'the Stand/small dance' (Steve Paxton), 'head to head' dance,etc, can continue to inspire and nurture ourselves and our art practice.

Photo credit: Anne Cooper & Monica Strehlke in City of Crows/EDAM. Photo by Chris Randle

Dive Deep- Friday 6 - 7:30, Saturday 1 - 2:30

These CI Dance classes sufficiently explore our potentially unexplored psycho-emotional aspects within specific interrelational movement.

We’ll dive deep into our internal landscape whilst relating, our unknown, unexpected, surprising aspects of physical & energetic relating, exploring how these experiences affect & change us, as we confront more uncomfortable, yet exciting & relieving mental/emotional truisms.

We’ll gently choose partners with highly intuitional guidance that potentially trigger our patterns, giving us ample chance to move through any stuck internal places with the help of exact experiential awareness.

This guided process is meant to enhance our personal evolution/development quickly & safely.

All levels welcome.

1st class concentrates on how we feel in relation to specific others in a safe protected space, whilst moving our stuff gently, so not a pain in the ass to feel. We practice this deeply & easily.

2nd class focuses on how we feel, but delves deeper into moving our stuff safely whilst "blaming" others for our predicament, taking more responsibility for moving where we are, so again, it's not a pain in the ass to relate/connect, rather, empowering

Andrew Harwood 2-4:00 COMPOSITIONAL AWARENESS IN CONTACT IMPROVISATION

CI offers us a container for the practice of non-verbal communication, of expanded awareness, and for creative expression while allowing what is unexpected to emerge. As we ground ourselves in the core principles of CI, focusing on the dynamics and subtleties of touch, tone, texture, weight, momentum, and moving support, we will expand our awareness to include space, time, image, gesture and feeling, through solo, duet, trio and ensemble dancing. We will consider how a lightly held compositional awareness and feeling can support our efforts to connect and find meaning when we are dancing. This work can be viewed not only as a means for creative expression but as a process for developing our capacity to collaborate and build a community that holds space for each individual.

Sunday 1 - 2:45 This class will be designed to help people build their skills and understanding of contact principles so that they can give and receive weight with confidence and safety. The class will begin with simple movement patterning exercises that will allow us to transition in and out of the floor efficiently. Once we are warm, we will begin to access more complex and dynamic movements drills that will incorporate inversions that can bring us out of the floor to standing and vice versa, we will play with the concept of being able to fall upwards into our recoveries. We will then move into structured partnering exercises where we have the to opportunity to learn tools to find each other's centre, to utilize rolling and sliding point of contact to be able to offer or invite our partner's weight into and out of support. We will have a strong focus on developing skills that will require the consent of our partner for these lifts to succeed. We will build into more dynamic movements that will allow for greater use of space, levels and pacing.

It's my party and i'll CI if i want to: play & "pranks" 

In this workshop, we'll tap into our inner rascal-- exploring different scores that invite a compassionate sort of mischief and generate an attitude of play within our dancing. Inviting a tone of rascalry into the dance creates opportunity to develop confidence, trust (in our impulses and in each other), agency, curiosity, and radical self-embodiment-- to allow ourselves to play with compassion & defiance, to take up space joyfully, is in itself a radical act. 

In the course of two hours, we will explore different scores through partnering exercises and ensemble gameplay, drawing on inspiration from Konstantinos Mihos, Augusto Boal, and the Nancy Stark Smith quote: "being relaxed and alert with a sense of concentration and humor, is generally a useful stance." 

Francesca Fewer Friday 2 - 3

In this class we will cultivate fine-tuned awareness and deep embodied sensitivity as means for becoming more agile and responsive within the emerging, unpredictable unknown. Using principles of The Feldenkrais Method to cultivate our abilities to sense detail and move with continual adaptability, we will expand our understading of how to effectively organize our structure in both weight-sharing and solo dancing. We will pursue having a wider array of possibilities available to us in any given moment, exploring how this gives us a greater ability to follow/respond to our partner’s invitations, and a greater ability to offer clear invitations to our partner. Francesca has a particular interest in cultivating a state of presence and embodied readiness that is so resposive that we can feelas though we are simply observing the dance unfold as we dance it, evenwhile we simultaneously engage continual choice-making.

Kat’s class will be on 1 - 2:30

Deep Listening — All Levels Contact Improvisation Skills. Sunday 10 - 12

We will start on the floor with a gentle somatic-based warm up that will help the body to feel gravity. Growing from the floor to standing, we will practice smoothing out our transitions into upright dancing. The goal is an aware, alert, and embodied presence that uses the full capacity of the mover as a human being awake in the world. More sensitivity is reached through relaxing the nervous system. More alertness is reached through waking up the mind with moment-by-moment choice making. More embodiment is reached through a deep listening to the relationship to the earth, each other, and the space around us.