// Velocity Dance Center • SFDI 2017 CLASS DESCRIPTIONS + FACULTY BIOS //

SFDI 2017
CLASS DESCRIPTIONS + FACULTY BIOS

PHOTO DEREK FOWLES

2017 INTENSIVES // Joe Goode / Angie Hauser / Hilary Clark / Andrew Marcus / I Moving Lab / Anya Cloud

2017 CLASSES + PERFORMANCES // Karen Nelson / Raja Feather Kelly / Mike Hodapp / Katherine Cook / Corrie Befort / John Dixon / Kris Wheeler / Chris Aiken / Sheri Cohen / Haruko Crow Nishimura / Alice Gosti / Tamin Totzke / Wobbly / Karen Daley / Ann Cooper + MORE

>> All Drop-in classes are $20

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INTENSIVES

// MORNING SOMATIC INTENSIVE //

Void And The Emergence Of Forms with Andrew Marcus
REGISTER JULY 31 – AUG 4 / 9-11AM
Century Ballroom

Progressively working through the overflowingness of sense perceptions toward silence, stillness, and, ultimately, void, we engage a process of reconstruction: Emergent structural differentiation and spatial/temporal relations prioritize the transitional, or the between state—often identified by that which it is not. Therein we lay the ground of the intersubjective field, toward actions in worlds.

ANDREW MARCUS founded Disappearance in 2010 to explore boundary space between the ordinary, the beautiful, and the sublime. Disappearance develops practices to effectively transcend such boundaries; to encourage experience of the magical and the erotic; and to unequivocally engage the Real. Marcus holds an MFA in Dance and Performance from Arizona State University. His experiments with improvisation and somatic practices date to 1980, and he is active internationally. The School Of Disappearance opened in 2013. Previously, Marcus founded The Slow Training For Embodied Projects and Marcus Vesseur Moves with Wilma Vesseur (Netherlands) from 2007, toward alternatives to stage performance practice. Between 2001-2010 he developed Sensation And Form, a physical approach to dance composition and Technique For A Soft Body, a synthesis of his studies of release techniques and contact improvisation. From 1992-2001 he was adjunct faculty at the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU/Tish School Of The Arts.

// MORNING SITE-SPECIFIC INTENSIVE //

addressing/redressing/undressing facilitated by I Moving Lab
REGISTER JULY 31 – AUG 4 / 9-11AM
Meet in Steward Studio

I Moving Lab is a global collective sharing rigorous indigenous work, who create performances, activations and gatherings that stem from international, intercultural, indigenous and interdisciplinary processes and perspectives. This intensive employs improvising tactics by choreographers Jack Gray (Aotearoa/New Zealand) and Dåkot-ta Alcantara-Camacho (Guåhan/Guam) who bring global frameworks as a creative/critical lenses for addressing/redressing/undressing the modern world and its inhabitants through movement and language. The physical tasks empower the discovery of the indigeneity within, evoked through concepts of visualizing and embodying space across past-present-future continuums. The body, like the land (we acknowledge Seattle as the territories of the Coast Salish people) is treated as a ceremonial site of activation and clearing. Deep listening will be a catalyst for personal revelations and recitations of language, sound and movement. In this workshop we will go to sites of importance in the stories and histories of Indigenous Elders, and participants will read selections of non-Western texts that lend depth to the undressing.

I MOVING LAB is an intercultural and indigenous based contemporary movement and performance ensemble. Formed in New York City and globally-based, I Moving Lab create performances, activations and gatherings that stem from international, intercultural, indigenous and interdisciplinary processes and perspectives.

// MID-DAY INTENSIVES //

The Felt Experience with Joe Goode
REGISTER JULY 31 – AUG 5 / 11:30AM-1:45PM
Century Ballroom

Together we will explore a performance practice rooted in deep feeling and awareness. Dive into the lush territory of embodied action. Each practice session begins with a deep acknowledgement of where the body is, and then slowly moves into some improvisation and simple steps toward making.

JOE GOODE is a choreographer, writer, and director whose first concern as an artist is to provide a “deeply felt, profoundly human experience” in the theater. He is widely known as an innovator in the field of dance for his willingness to collide movement with spoken word, song, and visual imagery. He was awarded a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in 2007, and the United States Artists Glover Fellowship in 2008. In 2006 Goode directed the opera Transformations for the San Francisco Opera Center. His play Body Familiar, commissioned by the Magic Theatre in 2003, was met with critical acclaim. His work has been recognized with numerous awards including a New York Dance and Performance Award (a “Bessie”), and several Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (“Izzies”). Goode has also been awarded fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the California Arts Council and the James Irvine Foundation. Goode’s work has been commissioned by institutions nationally over the last thirty years.

Poetics of Contact with Angie Hauser
REGISTER JULY 31 – AUG 5 / 11:30AM-1:45PM
Velocity Founders Studio

This intensive is for dancers who are committed to expanding their understanding and practice of Contact Improvisation. Our focus will be to deepen our physical skills while linking perceptual awareness with a poetic imagination. We will use a variety of approaches including skill work, perceptual tuning, somatic exploration, and our capacity to imagine. This class combines highly energized physical practices with detailed awareness work that is informed by Hauser’s years of research into the form of contact improvisation, contemporary dance forms, and the imagination. Hauser’s practice and teaching of contact improvisation is influenced by key collaborators Chris Aiken, Nancy Stark Smith, Andrew Harwood, and K.J. Holmes.

ANGIE HAUSER is a choreographer, performer, and teacher. Her work is grounded in improvisation and collaboration. She is a senior member of Bebe Miller Company receiving a BESSIE Award for her creative work with the company. Since 2000 she has collaborated with Miller as a dancer, performer, writer and artistic collaborator. Her long time collaboration with dance artist Chris Aiken has yielded multiple grants from the National Performance Network, and work presented at national and international venues including The Dance Center, Links Hall, Bates Dance Festival, Movement Research at Judson Church and Florida Dance Festival. Other choreographic projects include collaborations with nationally and internationally recognized dance artists Jennifer Nugent, K.J. Holmes, Darrell Jones, Andrew Harwood, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Paul Matteson, and musicians Mike Vargas, Jesse Manno, Tigger Benford, and Andre Girbou. She has danced with the companies of Elizabeth Streb, Liz Lerman and Poppo Shiriashi, and taught dance technique, choreography, contact improvisation and improvisation throughout North America and in Europe. She received her MFA from Ohio State University.She is on the dance faculty at Smith College in Northampton, MA.

dance witchery with Hilary Clark
REGISTER JULY 31 – AUG 5 / 11:30AM-1:45PM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio

Reaching from years of experiences in various dance, energetic and somatic processes, Clark shares her varied experiences with improvisation and keen observation abilities to expand the work we want to do and make. Through moving together and individually, with proposed movement structures, writing, discussion, and watching each other, we will uncover our default habits and references in an aim to expand our options of how we generate and locate ourselves in action. Gaining skillful perception, we will observe our reference points for movement employing the use of memory, imagination, sensation, architecture, the social and political implications of our bodies, and our relationships to each other. We’ll aim to understand the previous unnameable and expand out expressive and transparent moving alchemy.

HILARY CLARK is a dancer, teacher and choreographer, performing in pivotal experimental dance and theater work, touring nationally and internationally. She received a New York Dance and Performance Award (2008) for her work with Tere O’Connor, luciana achugar, and Fiona Marcotty. She has also worked with Luke George, Jen Rosenblit, Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Young Jean Lee Theater Company, Jon Kinzel and Larissa Velez Jackson. Aa a 2015 Artist in Residence at collective address (NYC), she explores the role and work of the dancer as well as developing Duet for/with/including Jen. Her solo, Accessories of Protection, premiered at Danspace Project (2012), her work as performer and choreographer is documented in Jenn Joy’s book The Choreographic (MIT, 2014). Clark has taught at Chunky Move, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Pacific NorthWest College of Art, and Movement Research. She recently opened Citrine Pilates & Wellness in Brooklyn, NY.

// AFTERNOON INTENSIVE //

Dancing With The Bodies That We Have with Anya Cloud
REGISTER JULY 31 – AUG 5 / 3:15PM-5:15PM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio

Through fully engaged physicality and critical inquiry this intensive will tackle and question the fundamentals of Contact Improvisation. We will practice finding and committing to our Contact Bodies. We will research the roundness of our bodies and what that can offer to our dancing. We will develop practical physical skills related to the physics and logistics of bodies moving, making choices, and responding. We will also explore more elusive and perceptual practices that are integral to the form. We will explore strategies for grounding, disorientation, diving deep, flying, playing, asking questions, taking risks, connecting, surrendering, finding agency, and more. We will notice what our dancing does to us and imagine what it might do in the world. This work asks for radical independence and responsible citizenship — we will take on both. We will dance with the bodies that we have.

ANYA CLOUD: I dance with the body that I have to cultivate radical aliveness. As a contemporary dance artist my research includes making, collaborating, practicing, performing, and teaching. I value sharing my work in diverse contexts and with diverse people. As a dancer and dance maker I have worked with and/or performed for Sara Shelton Mann, Nancy Stark Smith, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Karen Nelson, Eric Geiger, Karen Schaffman, Yoalnde Snaith, Leslie Seiters, Mary Reich, and Kristianne Salcines among others. My ongoing work with Sara Shelton Mann profoundly impacts my artistry. I have had the pleasure of teaching at Tanzquartier, Freiburg Contact Festival, Contact Austria, Israeli Contact Improvisation Festival, Ibiza Contact Festival, wcciJAM, Salt Dance Fest, and Ukraine Contact Improvisation Festival. I hold an MFA in Dance Theatre and I currently teach Dance at CSUSM, in addition to co-directing PADL West. I am also in the Feldenkrais™ Certification Training Program.

DROP-IN CLASSES

SFDI Drop-In Pricing:

All classes (2 hours) / $20 each
All jams: $5
Unlimited drop-ins package: $150
Velocity Class Cards not available for SFDI Drop-ins

REGISTER FOR UNLIMITED DROP-INS AND SAVE!

Honest Reactions to Imaginary Situations with Raja Feather Kelly
MON JULY 31 / 9-11 AM // Velocity Founders Studio
TUES AUG 1 / 3:15-5:15PM // Century Ballroom
SAT AUG 5 / 3:15-5:15PM // Velocity Founders Studio

My artistic process/classes begin with physical games, puzzles, systems and strategies and develop into research-driven, iterative practices. I desire to recognize and go beyond the ordinary, especially in respect to movement vocabulary, the line between personal and private, and duration. Physical and verbal conversations on pop-culture and the human condition (or our ultimate concerns of human existence: meaning, loneliness, freedom, and mortality). How does one’s body or other material matter grapple with this in space, time, and the mainstream.

Recipient of the 2016 Solange MacArthur Award for New Choreography, RAJA FEATHER KELLY was born in Fort Hood, Texas and is the first and only choreographer to dedicate the entirety of his company’s work to Andy Warhol. He is the creator of ANDY WARHOL’S 25 CATS NAME SAM; ANDY WARHOL’S DRELLA (I LOVE YOU FAYE DRISCOLL); ANDY WARHOL’S 15: COLOR ME, WARHOL; ANOTHER 37 REASONS TO CRY (ANOTHER WARHOLIAN PRODUCTION); ANDY WARHOL’S TROPICO; and many short works, all of which have been created and performed throughout various theatres in New York City. For over a decade, Kelly has worked throughout the United States and abroad (Austria, Germany, Australia, United Kingdom, and France) in search of the connections between popular culture and humanity and their integration into experiential dance-theatre. Kelly currently choreographs, writes, and directs his own work as Artistic Director of the feath3r theory, a culture-driven dance-theatre company.

spiral / slide / slough / ride with Mike Hodapp
MON JUL 31 / 9-11AM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio

To ground! This contact improvisation class is open to all experience levels. In it, we’ll explore the floorwork technique that undergirds our CI dancing. What happens in the critical 6 inches closest to the ground as we pour and release weight? How can we retrain our falling reflexes to open up a larger field of movement possibilities? How can we tap spirals, crescent rolls, slides, contraction, and extension to more effortlessly move across the floor and carry the weight of others? How do we fall together, collapse together, and fluidly move dances into and out of the ground?

MIKE HODAPP has been dancing and teaching contact improvisation for 20 years, since discovering it as a teenager at Oberlin College. He co-founded the Seattle Contact Improv Lab, now in its 10th year. His interest in CI is less about performance, and more about the work of CI as a physical discipline, mindfulness practice, emergent culture, and tool for questioning gender and power. Also, it brings him joy and connection and makes him happier and more whole. When not dancing, Mike can be found putting on puppet shows for his daughter, playing silly songs on the banjo, or subjecting high school students in his classroom to the fine (nonexistent?) line between teaching and performance art.

It is just the beginning, and it may last forever with Alice Gosti
MON JUL 31 / 3:15-5:15PM
Century Ballroom

In this workshop we will investigate durational performance, asking ourselves: how long does it go for? What if it last forever? Using improvisational scores and task based movement we will challenge time as we know it, expanding and contracting it to alter our own experience, emotions and perceptions.

ALICE GOSTI is an Italian-American choreographer, hybrid performance artist, curator and architect of experiences, working between Seattle and Europe since 2008. Gosti’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, commissions and residencies including being a recipient of the 2012 Vilcek Creative Promise in Dance Award, the 2012 ImPulsTanz danceWEB scholarship, the 2015 inaugural Intiman Theatre’s Emerging Artist Program as a Director and Velocity’s 2015 Made in Seattle Artist and NEFA’s National Dance Project 2016. Gosti’s work has been commissioned and presented nationally and Internationally in universities, theaters, museums and galleries. Dance Magazine has described Gosti’s work as “unruly yet rigorous, feminine yet rebellious, task-like yet mischievous.“http://gostia.com

Oops, You Dropped Something: Stories in CI with Katherine Cook
MON JUL 31 / 3:15-5:15PM
Velocity Founders Studio

Have you ever wondered about the potentials of Contact Improvisation as a tool for narrative and expression? In this class we will explore using CI to tell our deeply human stories: of anger, sorrow, joy, confusion, frustration, delight, or despair. We’ll explore how the physicality of Contact Improvisation–weight, release, tone, structure, relationship, and resistance–translates into the materials of our inner lives, and give room in our dancing to claim these wild territories as part of our experience, reckoning with the composition that arises as a result. All levels of experience with Contact Improvisation are welcome.

KATHERINE COOK is a dancer, teacher, and mathematician based in Seattle WA. Her teaching incorporates a love of improvisation, awareness and somatic practices, mathematics, and the natural world. She focuses her work at the intersection of the body, the mind, and the environment, and prefers questions to statements, curiosity to answers. Her teaching and performance are rooted in a deep and sustained relationship with the rigor, complexity, and creativity of improvisation. Her dancing celebrates the physical body, spontaneity, and generosity in the present. She has developed material with and/or performed with Nancy Stark Smith, Karen Nelson, Nita Little, Cyrus Khambatta, and Kris Wheeler, among others.

Contact as an Act of Resistance with Anya Cloud
TUES AUG 1 / 9-11AM
Velocity Founders Studio

This class will focus on developing an open system Contact Body that increases possibilities and cultivates radical aliveness. We will experiment with a multiplicity of ways to take our humanness in and out of physical contact in extreme and surprising ways. We will work to find agency in everything we do. We will set boundaries, take risks, and sweat in order to increase our aesthetic and sensorial range. We will question, provoke, and tangle with aspects of identity, power, expectations, composition, and communication. The politics of responsive resistance will offer a framework for inquiry, transgression, and generosity within our dancing. It is a high stakes and high physicality proposition. Some of the research will be quite practical and some will be quite elusive. We will consider why and how our dancing is relevant in the current world.

BODY = teacher / dancer witch with Hilary Clark
TUES AUG 1 / 9-11AM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio

We’ll begin slowly with simple exercises and scores influenced by my ongoing studies in fascia, energetic and somatic modalities, then moving to improvisations and proposed structures. We’ll interrogate our methods for moving and making through the influences of vulnerability, rebellion, ability and perceived lack of ability. This class is a supportive space meant to deepen our practice and availability to our own work as performers. We will explore the body as our teacher and seek to better understand our choices, seeing the dancer as also a maker.

Diversity in Dancing: Start Where You Are with Diverse Diviners
TUES AUG 1 / 3:15-6PM
Velocity Founders Studio

Calling all movers of diverse identity, ability & humanity to explore, share and enjoy their unique embodied connection and current expression. Our long class includes deepening into sensing, perception, creation, composition + communication. All levels welcome.

DIVERSE DIVINERS: Yulia Arakelyan co-artistic director of Wobbly, movement artist, choreographer, loves Butoh and improvisation. Corrie Befort dancer, choreographer, designer, filmmaker—also teaches Dance for Parkinson’s through Path With Art. Karen Daly 20-year dance artist tours internationally with DanceAbility. Erik Ferguson co-artistic director of Wobbly, anti-virtuosic movement artist trained in improvisation, DanceAbility, Butoh. Karen Nelson mutator of Contact Improvisation co-started DanceAbility and Diverse Dance, divines Tuning Scores. Syniva Whitney instigator Gender Tender performance project, dancer, actor, choreographer, visual artist.

who’s (NOT) here? what’s (NOT) happening? with John Dixon
WED AUG 2 / 9-11AM
Velocity Founders Studio

Let go of the ideas of presence and productivity to break open the possibilities of action and silence, stillness and explosive engagement. We’ll play with flip-flopping the switch between the known and unknown to lose ourselves in the ongoing fluctuations of identity, desire, connection, confusion and the oscillating energies in the space between us. Make your indecision physical while turning your curiosity into a mischievous partner. Let’s dance.

JOHN DIXON has been exploring dance via improvisation, choreography, teaching and performance since 1985. He has performed with improvisational movement artists Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson, Steve Paxton and Nina Martin and was a founding member of the collaborative improvisation ensemble, ROOM with Sheri Cohen and Tonya Lockyer and composer Stuart Dempster. John received his MFA in Dance from the University of Washington in 2002 and has taught classes and workshops at numerous colleges and universities across the country. He is currently on faculty at East Carolina University where he teaches improvisation, composition and other strategies for subverting social norms and redirecting habituation.

Early ideas, formal forms, creative Contact Improvisation with Anne Cooper
WED AUG 2 / 9-11AM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio

This 2 hour class prepares us to enter into contact improvisations that are true to the dance at hand, and, also challenges us a little in the practice of a few formal forms I’ve learned from Peter Bingham/EDAM and Steve Paxton (Material for the Spine). I will guide us in warming up and tuning our bodies an attention, continuing as we encounter the forms, and some preparations for CI such as “the small dance” (Steve Paxton), falling, recovery, rolls, and rising into support/releasing/improvising with support and the sensation and influence of gravity. The last half hour will be improvising (in contact) in “round robin” where, tuned, the dancing is your and your partner’s to discover, play out, investigate and improvise within the form.

ANNE COOPER began dancing CI in the 90s, training with Peter Bingham/EDAM and other teachers. She has performed as a dancer in choreographed and improvised works for many years, with a number of Canadian dance companies, musicians and dancers (including EDAM, DanStaBat, Mascall Dance and others.). She has studied with Nancy Stark Smith and participated in 3 of her “Glimpse” performance installations of the Underscore, most recently at Velocity in December, 2016. Anne also creates and performs her own work. She has taught CI since 2000 and is an avid “jammer”.

Feldenkrais for the Dancing Imagination with Sheri Cohen
THURS AUG 3 / 9-11AM
Velocity Founders Studio

We’ll mix Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® (slow, subtle and profound guided movement explorations), with some gentle hands-on support from partners, to bring ourselves to deep rest, full imagination and potent action. The Feldenkrais Method® helps us align our actions more directly with our intentions by clarifying how our movement relates to our kinesthetic sense of self. Open to all abilities.

SHERI COHEN is an Assistant Trainer in the Feldenkrais Method. She has taught the movement arts for over 25 years, including dance, Feldenkrais and yoga. As director of the Sheri Cohen Company, and in projects with others, she created and performed dance works in the U.S. and Europe. For more on Sheri, see http://www.SheriCohenMovement.com.

Causing It Only a Little with Karen Nelson
FRI AUG 4 / 9-11AMVelocity Founders Studio

There was a time when Contact Improvisation was not even really imaginable.*
Conjuring Unimaginable in solo and with a partner, we attend to the sensations of falling, momentum, and reflex of balance. We continually re-discover sensations of the skeleton and it’s movement in relationship with gravity, what Steve Paxton called the “small dance” of standing. In practice, we start small with refreshing our felt experience of gravity in ordinary movement like standing. Then causing it only a little,** eventually we free our movement to get as big or varied as wish, playing with a larger, expanded relationship between ourselves and earth.
(quote by Steve Paxton, *Why Standing? Contact Quarterly w/s 2015, and **archival video Chute)

KAREN NELSON’S 40-year dance and performance practice has been influenced by mentor/collaborator’s Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson’s, Material for the Spine, Contact, and Tuning Scores (respectively), and with many others around the world. A dancer/choreographer, performer, teacher and organizer, Karen co-founded Joint Forces Dance Co, Breitenbush Jam, Dance Ability, Diverse Dance Research Retreat, and the performance group Image Lab, among other projects.

Image Lab intensively developed Tuning Scores together for nearly a decade in the 1990s, and autonomously in current collaborations. They performed Tuning Scores Observatories in the US, Europe and Asia. A regular guest teacher at the Schools for New Dance Development in Amsterdam and Arnhem, Karen made numerous teaching visits including Bates Festival, Movement Research and Festivals in South America. She’s received awards from National Endowment for the Arts, Oregon Arts Commission, National Performance Network, Wild Woods Foundation, Vashon Allied Arts, NW New Works.

Time is an ally with Kris Wheeler
FRI AUG 4 / 9-11AM
Velocity Kawsaki Studio

In this class we’ll address time in improvisation. Though “time waits for no one” (12th Century) we will take time, use it well, and deepen our felt and aesthetic grasp of the moment. Drawing on Skinner Releasing Technique and other practices we’ll find body/mind becoming embodied, becoming presence. There will be playful and inquisitive opportunities for solo, duet and group dances. Some of the class will involve closing eyes, turning focus inward toward sensation. How are time and sensation related? Can we identify and “perform” our perceptions of sensation? Guided improvisations will also use the senses of seeing and hearing to nourish the fullness of our presence. Like with Steve Paxton’s “small dance” we’ll take the time to open awareness and explore presence in the myriad “small dances” that are always going on both somatically and in your imagination.

KRIS WHEELER enjoyed an international career as a performer and teacher of dance for 20 years during the ‘70s and ‘80s, working closely with dance legends Joan Skinner, Deborah Hay, Steve Paxton and others specializing in the improvisational and compositional creative processes of dance-making. She taught contact improvisation and hosted the first contact jams in Seattle. A soloist with the American Contemporary Dance Company, directed by Joan Skinner, and assistant director of, and soloist with, the Robert Davidson Dance Company, specializing in aerial dance, Kris also taught at University of Washington’s dance department for 6 years. She took a sabbatical from art-making to pursue graduate studies in psychology and creative process, becoming a depth-oriented psychotherapist. In 2005, Wheeler returned to dance and began a 10-year collaboration with performance artist, Vanessa DeWolf, investigating reflective feedback and free associative writing in cultivating presence and performance.

Creative Process Drop-In with Keyon Gaskin
FRI AUG 4 / 3:15-5:15PM
Century Ballroom

More Info coming soon!

Resonant Action with Chris Aiken
FRI AUG 4 / 3:15-5:15PM
Velocity Founders Studio

In this class we will explore ways of tuning ourselves, our perceptions, our readiness to move, our emotional state, or the concepts that define our experience. Our purpose will be to explore our capacity for committed dancing. Our approach will be to uncover basic but profound principles that underlie how we can be resourceful, adaptive and healthy within an improvised context.

CHRIS AIKEN is an internationally recognized performer and teacher of dance improvisation performance and contact improvisation. He has performed and collaborated with many renowned dance artists including Andrew Harwood, Steve Paxton, Kirstie Simson, Nancy Stark Smith, Peter Bingham, Ray Chung, Joerg Hassmann and Angie Hauser, as well as musicians such as Mike Vargas, Peter Jones, Tigger Benford, Philip Hamilton and Andre Gribou. Chris’ collaboration with Angie Hauser has been presented by the American Dance Festival, the Bates Dance Festival, and the Florida Dance Festival, among many others.

The felt experience with Joe Goode
SAT AUG 5 / 9-11AM
Century Ballroom

Together we will explore a performance practice rooted in deep feeling and awareness.

Get In and Get Out with Angie Hauser
SAT AUG 5 / 9-11AM
Velocity Founders Studio

In this class we will practice contact improvisation. Our focus will be on improvising while maintaining touch with another person: dancing together. Specifically we will experiment with a variety of frames for entering and exiting the dance. How do we ‘get in’ with ourselves? with our partner? with the room? and then how do we get out? We will dance with questions of endurance, attentional duration, curiosity, fear, social dynamics, leading and following.

ANGIE HAUSER is a choreographer, performer, and teacher. Her work is grounded in improvisation and collaboration. She is a long-time member of the Bebe Miller Company, receiving a Bessie Award for her creative work with company. She has a 15-year partnership creating improvised performances with dance artist Chris Aiken. She teaches dance technique, contact improvisation, improvisation, and choreography throughout North America and in Europe including as Assistant Professor at Smith College in Northampton, MA.

Dancing Embodiment with Haruko Crow Nishimura
SAT AUG 5 / 9-11AM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio

We will investigate the subtle and extreme manifestations of our energies, discover how to work with them, follow our curiosity – not giving up – and find ways to go deeper into to even the simplest of our our movements and gestures. I will provide tools to explore embodiment through imagery, guided work, sensory experience and structured improvisation. We will push ourselves to the edge of possibility seeking extreme qualities of movement and playful theatricality. We will work with word guided movement and group and solo exercises. I will incorporate training of our internal sensibilities striving to become a vessel and honing our ability to “be moved” by the image & physical sensation rather than moving of our own will. This workshop is open to dancers, actors, visual artists and writers.

HARUKO CROW NISHIMURA is a director, dancer and vocalist who strives to discover how art can create deeper connections and awakenings. She artistic directs the performing arts group Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE) whose work was the subject of a major exhibition at the Frye Art Museum in 2011 and has been featured in 10 countries presenting experimental dance and theater projects, concerts, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation. She was commissioned along with DAE by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach and undertook a massive site specific collaboration for NEXT50 with Olson Kundig Architects in 2012. She danced as a soloist with the Kronos Quartet in 2013 and again in 2015 as part of 95 rituals a celebration of Anna Halprin’s 95th birthday. Her recent dance theater project Predator Songstress, which combined performance and social practice, was presented by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco and at On the Boards 2015. She and DAE were invited by the National Parks Arts Foundation to create a work she is calling Ritual Voices,a large scale site specific work on the Gettysburg Battlefield in Pennsylvania, a rich 3 city collaboration at the national monument. She is also embarking on a new Virtual Reality Film based on her dance work REDSHOES with Mechanical Dreams, a female led start up creating Virtual Reality films.

Resistance Lives in the Spine with taisha paggett
SAT AUG 5 / 9-11
Meet in the Velocity Lobby

This contact-focused class draws on a selection of practices from the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People and is a truncated version of the intensive, Poetics of Resistance. We’ll explore foundational physical and perceptual skills such as falling, suspension, giving and supporting weight with one or more partners, working with and across disorientation, and using breath as a support structure and catalyst for moving. Students will be asked to contemplate how these physical practices relate to broader contexts of social justice, interdependence and action. Open to all movers.

taisha paggett is a Southern California‐based dance artist whose individual and collaborative interdisciplinary works re‐articulate and collide certain western choreographic practices with the politics of daily life to interrogate fixed notions of black and queer embodiment and survival. Such works include the dance company project, WXPT (we are the paper, we are the trees) and the School for the Movement of the Technicolor People, which have collectively been supported by Clockshop (Los Angeles), the MAP Fund (in conjunction with Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), National Performance Network, Diverseworks (Houston), the Fusebox Festival (Austin) and Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, amongst other institutions. Most recently as a dancer, paggett has worked with Every House Has a Door, David Roussève/REALITY, Yael Davids, Meg Wolfe and with Ashley Hunt through their ongoing collaboration, “On movement, thought and politics,” amongst others. Paggett is an assistant professor of Dance at UC Riverside.

Void And The Emergence Of Forms with Andrew Marcus
SAT AUG 5 / 3:15-5:15PM
Century Ballroom

We introduce a practice of contact with the felt senses, their interaction and combination in response to objects of perception, in ways that typically accumulate and coalesce into concepts such as “my body,” and “my body in relation to..,” but which we suspend, toward the possibility of relinquishing the naming function. In this way, we cultivate unconditioned physical encounters with, and within, the phenomenal world. Progressively working through the overflowingness of sense perceptions toward silence, stillness, and, ultimately, void, we engage a process of reconstruction: Emergent structural differentiation and spatial/temporal relations prioritize the transitional, or the between state—often identified by that which it is not. Therein we lay the ground of the intersubjective field, toward actions in worlds.

A wild and tender terrain with Tamin Totzke
SAT AUG 5 / 3:15-5:15PM
Velocity Kawasaki

In this class we will enter a wild and tender terrain through an exploration of dynamic tone and sharing weight. Through fluctuating tone we move with our partners, offering slippery slopes of softness or a rigid cliff to jump from. We begin in solo examining how tone can inhabit sensations, impulses and desires then move into duets to explore how this practice deepens the connection of sharing weight. I’m interested in the vulnerability that’s unmasked when this form of play introduces elements of perplexity and surprise.

TAMIN TOTZKE is a Seattle-based choreographer, dance educator and movement improviser. Currently, Tamin dances with the movement collective NFKAA who will be performing at the Seattle International Dance Festival in June 2017. She has toured nationally and internationally, with notable projects including: teaching and performing with Cloud Gate Dance Theater, Taipei Dance Forum, Epic Arts, BodyCartography, Kirstie Simson and Jennifer Monson. Recently she premiered a site-specific dance work in Seattle’s historic Georgetown Steam Plant with her collaborator Tia Kramer through their project, study of time and motion. More info can be seen at studytimeandmotion.com. Tamin holds an MFA in dance from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign and is now pursing a Master’s degree in somatic psychology.