// SFDI 2016 //
** SAVE THE DATE FOR SFDI 2017 **
JULY 30-AUG 6, 2017
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// ON THIS PAGE //
REGISTRATION / PERFORMANCES + PUBLIC EVENTS / INTENSIVES
HOUSING / WORK STUDY / REFUND POLICY
// SEE ALSO //
SFDI CLASS DESCRIPTIONS + FACULTY BIOS / SFDI SCHEDULE / JAMS
SEATTLE FESTIVAL OF DANCE IMPROVISATION (SFDI) 2016
23rd ANNUAL SFDI / JULY 31 – AUG 7
REGISTER TODAY!
“Transformative, mind expanding, inspiring…TOTAL MAGIC.”
– 2015 SFDI PARTICIPANT
“Velocity works hard to be intellectually rigorous and highly inclusive…This is one of the smartest dance communities I have ever spent time with.”
– RALPH LEMON, 2015 SFDI FACULTY
“If you love to improvise, Velocity Dance Center in Seattle is the place to be.”
— DANCE MAGAZINE
The international Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (SFDI) is a world-renowned festival that provides the perfect opportunity to learn and share experiences with some of the most highly regarded artists working in the field of dance today. SFDI is a week of intensives, classes, jams, somatic labs, site-specific workshops, performances and discussions focused on fostering the study and practice of dance improvisation.
solo/group improvisation + contact improvisation + somatics + alexander technique + contemplative dance practice + site-specific dance + composition + performance
PHOTO DAN MERLO
INTENSIVES // Bebe Miller / Darrell Jones / luciana achugar / Cathie Caraker / Krista DeNio
Stephanie Nugent with Shel Wagner Rasch
CLASSES + PERFORMANCES // HIJACK / Morgan Thorson / Linda Austin
Cyrus Khambatta / Aaron Swartzman / Lila Hurwitz / Alia Swersky / Amy O
Victoria Jacobs / Douglas MacKenzie / Melanie Noel / Karen Nelson / Wobbly
Corrie Befort / Karen Daly / John + Anna Dixon / Katherine Cook + MORE
SEE CLASS DESCRIPTIONS + FACULTY BIOS >>
LEARN MORE ABOUT NIGHTLY JAMS >>
REGISTRATION
REGISTER FOR ENTIRE SFDI 2016 FESTIVAL PACKAGE
Sign up for your choice of Morning, Mid-day and Afternoon Intensives with Bebe Miller, Stephanie Nugent, Darrell Jones, luciana achugar, Cathie Caraker, or Krista DeNio. Includes unlimited drop-ins, performances and jams.
> Entire SFDI 2016 Festival Package Fee: $475*
REGISTER FOR INDIVIDUAL INTENSIVES
Sign up for an individual 5-day, 4-day or 3-day intensive without unlimited drop-ins. Includes performances and jams.
> Morning Somatic Intensive Fee: $200*
> Morning Site-Specific Intensive Fee: $200*
> Mid-day Intensive Fee: $400*
> Afternoon Fundamentals of Contact Improvisation Intensive Fee: $110*
REGISTER FOR UNLIMITED DROP-INS
Sign up for unlimited drop-in classes only. Includes performances and jams.
> Unlimited Drop-ins Fee: $150*
DROP IN TO INDIVIDUAL CLASSES + JAMS // No pre-registration required
> All drop-in classes 2 hours: $20 each
> All jams: $5 each
PERFORMANCES + PUBLIC EVENTS
SPEAKEASY SERIES: LIGHTNING TALKS
WEDS AUG 3 / 6-8:30PM
Velocity Founders Theater 1621 12th Ave
FREE + open to all
In this popular evening of performance, presentations, and community dialogue, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (SFDI) intensive faculty share what’s currently driving their research and practice.
SPEAKEASY SERIES: History of Contact Improvisation through the Body:From Unimaginable to Resonance & Meaning
THURS AUG 4 / 1:30PM
FREE + open to all
Journeying in time from 1972-2016, this demonstration/conversation explores the development of a post modern dance form. Conceived and facilitated by Karen Nelson with Katherine Cook including Stephanie Nugent, Shel Wagner Rasch, Cyrus Khambatta, Aaron Schwartzman, Arwen Wilder, Krista DeNio, AND Cathie Caraker.
DANCE INNOVATORS IN PERFORMANCE
THURS AUG 4 / 8PM
Erickson Theatre Off Broadway 1524 Harvard Ave
TICKETS $12 / $15 at the door (FREE WITH SFDI PASS)
A critical mass of today’s most highly regarded dance artists who have been dancing everywhere but in the mainstream.
THE PLEASURE PROJECT / luciana achugar
a public intervention / presented as part of Seattle Art Fair
FRI AUG 5 / 10-11AM
Occidental Square 117 S Washington St
FREE + open to all
2016 SFDI faculty member + choreographer luciana achugar will lead an intensive work period in Seattle, based on the research of The Pleasure Project, with a group of local and international dance artists. Velocity will host achugar in residence as part of SFDI, which will culminate in a durational public performance on Friday morning of Seattle Art Fair in Occidental Park. This project is curated by Velocity Artistic Director Tonya Lockyer.
The Pleasure Project is the culmination of a three-month-long procession of public space interventions made throughout NYC and Biel/Bienne Switzerland, that seeks to viscerally activate the passive spectator. Anti-spectacular yet super-natural, it is less a performance and more of a practice of moving performance closer to ritual—a ritual of growing ourselves a new and much-needed ‘post-civilized’ body; a collective body with audience and performers; a collective utopian body, a sensational body, a connected body, a decolonized body, an anarchic and animal body, that is full and filled with pleasure, and magic. The Pleasure Project is a performance as an intervention for a theater in ruins.
BEBE MILLER + DARRELL JONES
A special performance presented as part of Seattle Art Fair
FRI AUG 5 / 4PM
Union Station 401 S Jackson St
FREE + open to all
In the Union Station site —activated everyday by commuters and tourists visiting from around the globe, moving through its transit hub— 2016 SFDI faculty Bebe Miller + Darrell Jones’ performance will highlight how choreography is everywhere, always in everything. Through their deeply physical approach to improvised movement, they will brings awareness to the body of the viewer in the context of the art fair, revealing how we don’t just see art, we feel it and gain knowledge and experience through motion.
UNDERSCORE
FRI AUG 5 / 6-9PM
Velocity: V2 1525 11th Ave
FREE + open to all
A long-form open improvisation structure for practicing and examining dance improvisation. If you’re never attended an Underscore, be sure to attend the talk with Katherine Cook in Founders Studio on Thursday, 3:30-4:30pm.
PARTICIPANT PERFORMANCE
SAT AUG 6 / 7:30PM
Velocity Founders Theater 1621 12th Ave
FREE + open to all
Performances by SFDI participants.
NIGHTLY DANCE JAMS
Open movement jams welcome to all.
Velocity Founders Theater 1621 12th Ave
$5 at the door / FREE for SFDI Participants
Learn more about each Jam on the SFDI 2016 Jams page >>
2016 SFDI INTENSIVES
BEBE MILLER, a native New Yorker, first performed her choreography at NYC’s Dance Theater Workshop in 1978, after receiving her MA in Dance from OSU in 1975; she formed Bebe Miller Company in 1985. Known for its mix of virtuosic dancing and fundamental humanity, her choreography has been produced at major dance centers across the country and internationally in Europe and the African continent. Her work has been commissioned by Dayton Contemporary Dance Company, Oregon Ballet Theater, Boston Ballet, Philadanco, Ailey II, and the UK’s Phoenix Dance Company, among others. She has been honored with four New York Dance and Performance “Bessie’s,” fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council and the Guggenheim Foundation, and was named a United States Artists Ford Fellow in 2010. A Professor in Dance at The Ohio State University since 2000, Bebe is a Distinguished Professor in OSU’s College of Arts and Humanities and received an Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Ursinus College in 2009. In 2012 she was designated as one of the inaugural class of Doris Duke Artists, a program of the Doris Duke Foundation’s Performing Artist Awards. Most recently, she was honored by Movement Research as an honoree for their 2015 Gala along with Tere O’Connor and Moira Brennan. Bebe currently lives in Columbus, OH.
STEPHANIE NUGENT is a creator, performer, and educator of dance/theater and contact improvisation who’s work has been described as “powerful” and “heroic” -LA Times, “provocative, physical, and painterly” -San Diego Union Tribune, and “fascinating” -Dance Magazine. She has served on faculty at universities including UC Santa Barbara, California Institute of the Arts, The Ohio State University, and Indiana University Bloomington. Stephanie has organized jams in Pasadena, Los Angeles, and Indianapolis, and has taught CI at festivals including the West Coast Contact Jam, the Portland Contact Improv Jam, and the Great Lakes Area Contact Improvisation Enthusiast’s Retreat, where she will be faculty-coordinator for 2016-17. Current projects include Mapping the Aether, created and performed by Nugent with Suzanne Lappas and Hourglass, an interactive live music and dance event with composer Robin Cox. www.stephanienugent.com
DARRELL JONES performs in the United States and abroad with a variety of choreographers and companies, including Bebe Miller, Urban Bush Women, Ronald K. Brown, Min Tanaka, Ralph Lemon and KOKUMA Dance Theater. He was on tour with the Bebe Miller Company throughout the summer and fall of 2005. Along with performing Darrell choreographs and teaches. He has collaborated with other choreographers (Fiona Millward, Jeremy Wade, Angie Hauser), writers (Cheryl Boyce Taylor), musicians (Brian Schulur, Jesse Manno, NOMAD), and designers (Mahwish Syed), in dance films, documentations and interactive multimedia installations. In addition to his collaborative duets he also works in solo forms. His choreography has been presented at The Place Theater in London, Kwanju Biennale in South Korea, The Kennedy Center in Washington DC and Judson Memorial Church in New York City. Darrell has taught workshops and master classes throughout the United States and in other countries such as South Africa, UK, and South Korea. His classes are informed by his training and studies in a variety of contemporary dance techniques, improvisation, Butoh and Traditional Dance forms. He will be full-time on the Dance Center faculty in January, 2006, where he will be teaching dancemaking, improvisation, and modern technique.
LUCIANA ACHUGAR is a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay who grew as an artist in close dialogue with the NY and Montevideo contemporary dance communities. She began making work collaboratively with Levi Gonzalez in 1999, and in 2002 she started working independently. Her work is concerned with the post-colonial world, searching for an undoing of current power structures from the inside out. She is a two-time “Bessie” recipient, a 2013 Guggenheim Fellow and Creative Capital Grantee and a 2010 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee, amongst other accolades. Her last work “An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love” premiered at Gibney Dance as co-presentation of The Chocolate Factory in December 2015 and was presented in June on the streets of Lower Manhattan in NYC during the 2016 River to River Festival. www.lachugar.org
CATHIE CARAKER is an international dance artist who has been working at the edges of movement research, improvisation and performance for over 25 years. She is the director of MAMMALdance, a forum for embodied, inter-media research and performance. A native of San Francisco, she moved to Amsterdam in the 1980s, where she graduated from the School for New Dance Development (SNDO), eventually joining the faculty from 1995 – 2005. Her dance work has been influenced by post-modern ideas and practices including the Judson Church movement, European new dance /music improvisaton, Contact Improvisation and somatics. In 2005 she returned to San Francisco. Her performance work has been produced and presented by theaters including Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace at St Mark’s Church, Movement Research at the Judson Church, the University Settlement House, the New York Improvisation Festival, the NesTheaters in Amsterdam, CounterPULSE in San Francisco and the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. She has collaborated with numerous artists including Gonnie Heggen, Robert Steijn, Meredith Monk, Nancy Stark Smith, Mike Vargas, Daniel Lepkoff, Andrew Harwood, Felice Wolfzahn, KJ Holmes, David Hurwith, Katarina Eriksson, Rosemary Hannon, Ray Chung, Vitali Kononov, Henry Kaiser, Jerry Smith, Ronja Ver and Pipaluk Supernova. Cathie is a graduate of the innovative SNDD / Department of Choreography of the Amsterdam School for the Arts. She also holds an MFA in dance from Bennington College and is a certified practitioner of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC), as well as a longtime Pilates and Gyrotonic® instructor. Her writings on BMC as a somatic approach to dance education have been published by the Belgian dance journal Nouvelles de Danse.
KRISTA DENIO is an interdisciplinary choreographer, director, performer, writer and educator, committed to developing new forms of performance work and interdisciplinary thinking and creation between the fields of dance and theater, among others. She is currently based in the Bay Area, California and directs EchoTheaterSuitcase, bringing military veterans and civilian non-veterans together to make original performance work, in addition to other socially engaged projects. Krista teaches dance and performance making throughout the Bay Area and is currently collaborating with Professor Lochlann Jain, (Stanford University) on Empathy Lab, a course bringing anthropologists and performance makers together to exchange methodologies. She is a member of the International Interdisciplinary Artists Consortium, and the former Executive Artistic Director of Earthdance. BA in Dance/Dramatic Art and Interdisciplinary Studies Field Major, Development and Human Rights [U.C. Berkeley]; MFA Theater: Contemporary Performance [Naropa University]
SEE CLASS DESCRIPTIONS + FACULTY BIOS >>
HOUSING
Velocity has a special partnership with the University of Washington to provide housing for all Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation participants. In order to better place you, please fill out this Google Form by July 1. (Note: Housing must be settled a minimum of two weeks in advance of the festival.)
Options are single or double rooms, with prices ranging from roughly $36-$50 /night. When applicable, Velocity will pair you with a roommate. You will then be redirected to finalize your application through the University of Washington.
WORK STUDY
Applications for Work Study are now open. Positions open until filled.
REFUND POLICY
*$100 non-refundable deposit is built into all SFDI prices. This deposit serves as the place holder within the program. All paid tuition (not including the $100 deposit) and housing fees will be refunded in full only if written notice of withdrawal is received on or before July 1, 2016. Between July 2 and July 30, 2016 all paid tuition (not including $100 deposit) will be refunded for medical reasons only. A signed note from a doctor is required. Dorm fees will be refunded in full. After the program begins, July 31, 2016, tuition and housing fees will not be refunded for any reason.
Have questions? Need more info? Contact Cait Wyler, Summer Festivals Manager.
In 2011, after 18 successful years, Dance Art Group (DAG) handed the festival over to Velocity Dance Center. View the DAG press release here.
SFDI 2016 is made possible thanks to NEA Art Works and City of Seattle Office of Arts & Culture; with additional support from our season sponsors 4 Culture, Arts Fund, Case Van Rij, The Glenn H Kawasaki Foundation, The Seattle Foundation, Jeremy Steward and Eric Hartmann; and supporters The Pruzan Foundation, Fales Foundation Trust, Barbara Lewis, The Patricia and Marcus Meier Charitable Foundation, and ArtsWa, with special thanks to community partner Seattle Art Fair.
