Velocity Dance Center

// MASTER CLASSES + WORKSHOPS ARCHIVE //

2019

MASTERCLASS SERIES: ERICA BADGELEY
TUMBLEWAKE
FRI MAY 24 + 31 / 1-3PM
Drop-in $15 / Friend-MVP $12

CLASS DESCRIPTION

The floor can feel scary and far away. What if your relationship to gravity felt as easy as swimming on land? In this class, we will play with our body’s infinite orientations to the floor, facilitated by our limbs and a sense of buoyant ease. Together, we will navigate gravity as our partner, not our master. This class is influenced by teachings of: Les Slovaks, RootlessRoot/Fighting Monkey, Rakesh Sukesh/Payatt Intransit, Tomislav English, David Zambrano, dancers who’ve worked with Anouk van Dijk, Ultima Vez, Rosas, and Sasha Waltz. It also sources the wisdom of Aikido, Tai Chi, and GYROTONIC® / GYROKINESIS®. Suggested attire for your comfort: knee-pads, slide-y pants, and a long sleeves shirt layer.

ABOUT THE TEACHING ARTIST

Erica Badgeley is a Seattle Dance Artist who spent 2.5 years dancing professionally in Europe. She was a member of the SEAD Bodhi Project, and worked in Austria and Belgium from 2014 – 2016 performing and touring works by: Etienne Guilloteau, Moya Michael, Matija Ferlin, Bostjan Antoncic, Julia Schwarzbach and Lisa Hinterreithner. In Seattle, she has performed and collaborated with: Cameo Lethem, Elia Mrak, Kate Wallich | The YC, Danielle Agami / Ate9, Coleman Pester/TMS, Jeffrey Fracé, and Tonya Lockyer. Her own choreography and improvisations have been presented in Seattle, Brussels and Salzburg. She is also a co-founder of Sh*t Gold Open Mic in Seattle and The Artist Commons in Brussels. Erica is an alumna of the University of Washington Dance Department, and a certified GYROTONIC® / GYROKINESIS® Trainer, currently teaching at Seattle Changing Room and Pivot Bellevue. She will perform next in Seattle International Dance Festival’s Spotlight on Seattle Program this June 13th, 2019.

MASTERCLASS SERIES: ANNA K LONG
GAGA
SAT MAY 4 / 7-8PM
Drop-in $15 / Friend-MVP $12

CLASS DESCRIPTION 

Gaga is a new way of gaining knowledge and self-awareness through your body. Gaga provides a framework for discovering and strengthening your body and adding flexibility, stamina, and agility while lightening the senses and imagination. Gaga raises awareness of physical weaknesses, awakens numb areas, exposes physical fixations, and offers ways for their elimination. The work improves instinctive movement and connects conscious and unconscious movement, and it allows for an experience of freedom and pleasure in a simple way, in a pleasant space, in comfortable clothes, accompanied by music, each person with himself and others.

ABOUT THE TEACHING ARTIST

Anna Long is a freelance dancer, choreographer, and Gaga teacher based in Chicago, IL. Anna was in the inaugural Gaga Teachers’ Training Program, and has been a certified Gaga instructor since 2012. She completed her degree in dance and biology at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, NY and has continued to perform and teach contemporary dance home and abroad. In 2010 Anna first experienced Gaga, the movement language of Ohad Naharin through Bobbi Smith’s classes during the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance summer intensive. After immersing herself inside the vocabulary and repertoire of Batsheva, she sought to incorporate Gaga into her training and artistic endeavors. Anna has taught regular Gaga classes in New York City and Chicago. She was a guest teacher for Inbal Pinto and Avshalom Pollak Dance Company, CSU Long Beach, Columbia College  Ate 9, Lee Saar, and Punch Drunk Theatre’s Sleep No More. She has hosted Gaga/choreography workshops in Boston, Chicago, Paris and Los Angeles. She has created works on Visceral Dance Chicago and for Loyola Marymount College in Chicago and produced her own. Anna was one of the featured choreographers for Chicago’s Dance in the Parks 2016 as well as debuting “Triptych”, her first self produced show at Links Hall along collaborators Owen Scarlett and Belle Jessen in 2016. Anna will be a featured performer and choreographer for James Graham Dance Theater’s Dance Lovers SF in 2017.

MASTERCLASS SERIES: Molly Griffin + EMMA WHITELEY
Driving force
WEDS APR 10 / 6:15-7:45PM
Drop-in $15 / Friend-MVP $12

CLASS DESCRIPTION 

Ground the body. Push yourself to physical extremes. Listen to and follow your instincts. Play with possibilities. Develop and train in and out of the floor. This class will push you to leave vanity at the door and create an environment where you feel safe to explore new textures, new movement, new emotional layers, and new games. We feel strongly about starting each class with a playful game and taking that playfulness into highly physicalized movement that has a focus on floor-work and intention. Come join us.

ARTIST BIO + PRONOUNS

Emma Whiteley (she/her)

Newly a west coast habitant, Emma spent the previous nine years dancing in New York City. She was a founding member of both Vim Vigor and UNA Projects and had the pleasure of performing in New York, California, Colorado, Tel Aviv and Panama. Emma has also assisted the companies with teaching at New York University, University of Michigan, SUNY Purchase, Alonzo King Lines Training Program, Peridance, and Springboard Danse Montreal. Emma has also had the pleasure of performing Roy Assaf’s A Girl with UNA Projects. She received her BFA from NYU’s Tisch school of the arts.

Molly Griffin (she/her)

Molly Griffin has been a performer in Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, Company XIV, Keigwin + Company, Danielle Russo Performing Project, the Metropolitan Opera, Liz Gerring Dance Company, and the Limon Company. She has been a part of new creation projects with Hofesh Shechter, Itzik Galili, Danielle Russo, and Liz Gerring. Molly’s film credits include Broad City and a Pussy Riot music video. She has recently moved to Seattle, WA where she is on fellowship to receive her MFA in Dance from University of Washington. Molly holds a BFA in dance from The Juilliard School.

LOVER OF LOW CREATURES: SPECIAL PREVIEW PERFORMANCE + WORKSHOP
SAT MAY 4 / 3-5PM / FREE
Velocity 1621 12th Ave

RESERVE TICKETS>>

Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco (Bet Ya UnGodly Things, I Can Fly Twice As High) and Sara Porkalob (Dragon Lady, Dragon Cycle) will present a free preview of Lover of Low Creatures, the latest contemporary dance musical from Neve, directed by Porkalob. This special preview will be free to the public thanks to sponsorship from Velocity Dance Center who currently host Neve as a Creative Resident, and the City of Seattle Office of Arts and Culture through the CityArtist Grant. This special preview will be followed by a storytelling workshop facilitated by Neve Mazique-Bianco and Sara Porkalob.

While this event is open to everyone, we especially wish to welcome pregnant folks and their loved ones, queer and trans families, Black/Indigenous/mixed race/families of color, disabled families, loving families, complicated families, and children of all ages (free childcare will be provided).

Since Lover of Low Creatures is about ancestral wound healing, and heavily features a mixed race mother/daughter duo, since Sara and I both make work about our families who are families of color, who are queer, who are disabled, we wanted to present this special free preview to people building and creating families like ours, no matter what stage of the journey they are on.

Reserve your free admission, and feel free to contact Velocity if you have any questions!

ABOUT NEVE:
Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco (dancer/choreographer/creator/multidisciplinary star), or NEVE, is a Black (specifically Sudanese, even more specifically Nubian) punk disabled queer fairy beast. A certified personal trainer and integrated dance teacher trained by NASM and Axis Dance Company, respectively, Neve cares about the welfare and equitable access to joy, sensuality, community, self-expression, and liberation of all bodies. Neve received multiple film and theatre directing awards in 2017, from East Bay Express in Oakland, the Toronto International Porn Festival, and from the Seattle Gender Justice League. They made their international debut at Berlin’s Hebel Am Ufer. In spring 2018, Neve joined the artistic board of directors of PlayThey Studios, a media and event production cooperative company of queer/trans/Black/disabled and otherwise marginalized artists. Neve is one of the first four recipients of the PNW Afro X Fellowship, a research fellowship for African American artists created in collaboration by The Seattle Public Library and the Central District Forum, as well as the recipient of a 2019 City Artist grant, both of which benefit production of their evening length work Lover of Low Creatures.

ABOUT SARA:
Sara Porkalob (director) is an award-winning activist based in Seattle. She’s featured in Seattle Magazine’s “Most Influential People of 2018,” City Arts’ “2017 Futures List,” and served as the Intiman Theatre’s 2017 Co-Curator. She is a co-founder of DeConstruct, an online journal of intersectional performance critique. Her first full-length play Dragon Lady garnered a Seattle Times Footlight Award, a Broadway World Award for “Best New Play”, and is the recipient of three 2018 Gregory Awards for Outstanding Sound/Music Design, Outstanding Actress in a Musical, and Outstanding Musical Production. In 2019, American Repertory Theatre will produce Dragon Lady and Dragon Mama, the first two plays in her trilogy The Dragon Cycle, and in July, Nordo Culinarium will produce her new play 7th and Jackson, a historical fiction with music and immersive dining, inspired by Seattle’s International District. Porkalob is a proud 2nd generation Filipinx American and owes all of her success to her family. Believe survivors. Black Lives Matter. Queer Trans Lives Matter. Vote.

Photo – Saira Barbaric

WORKSHOP SERIES: GENDER TENDER
SAT APR 27 / 2-3PM  / $10
+
MELTED RIOT AUDITION
SAT APR 27 / 3-5PM / FREE
Velocity 1621 12th Ave

Fox Whitney, lead artist of GENDER TENDER is seeking performers for their latest project MELTED RIOT. Inspired by the Stonewall Riots of 1969, this interdisciplinary performance gives way to somatic revolt, political satire and dances about space stations. This evening length performance happening on Friday June 28 and Saturday June 29 will use a crowd of voices, bodies and sculptural interventions to investigate radical extremes.

*NOTE: The workshop is separate from the audition, though participants are encouraged to attend both. The workshop costs $10 for a 60 minute workshop, and the audition is free!

GENDER TENDER/MELTED RIOT WORKSHOP: 2-3PM / $10 / pay at the door
Learn a bit about the performance and engage in Gender Tender training methods and durational performance scores that happen during MELTED RIOT. Open to all!

MELTED RIOT AUDITION 3-5PM / FREE
Come ready to move and make some noise. Seeking performers of all backgrounds that are interested in one to all of the following: meditation, duration, our queer and trans ancestors, witchery, trans-centric dance, ghosts, queering sound, contact with others (the quick and the dead) and moving with unusual objects in unusual settings. We will work with structured improvisations, set choreography and objects from MELTED RIOT. Come prepared to time travel to 1969. There are different levels of involvement possible and the rehearsal schedule varies but GT rehearses regularly Wednesday evenings from 9:30p-11p at Velocity. Performance availability needed Friday and Saturday June 28-29 and for tech and dress rehearsals earlier that week.

ABOUT MELTED RIOT:
Based on a vision transgender artist Fox Whitney had of drag artist and cabaret singer Stormé DeLarverie throwing the first punch at the Stonewall Riots on June 28th, 1969, MELTED RIOT will transform the space of Velocity Dance Center using Fox’s binary-disintegrating choreographic techniques and interests in altered states, shock comedy and the metaphysical world. The structure of the performance is created using information Fox received while dancing to the songs that played on the Stonewall Inn jukebox during the riots in 1969. MELTED RIOT uses tactics rooted in dance, durational performance and visual art to investigate the effects peaceful and violent forms of support and sabotage have on the bodies, minds and spirits of the queer community. Performance artists that were present at the Stonewall Riots like Marsha P Johnson, Stormé Delarverie and Sylvia Rivera inspired this project as well as artists like Yvonne Rainer, Faith Ringgold, Agnes Martin, Nan Goldin, Andy Warhol, Richard Pryor, Simone Forti, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pauline Oliveros and the history of tableau vivant in performance (the act of recreating paintings as living artworks). MELTED RIOT is also inspired by political actions and protests like the Levitate the Pentagon protest, the Compton Cafeteria Riots and the Clean Sweep protest formed by the gay youth group Vanguard in the 1960s. This weekend of performances is dedicated to the real and imagined people that took part in the Stonewall Riots of 1969. Featuring Fox and over 20 other Seattle area artists. MELTED RIOT happens on the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots in NYC, a defining moment in the movement for equal rights for the LGBTQ+ community and the original Pride weekend.

ABOUT FOX WHITNEY:
Fox Whitney is an artist creating performative experiences that combine theater, dance and visual art. Fox’s transgender, queer, multiracial point of view is at the heart of their performance project, Gender Tender. GT engages a team of artists trained in Fox’s unique methods modeled on the structures of sports teams, sitcoms and riots. They are also a filmmaker, actor, dancer and teaching artist. They are currently the artist in residence at Velocity Dance Center.

Photo – Courtesy of the artist

MASTERCLASS SERIES: BATSHEVA
GAGA/NAHARIN 
FRI MAR 8 / 5-6PM  + SAT MAR 8 / 12-1PM

Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 Friend-MVP

REGISTER>>

DESCRIPTION:

Gaga/Naharin is a movement language developed over the last decade by Ohad Naharin, in the Batsheva
studios with the members of the Batsheva Dance Company. This expressive and dynamic movement language is used daily by dancers of the Batsheva Dance Company and Batsheva Ensemble as the basis for their distinctive technique. Gaga offers a new way to reach a deeper knowledge and understanding of one’s self via the body and its movement. Gaga encourages, teaches and cultivates multi dimensional movement, efficiency and texture of movement, the use of explosive power, the connection between pleasure and effort, quickness, clarity of intention, stamina. It enables recognition of one’s own movement habits and helps to acquire new ones. Essentially, Gaga increases one’s understanding of the body’s weaknesses and strengths, as well as its response to them. Through Gaga, one works to break down physical barriers in order to reach a greater comprehension and control of instinctive movements. Ultimately, Gaga empowers the experiences of pleasure, stillness, positivism, and happiness. The Gaga movement language is a tool that can be utilized by dancers and non- dancers alike.

*This class is in support of the Batseva Dance Company – Venezuela performance at the Paramount Theatre March 9, 2019. For special offer tickets to the performance visit http://www.bit.ly/velocitydance-stg

ABOUT THE COMPANY:

BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY has been critically acclaimed and popularly embraced as one of the foremost contemporary dance companies in the world. Artistic Director, Ohad Naharin, is also the originator of the innovative movement language, Gaga, which has enriched his extraordinary movement invention, revolutionized the company’s training, and emerged as a growing international force in the larger field of movement practices for both dancers and non-dancers.

MASTERCLASS SERIES: COMPANY WAYNE MCGREGOR
with TRAVIS CLAUSEN-KNIGHT + JESSICA WRIGHT
THURS FEB 21 / 9:30-11:15AM

Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 Friend-MVP

DESCRIPTION:
Company Members from the multi-award winning Company Wayne McGregor will conduct a unique workshop for experienced dancers based on the concepts of the contemporary dance company. The workshop will consist of an introduction to the Mind and Movement resource with contextual information about the development of the choreographic thinking tools. A short warm up will be delivered followed by a practical exploration of some of the Mind and Movement lessons and an introduction to the principles that underpin the resource.

Drop-ins only!

*This class is in support of the Company Wayne McGregor- Autobiography performance at the Moore Theatre February 22, 2019.

ARTIST BIOS:
TRAVIS CLAUSEN-KNIGHT – Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Travis moved to England and later graduated from the Arts Educational School, Tring Park in 2009. While in training, he won several awards for dance and choreography within the school and outside, including at the National Youth Ballet and the International Competition of Dance in Spoleto, Italy. Since graduating, Travis performed with Matthew Bourne’s world tour of Swan Lake and featured in the 3D film of the production. He was involved in Michael Clark’s TH residency at Tate Modern in 2011. He also performed with Tavaziva Dance in their re-mount of Double Take and was part of the creation of Sensual Africa. His other credits include work with A.D. Dance and Combination Dance. Since joining Company Wayne McGregor in 2013, Travis has also pursued creative work in fashion, featuring in several collections for upcoming brands such as Kawakey and Jamie Elwood as well as in campaigns for Cerruti 1881. His passion for choreography and creation also drives his successful collaborations with other artists as well as his commitments to mentoring and teaching young creatives.

JESSICA WRIGHT trained at Central School of Ballet, London, before joining D.A.N.C.E., an interdisciplinary programme based in Brussels, Aix-en-Provence and Dresden. During this time she performed with the Forsythe Company in Human Writes and danced in new works by McGregor, Preljocaj and Flamand. She has restaged excerpts of Company Wayne McGregor works Entity and FAR for Milano City Ballet and Compagnie Grenade (Aix en Provence). Jessica also makes dance films in collaboration with choreographer Morgann Runacre-Temple, commissioned by Channel 4, Big Dance and English National Ballet (in partnership with TATE Liverpool and Manchester International Festival). Their films have screened at international festivals including FIFA (Montreal), Cinedans (Netherlands), Agite y Sirva (Mexico) and ScreenDance (Sweden). The Try Out was nominated for two awards at IMZ’s prestigious DanceScreen Festival (2016). Curing Albrecht (2017) was commissioned by ENB as a curtain-raiser to Akram Khan’s Giselle and was subsequently shown on BBC iPlayer, Canal+ TV (France) and at the ICA. It was awarded ‘Best Dance Film’ at the New Renaissance Film Festival (UK) and ‘Best Director’ at Portland Dance Film Festival (USA) in 2017. Jessica joined company Wayne McGregor in 2008.

PHOTO – Jessica Wright, Travis Clausen-Knight and Jordan James Bridge (Company Wayne McGregor) perform Autobiography, choreographed by Wayne McGregor. Photographer Andrej Uspenski

MASTERCLASS SERIES: SZALT
TUES FEB 19 / 6:15-7:45PM

Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 Friend-MVP

DESCRIPTION:

Stephanie Zaletel’s masterclass will activate breath, target core muscle groups through fitness inspired tasks, and incorporate imaginative meditation and improvisation as a means to re-approach contemporary forms. The latter portion of class will include an opportunity for dancers to learn and explore repertoire from our current touring production, moon&. We encourage all levels of mover to join though repertoire will be geared towards professional and pre-professional dancers.

ARTIST BIO:

STEPHANIE ZALETEL is an LA based choreographer, dancer, and educator. Her choreography has been commissioned for various music videos, short films, colleges, institutions, and collaborations. Zaletel began her career dancing for Barak Marshall, Colin Connor (Artistic Director, Limon), and Danielle Agami (Artistic Director, Ate9) before officially forming szalt (dance co.) in 2015. szalt (dance co.) is a team of specialized dance artists led by Stephanie Zaletel in Los Angeles – arousing curiosity through voyeuristic feminine experiences, depictions of body memory, and dream logic – creating and facilitating highly collaborative, site-sensitive, and socially fluent dance performance and practice. Zaletel and her team have performed, led workshops, and held residencies at numerous notable venues across the U.S. including LA Dance Project, The Hammer Museum, REDCAT, Arizona State University, Cornish College of the Arts, Tempe Center for the Arts, Loyloa Marymount University, and Ford Theatres. Zaletel most recently choreographed for Lars Jan’s “The White Album” which premiered at Wexner Center for the Arts, BAM’s Next Wave Festival, and will be showing at the Freud Playhouse in partnership with CAP UCLA and Centre Theater Group in 2019. She holds a BFA in Dance Performance and Choreography with a minor in Humanities from California Institute of the Arts.

*PHOTO CREDIT – Sarah Prinz

WORKSHOP SERIES: LAVINIA VAGO with HARALD STOJAN
A Physical Investigation of the Mind
THURS FEB 14 / 12-2PM

Velocity 1621 12th Ave
PRE-REGISTRATION $15 / Friend $12 | Drop-in $20 / $17 Friend-MVP | $24 Undercurrent + Vago Workshop Package

DESCRIPTION:
How can we handle and process thoughts if we perceive them as material reality? Where do we anchor our body in relation to the mind, to sound, to the environment surrounding us? Inspired by club spaces, dance floors, raving and psychoacoustics we will create and affect artificial spaces through sound, voice and body while working with states of trance and flow.

Lavinia Vago and Harald Stojan will lead a workshop on mechanisms explored, analyzed and developed during the creation of their work NOESIS X, a solo for two.

ARTISTS BIO:
LAVINIA VAGO (choreographer, dancer, teaching artist) is a dance artist from Italy, based in Seattle, working between NYC, Montréal, and Berlin. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Cornish College of the Arts. She has created, performed and toured internationally with Sidra Bell Dance New York, Vim Vigor Dance Theater, Loni Landon Projects, Saint Genet, Tom Weinberger and more extensively with Rubberbandance Group. She has been co-directing, creating, and performing with Kate Wallich + The YC since 2010 and has been a rehearsal director for YC2 since its founding in 2017. She also works as a choreographic assistant and rehearsals director for Victor Quijada, Loni Landon and Kate Wallich. As an educator and choreographic assistant she has taught at Strictly Seattle, Velocity Dance Center, Marymount College, Purchase College, The Juilliard School, The Ailey School, Domaine Forget, Springboard Danse Montreal, L’ècole de danse contemporaine de Montreal, L’école superieur de ballet du Québec. She teaches her own contemporary improvisational class as well as Dance Church™ and the RUBBERBAND Method. She was recently trained to teach Dance for Parkinson’s disease and will soon begin teaching classes in Seattle.

HARALD STOJAN (sound designer, composer, musician) lives and works inter- Berlin, Vienna and the whole world as composer, soundartist, audio engineer, poet and performer oscillating between contemporary musics, fine arts & dance. Studies of computermusic and audio engineering in Vienna, with focus on multichannel/ambisonics, voice and psychoacoustics shape their output. Works usually are site-specific involving sound sculptures, multi-channel sound installations and live performances in various mediums and formats. The physical quality of sound, and sound as the embodying medium of touch and gesture are means of creating affective and immersive experiences which find their fundament in the studies biological, neurological and evolutionary mechanisms of hearing/sensation. Extended vocal techniques and live processing are as much visceral to the work as deconstructed formats of academic- and club music. Artistic collaborations in Theatre, Architecture, Fashion & Dance – among others at Signature Theater New York/Broadway, Columbia University New York, TAKE Festival for Fashion Vienna, Actoral Festival Marseille and venues all over Vienna and Berlin (Theater in der Drachengasse, Kabelwerk/Wien, WUK, EKH etc.). A portion of the collective CLINIC, exploring contemporary club and event culture & part of demon pop duo Pandora. Currently pursuing a contemporary dance education at Tanzfabrik Berlin.

WORKSHOP SERIES: mayfield brooks
end of knowing
SAT FEB 9 / 2-5PM

Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 Friend-MVP

DESCRIPTION:

This workshop will explore mayfield’s ongoing dance practice and project “Improvising While Black/IWB” using voice/body, somatics, contemporary dance, contact improvisation, afropessimist theory, and heart mapping practices. We acknowledge our privilege, oppression, joy and trauma. There is play, dynamic partnering, deep belly laughter, wandering, reading, writing, questioning, critiquing, seeking, democratizing, deconstructing, and exploring giving into gravity’s call as a trustworthy proposition. Who’s got your back? And who can you catch? Trust comes with embodied knowing of one’s own capacities. We will train in a multiplicity of methods: trust, falling, and wildness. The possibilities are endless.

ARTIST BIO:

mayfield brooks improvises while black, and is currently based in Brooklyn, NY. mayfield is a movement-based performance artist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. They studied contemporary dance at the School for New Dance in Amsterdam, moving on centre in Oakland, CA, and hold an MFA in interdisciplinary performance from UC Davis and a Masters in Performance Studies from Northwestern University. Mayfield was a 2017 artist in residence at Movement Research, NYC, and was a 2018 WOW/UNY artist in residence at Governor’s Island New York.

*PHOTO CREDIT – Amar Puri

MASTERCLASS SERIES: Marion Spencer
MON FEB 4 / 9:30-11:15AM
WED FEB 6 / 6:15-7:45PM

Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 Friend-MVP

DESCRIPTION:

Class is a highly imaginative and highly physical investigation of ourselves as movers. We will hold a safe space for building community, investigation, risk and rigor, while embracing a spirit of constant kindness, learning and growth. We begin with a sensation-based warm up, grounding ourselves in our bodies and in the space through improvisation and set material. We cultivate our technique and curiosity through floor, standing and across the floor sequences. Class culminates with a full bodied and nuanced dance phrase that collages together ideas and desires we have found in practice, while also challenging us physically and creatively as dancers and performers.

ARTIST BIO:

Marion is a Brooklyn based dancer, choreographer and educator. Her work has been presented by Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn Studios for Dance, Gibney, Triskelion Arts, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Amherst College, the Dance Now Festival and the Domestic Performance Agency. She currently dances for Kendra Portier, Kinesis Project Dance Theatre and is collaborating with dance artist Simon Thomas-Train. Since moving to New York, Marion has had the pleasure of working with Michelle Boulé, Athena Kokoronis, Stephan Koplowitz, Annie Kloppenberg, Shandoah Goldman, Shaun Irons & Lauren Petty, Vanessa Justice, Michiyaya, Hollis Bartlett, and apprenticed and performed with David Dorfman Dance. Marion teaches at Gibney, Dancewave, Greenwich Country Day School and Girls Preparatory Charter Middle School. She graduated with honors from Vassar College in 2009, where she studied Geography-Anthropology and was a member of the Vassar Repertory Dance Theatre. www.marion–spencer.com

*PHOTO CREDIT: Whitney Browne Photography

WORKSHOP SERIES: Workshop/Audition with Natascha Greenwalt 
FRI JAN 25 / 12-3PM

Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $20 / $17 Friend-MVP

DESCRIPTION:

This workshop/audition for Coriolis Dance’s newest performance will take place in two parts:

PART I – Postballet Class / A ballet class structure that explore sensation and imagery in the body. Along with barre and center work, this class incorporates spinal/pelvis articulation, moving in and out of classical lines, and pushing the extremes of rhythmic dynamics.

PART II Repertoire / Danses des Cygnes is a contemporary feminist re-telling of Swan Lake that “turns the patriarchal power structure of Swan Lake on its head.” City Arts. In this work Natascha explores the power dynamics at play in the ballet, expressing the abuse of Odette but ultimately telling a story of female empowerment and community. This work uses the reclaiming and retelling of this fable as a way to own our power as women.

SEEKING: One female identifying performer of smaller stature to step into and expand a previously existing role in Danses des Cygnes by Coriolis Co-Artistic director Natascha Greenwalt. This artist should be able to express the female perspective but we are very open to expanding gender norms of who might be able to express that perspective. They also need to fit into the costuming of the artist previously dancing this role.

Coriolis welcomes artists of all ethnic backgrounds, gender identities, and body types. Strong classical training, willingness to manipulate ballet vocabulary, openness to exploration and strong communication are a must. Coriolis is project based company and would love to meet artists to for consideration in future works as well.

Paid rehearsals & Performance.
Rehearsals. Mondays 10-11:30 class 12-3 rehearsal & Fridays 12-3 at the Nest, eXit Space in Greenlake.
Tech June 3-5, 2019
Performance Dates: June 6-9, 2019

ARTIST BIO:

Natascha Greenwalt is a Seattle based performer, teaching artist, choreographer and GYROTONIC® Instructor. In 2005 she graduated magna cum laude from Cornish College of the Arts as a Kreielsheimer Scholarship recipient and has performed with companies such as Spectrum Dance Theater and House of Verlaine. She has received choreographic commissions from Ballet Bellevue, Western Washington University, and Cornish College of the Arts.  She teaches ballet at Exit Space: School of Dance, and has served as a guest instructor for Whitman College SDL and the Montana Dance Arts Association, DANCE This and Velocity Dance Center’s Strictly Seattle. This year marks Coriolis Dance’s 11th season for which she is the co-artistic Director and co-founder along with Christin Call.  Natascha continues to explore matters of the heart through emotionally driven technical contemporary ballet.

For more info please visit. www.coriolisdance.com

About Coriolis Dance:

Coriolis is two women in leadership–Co-artistic Directors/Co-founders Natascha Greenwalt and Christin Call.  They work together to create stories of strength and resilience through vulnerability. Their works are complex, emotionally raw, and highly stylized experiences designed to immerse audiences in meaningful and challenging ways. Formed in 2008, they are also the originators of Postballet, an expansion of rigorous ballet technique infused with contemporary practices of improvisation, embodiment, and conceptualism.

*PHOTO CREDIT – Bret Doss Photography

2018

SILAS RIENER WORKSHOP
*OPEN TO ALL*
Part of Merce 100 + the Merce Cunningham Centennial, with support from the Cunningham Trust

DEC 15 / 2-5PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 at the door / $12 Friend-MVP Member

An interdisciplinary workshop for non-dancers and dancers alike providing a first-hand experience of some of Cunningham’s pioneering approaches to art making and performance, taught by Cunningham Company Member Silas Riener.

“Silas Riener is a rare sort of dancer, one whose body emits force, whether the results are satiny, vigorously unyielding or somewhere in between.” –Gia Kourlas, The New York Times

For more info about MERCE 100, click HERE>>  

CI FUNDAMENTALS: ALIA SWERSKY
Space Duets
Series II: Oct 28 – Dec 9 (no class Nov 25)
REGISTRATION FOR THIS SERIES HAS CLOSED

What if making contact begins with our awareness of the spaces between? Our focus will be on the crevasses, cavities and spaces between our bodies; the compositions created by varies proximities.  From this sensitivity to the spaces within our dance, we will inhabit a multiplicity of qualities, allowing a richness of relationship and poetry to our dancing.

ALIA SWERSKY is a movement artist ritual maker, performer and teacher, engaged deeply in the vital act of dance improvisation. She graduated from Cornish College of the Arts in 1998 with a BFA in dance and now teaches as part of the creative process curriculum at Cornish as an adjunct faculty member since 2005. Swersky has taught at Velocity’s Strictly Seattle Festival and the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (SFDI) since the early 2000’s. She was a long time Co-artistic director of Dance Art Group (DAG), a non-profit organization that promotes the practice and appreciation of dance and somatic education in the Seattle area, including the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. Other influences include contact improvisation, yoga, embodied somatic techniques, authentic movement, tuning scores, and many pivotal dance partners and teachers.  Alia has been actively performing, and creating improvisational and choreographic works in Seattle since 1998.

MASTERCLASS SERIES: MICHELLE BOULÉ
FRI OCT 19 9:30–11:15AM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

MASTER CLASS SERIES: DANIEL COSTA

THU SEP 13+20+27 9:30–11:15AM
Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

This contemporary dance class focuses on bold dancing with an attention to fine details, heightening our sensory awareness, and encouraging voluminous dancing. We will begin by slowly awakening our systems and increasing perception of all six limbs and their tactility on the floor, incorporating psychomechanical principles based on the Alexander Technique and Body Mind Centering®. Our approach will assist in opening our joints, help us discover advantages of momentum, and build our strength and flexibility when we repeat phrasing and add on new material. We will conclude with full-bodied and vigorous movement that challenges our ability to maneuver swift changes in direction and space. Phrase work will utilize principles from class—featuring segmented and successive sequencing in and out of the floor—creating a boneless appearance and a loose-limbed, articulate style. Expect somatic exercises, conditioning, floor-work, improvisation and technical exercises that encourage strong locomotion within a grounded movement vocabulary.

DANIEL COSTA, originally from New Jersey, moved to Seattle, Washington in 2015. Costa is a choreographer, performer and educator who seeks to strip away shame and access vulnerability by channeling athleticism, artistry, and healing through dance. He teaches classes at Velocity Dance Center and Fremont Abbey Arts Center, and choreographs, directs and performs for his company, Daniel Costa Dance (DCD). Costa has also served on faculty for Strictly Seattle 2018 a 3-week dance intensive held annually at Velocity Dance Center.

Costa’s choreography has received numerous awards, grants, residencies and commissions, including a 4Culture project grant, choreographic commission for Strictly Seattle at Velocity Dance Center, choreographic commission for Bellingham Repertory Dance, Seattle International Dance Festival’s James Ray Residency Project 2017-18, Spectrum Dance Theater’s Summer Residency 2018, Velocity: V2 & Northwest Film Forum’s Dance + Film Residency 2016, SeattleDances’ DanceCrush Award 2017 and Rutgers University’s Margery J. Turner Choreographer Prize in 2015.

Costa has presented work in Seattle for over 3 years. Festival and presenter credits include: Next Fest NW, Full Tilt, Men in Dance, Seattle International Dance Festival, 12 Minutes Max and BOOST Dance Festival. As a performer, Costa has worked with Chamber Dance Company, Madboots Dance, Stephanie Liapis, The Three Yells, Wade Madsen, Cherdonna Shinatra, and has performed works by Crystal Pite, Kate Weare, Shen Wei, Larry Keigwin, and Manuel Vignoulle, among others. Costa holds a BFA in dance from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.

PHOTO JIM COLEMAN

WORKSHOP SERIES: Rainbow Fletcher | HYPERNOVA

SUN SEP 16 6:30–8:30PM
6:15pm– Registration
Drop-in $20/$17 MVP

Rainbow Fletcher | HYPERNOVA contemporary dance company creates works that feature both resident company members and invited guest artists from the local community. Rainbow and company are currently working on a revamped presentation of their evening-length piece, Bitter Suites, coming this November 8th-11th at Velocity. Save the date!

This workshop will be an opportunity for dancers to learn original choreography from HYPERNOVA’s current and past repertoire, including movement from Bitter Suites, Hot House, and more. Attendees can expect athletic, full-bodied phrase-work that takes you through space with detailed fast twitch speed, and articulation. Beyond the signature physicality of her style, Rainbow will expand on the subtle nuances and expression that can also be found within her choreography. The goal of this workshop is to not only share new movement but also offer guidance and tools on how to edit and shape your own choreography.

Rainbow Fletcher founded HYPERNOVA in 2014. The company is an ongoing representation of Rainbow’s work that is known for its unmistakable originality, complexity, and modern sensibility. Rainbow’s voice as a creator is strongly influenced by her background in contemporary, ballet, flamenco, cabaret, martial arts, and yoga. All elements from concept to movement are generated in a rehearsal process where the company as a whole can share ideas. Each project created is conceptualized by a collaborative team of artists that strive to deliver authentic and stylistically charged art experiences to the public. www.hypernovadance.com

Rainbow Fletcher creates dance-based art that is dynamic, emotionally driven, and elegantly athletic. As a freelance artist, she has performed and set works for a variety of dance companies, festivals, venues, music videos, and commercial productions located in and around the Pacific Northwest area. Beyond her own work, Rainbow is Co-Artistic Director of The Offshore Project; a longstanding creative partnership with fellow artist and collaborator, Ezra Dickinson. Rainbow is well known for her past groundbreaking work as the Choreographer and Dance Director of the Can Can Castaways; the original in-house group of Can Can Kitchen and Cabaret. She performed with the Castaways for nearly a decade in over a dozen full-length productions. Rainbow graduated with a BFA in Dance from Cornish College of the arts in 2004. www.rainbowfletcher.com

MASTER CLASS SERIES: ZACK TANG

TUE + THU AUG 21 + 23 / 9:30–11:30AM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

The class will focus on tools to help you with your contemporary floor work. Emphasizing the carriage of your upper body to the floor. Discovering the surface area of your skin against the ground and finding rotating points in your arms, torso, hips, and legs.

Originally from Houston, Texas, ZACK TANG holds a diploma from The High School for Performing and Visual Arts (07). Upon receiving his BFA from The Juilliard School, under the direction of Lawrence Rhodes, Zack won the Hector Zaraspe Prize for choreography. He has worked with choreographers Victor Quijada, Peter Chu, Alexander Ekman, Stijn Celis, Larry Kegwin, Mark Morris, and Darrell Grand Moltrie, Andrew Skeels, and has performed works by José Limón, Anthony Tudor, Martha Graham, Paul Taylor, and Bronislava Nijinska. In 2012, Zack was listed in Dance Magazine’s “Top 25 to Watch”. Before joining RUBBERBANDance Group, he spent two years with Alonzo King’s LINES Ballet. During his time in Montreal, Zack has been cast as a guest artist for events and advertisements for Cirque du Soleil, Cirque Eloize, Street Parade, Aldo, Running Leap Pictures, and Andrew Skeels. This is Zack’s sixth season with RUBBERBANDance Group.

MASTER CLASS SERIES: GAGA with AMY MORROW

TUE AUG 14 / 9:30–11:30AM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

9:30-10:30am | Gaga Session
10:30-11:30am | Toolbox Session

Led by Amy Diane Morrow, who graduated from the inaugural teacher training program directed by Ohad Naharin.

Open to people ages 16+, regardless of their background in dance or movement. No previous dance experience is needed. All you need is curiosity!

Gaga – Ohad Naharin’s Movement language גאגא -שפת התנועה של אוהד נהרין. is a new way of gaining knowledge and self-awareness through your body. Gaga provides a framework for discovering and strengthening your body and adding flexibility, stamina, and agility while lightening the senses and imagination. Gaga raises awareness of physical weaknesses, awakens numb areas, exposes physical fixations, and offers ways for their elimination. The work improves instinctive movement and connects conscious and unconscious movement, and it allows for an experience of freedom and pleasure in a simple way, in a pleasant space, in comfortable clothes, accompanied by music, each person with himself and others.

Toolbox is a special session to experiment with endless possibilities using tools not rules. The Theorists share keys for unlocking our movement practice inside multi-disciplinary collaborations. We experiment with impossible tasks with optimism. We deconstruct our capacity for complexities to re-choreograph ourselves. We continuously push our limits, listen to the body, and ask “How is our dance relevant as artist citizens?”

Wear comfortable clothes. Be ready to dance barefoot or in socks. Bring a bottle of water and a towel.

WORKSHOP / AUDITION: BETH TERWILLEGER

SAT JUL 14 / 2–5PM
Drop-in $18 MVP Member ($20 regular)

The focus of this workshop will be on artistic/dance expression through character development and emotional embodiment. The dancers will be lead through an improvisational warmup to get both the body and the mind prepared. During the rest of the time, movement expression and exploration will occur along with the development of a character within that movement. We will learn movement phrases and develop characters out of them while allowing those characters to influence both the movement and the emotion behind them. Character interaction will allow for an even further dive into the emotional depth of what it means to embody an idea or being, and also what it means to share it with the audience.

The workshop is also an opportunity for Beth to hire dancers for her upcoming project: The None. The None is an immersive storytelling piece that shares the characters, along with their stories, with the audience while enhancing the experience through technological elements. The purpose of the work is to capture the audience’s attention through emotion and mystery and to inspire them long after they walk out of the theater. It is also an opportunity to give dancers a rich experience where their emotional voices can be share and heard. Beth is looking for strong, generous dancers who are fearlessly creative and open to developing as artists. The rehearsals for the piece will begin in early August and will continue until the show in the Fall at Velocity (date TBA). There is flexibility in schedule and availability with rehearsals and it is all paid work (hourly for rehearsal and performance time). There are spots for ten dancers, a mix of male and female, and all styles and types of dancers are encouraged to attend.

Note: This workshop is not just for those who are looking for work or for professional dancers, anyone and everyone is welcome to attend. Those who are interested in auditioning for The None will just fill out a form before the class to express their interest.

BETH TERWILLEGER is a performing artists who spent many years dancing for Ballet Austin before freelancing in both San Francisco, CA and London, UK. During her time in Austin, Beth created a performing arts company, Califa Dance Collaborative, that brought together interdisciplinary performance pieces that were easily accessible to the public while generating a great deal of support for the art community. Since this endeavor, Beth’s passion lies within the creation of work that is emotionally accessible, creatively compelling, and intellectually stimulating for any audience member. The focus of her art has always been on the escape of the artist into the character and the quest for bringing the audience along with it. She has continuously been described as hard working and dependable, yet wildly creative and wants to use these traits to bring new elements to the dance world to find synergy between dance and the rapidly evolving world around it.
https://www.bethterwilleger.com/

CI FUNDAMENTALS SERIES V: SCOTT DAVIS

SUNS MAY 27–JUL 1 / 1:30PM–2:50PM
$60 Full Series // Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)
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Deepening the Basics. In this series we will continue to build foundational CI skills, including rolling point of contact, giving and receiving weight, sloughing and sliding, and reading our partner’s center. As with many contact classes, we will begin each class with activities that tune our awareness to gravity and momentum and then experiment with the physics of shared weight. The series will also introduce simple games and puzzles as tools for decision making and work with music as an underscore for our dancing.

SCOTT DAVIS is a Seattle-based educator, dancer, and movement improviser. His introduction to Contact Improvisation was in the 1980s and his most influential dance improvisation mentors include KT Niehoff, Amii LeGendre, Karl Frost, and Cyrus Khambatta. Scott has a long history of touring and performing with various dance ensembles and has most recently appeared with Seattle’s AVID, a group whose work is built on the shared vocabulary of Contact Improvisation.

MASTER CLASS SERIES: AMY O’NEAL

FRI + SAT JUN 29+30
$30 Pre-register for both // Drop-in $17 MVP Member ($20 regular)
REGISTER >>

HOUSE DANCE WORKSHOP
FRI JUN 29 / 6:30-8PM

House Dance is a social club dance with origins in the electronic music clubs of Detroit, Chicago, and New York City. The dance is a freestyle dance in nature but has evolved to include codified footwork steps and basic grooves that universally identify the dance. Most importantly, House is a feeling. It is a culture. It its spiritual. It is about communicating your essence in deep communion with the music and exchanging with other dancers. Amy’s first and consistent House mentor is Sekou Heru of DanceFusion NYC.  She first saw House at clubs in Seattle over a decade ago while participating in cyphers with b-boys. Her and friend/colleague Dani Tirell, organized the first Seattle House Dance Project in 2017, a 4-day event consisting of battles, workshops, showcases, and a panel discussion on the culture. In this class, Amy will talk about why the dance exists, teach basic fundamental steps, how to freestyle with those steps and incorporate your own movement background, and a short phrase. Bring a towel and lots of water because you will sweat a lot!

EXPERIMENTAL CONTEMPORARY HIP HOP WORKSHOP
SAT JUN 30 / 2-4PM

First, we will talk about conscious fusion of dance cultures, the histories behind them, where they connect, and where we need to see and respect differences. The evolution of concert and commercial dance is in a state of constant sampling, so how do we respect the cultures and histories, while allowing expression to evolve? Come learn the perspectives behind Amy O’s movement language, improvise with concepts Amy has learned and synthesized from both street and contemporary dance practices, and learn a phrase that is in deep communion with music and rhythm that challenges expected aesthetics in each moment.

AMY O’NEAL is an award winning dancer, choreographer, movement director, and dance educator.  Her work is at the intersection of street and club dance culture and contemporary dance and performance while honoring their cultural differences. A sought after artist and teacher for the past 18,  Amy works nationally and internationally choreographing and performing for stage, dance films, live music shows, music videos, and commercials and teaches at studios, colleges, and universities. For 20 years, Amy called Seattle home and was a popular teacher at Velocity Dance Center for 15 years. Her work was regularly supported and produced by Velocity, On the Boards, and Seattle Theater Group. She is a two-time Artist Trust Fellowship recipient, two time Stranger Genius Award nominee, the first Distinguished Alumni awardee from Cornish College of the Arts, and a Herb Alpert Award nominee. Her work has been funded by Creative Capital, National Dance Project, National Performance Network, and Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation among others. From 2000-2010, she was the co-director of locust (music/dance/video) with musician composer, Zeke Keeble, creating and touring six evening length performances and several shorter works. Amy was also the lead singer of Zeke’s band Marrow from 2002-2005. She is a long time collaborator of musician, comedian, band leader of the Late Late Show with James Cordon, Reggie Watts.  She has performed live, toured, and choreographed music videos with him since 2001. Before leaving Seattle, Amy taught regularly at The Beacon Massive Monkees studio and co-founded the House dances classes and open sessions and Seattle House Dance Project with Dani Tirrell. Her last evening-length work Opposing Forces, premiered at On the Boards in 2014 and toured nationally through 2017. She relocated to Los Angeles in 2017 and currently teaches a weekly class called The Rhythm Assembly at Ryan Heffington’s studio, The Sweat Spot.

MASTER CLASS SERIES: WHYTEBERG

SAT JUN 30 / 2-4PM
Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)

WHYTEBERG is a Los Angeles-based dance duo created by Gracie Whyte and Laura Berg as a platform for their collaborative choreographic work. Since their inception in August 2014, WHYTEBERG has performed and choreographed for film, stage, music videos and site-specific productions, working with prominent music artists such as Mac Miller (MTV Video Music Award Nominee, Coachella Music Festival performer/artist), Anderson .Paak (Grammy Best New Artist Nominee), Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros (US Billboard top 10 musician and Coachella Music Festival performer/artist), and Jacob Streilein, an Emmy-award winning animator. Gracie and Laura are most interested in figuring out how to blend disciplines and utilize non-traditional dance spaces, integrating dance into other genres of work to elevate and enhance the level of art being created. Choreographically, WHYTEBERG aims to be diverse in scope, utilizing dancers’ vast technical training while always maintaining a commitment to entertainment in an aesthetically relevant, youthful and engaging way.

SERIES: CUNNINGHAM TECHNIQUE with THOMAS HOUSE

WEDS MAY 23–JUN 27 / 6PM–7:30PM
$60 Full Series // Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)
REGISTER >>

Immerse in the technique and educational philosophy of Merce Cunningham. Cunningham technique challenges a dancer’s ability to change direction within the body and in space. Class starts with a back warm-up and move through a series of exercises such as pliés and tendus, progressing toward large sequences that move through space. Bring your thinking caps! 

THOMAS HOUSE was born and raised in Virginia Beach, VA. He began his formal training at Purchase College, SUNY where he graduated in 2014. While in school he performed works by Lar Lubovitch, Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, Doug Varone, Twyla Tharp and had the opportunity to study dance abroad for 4 months in Taipei, Taiwan. In March Thomas moved to Seattle from Brooklyn where he worked as a freelance dance artist. In Seattle he is a primarily a dancer with Kate Wallich + The YC and also teaches and choreographs locally. He continues to perform internationally with NYC based company Abraham in Motion. He has also performed & worked with companies Aszure Barton & Artists, KT Neihoff, LoniLandonDanceProjects and Zoe|Juniper. This summer he recently participated in a Cunningham Technique training program through the Merce Cunningham Trust. 

CI FUNDAMENTALS SERIES V: MIKE HODAPP

SUNS APR 15–MAY 20 / 1:30PM–2:50PM
$60 Full Series // Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)
REGISTER >>

Embracing Your CI Fears. In this session, we’ll explore some of the parts of contact improvisation that dancers can find scary. How can we be comfortable upside down or moving backwards? How do we sense the things that we can’t see? How can we enter or leave dances without it feeling awkward? What’s the deal with trios? Throughout this series, we’ll spend time warming up into deep and connected dancing and then search for what feels a little edgy. What are the aspects of our dancing that we’d like to change, but we’re not sure how?

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.

WORKSHOP: WHAT WILL YOUR BODY SAY WHEN IT’S FREE?
A free movement and writing workshop for free people
facilitated by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco and sponsored by Sins Invalid!

SAT MAY 19 / 1:30PM–5:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
FREE but pre-registration is required because space is limited and we wish to prioritize participation of disabled/sick/neurodivergent/mad/Deaf/blind people of color.

Are you interested in being in an access and Black and brown centered space where you can create work exploring how our bodies dream freedom? In this free, disability justice informed workshop for People of Color (Black, Native, Indigenous, Brown, Latinx, Asian, Pacific Islander, Arab, North African, Mixed, Biracial, Hapa, etc), we will use movement, dance and writing exercises to create pieces naming and claiming the ways we find and make freedom.

What are you proud of that your body can do? What do you love? What do you long for? As people with non-normative and societally disruptive body/minds, we’re often told that freedom can only be found outside of ourselves, but we know that we are freedom portals and agents of liberation. In a time of repression, it’s even more important to dream freedom with one another. This workshop will be a space to do that.

About Leah: Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha is a queer non-binary disabled femme writer, curator, educator and freedom dreamer of Burgher/Tamil Sri Lankan and Irish/ Roma ascent. The Lambda Award-winning author of Dirty River, Bodymap, Love Cake, Consensual Genocide and co-editor of The Revolution Starts At Home, she co-founded and co-directed QTPOC performance incubator Mangos with Chili from 2005-2015, is a lead artist with disability justice performance collective Sins Invalid and co-founded Toronto’s Asian Arts Freedom School. Her writing has been widely anthologized, and she has taught writing to queer and trans, BIPOC, disabled and femme communities since 2002,including studying and teaching with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People program at UC Berkeley from 2008-2011. brownstargirl.org has more

About Neve: Neve Kamilah Mazique-Bianco is a Black/Indigenous North/East African, and Scottish American disabled queer multigender femme declaring punk’s not dead and neither is disabled people of color excellence. Neve is a dancer-choreographer, singer-songwriter, actor-playwright, activist, body scientist, and accessibility engineer living in Seattle but loving and working all over. Mazique-Bianco received physically integrated dance teacher training from Axis Dance Company, and is now pursuing NASM’s Personal Trainer certification in order to bring self love and motivation to more populations and bodies. They are a member of Sins Invalid (sinsinvalid.com), Play They Studios (@playthey on IG and Play They on fb) and the Access Centered Movement Collective (accesscenteredmovement.com). Neve is the founder of access centered dance performance and fashion house Badhouse Processions, and star/creator of the musical play-ballet Bet Ya UnGodly Things, which Velocity will co-produce in 2019. Find more at nevebebad.com!

About Sins Invalid: Sins Invalid is a performance project that incubates and celebrates artists with disabilities, centralizing artists of color and queer and gender-variant artists as communities who have been historically marginalized. Our performance work explores the themes of sexuality, embodiment and the disabled body. Conceived and led by disabled people of color, we develop and present cutting-edge work where normative paradigms of “normal” and “sexy” are challenged, offering instead a vision of beauty and sexuality inclusive of all individuals and communities. We define disability broadly to include people with physical impairments, people who belong to a sensory minority, people with emotional disabilities, people with cognitive challenges, and those with chronic/severe illness. We understand the experience of disability to occur within any and all walks of life, with deeply felt connections to all communities impacted by the medicalization of their bodies, including trans, gender variant and intersex people, and others whose bodies do not conform to our culture(s)’ notions of “normal” or “functional.” www.sinsinvalid.org

About the Workshop Space/Access Info: We will be hosting this workshop in Velocity Dance Center’s Steward Studio (1621 12th Ave, Seattle, Capitol Hill Link stop). This is a brick studio with black marley floor. One wall is a window which accesses direct sunlight, and the opposite wall has full mirrors. There is wheelchair access to Velocity in general, either up a slightly steep ramp to the right of the doors, or via Octosushi’s ramp to the left. All studios are wheelchair accessible, and there is an All Gender restroom with one wheelchair accessible stall. While Velocity Dance Center itself has no scent free policy, this will be a scent-free/fragrance free workshop to make the space accessible and safe to its facilitators and participants. We will have scent free soap available in the bathroom, and we ask that you do not wear scents, or wash yourself or your clothes in anything chemically scented (hint: the word fragrance in ingredients lists indicates that it is scented, and when in doubt, follow your nose! Leah also wrote this: https://www.brownstargirl.org/blog/fragrance-free-femme-of-colour-realness-draft-15). We will be hiring an ASL interpreter or CART provider based on the needs/desires of our participants for this round, and other accommodations are available if we are given a heads up via your registration form!
tinyurl.com/May19BodyFree

FACEBOOK EVENT >>

WORKSHOP/AUDITION: CHRISTIN CALL/CORIOLIS DANCE 

SAT MAY 19 / 2PM-4:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Sliding scale: $5-$20

1:45PM – Registration
2PM-2:30PM—Embodied warm-up
2:30-4:30PM – Improvisational exercises and scores

Come experience Co-Artistic Director Christin Call’s artistic process for the creation of interdisciplinary performance work and audition for a performance opportunity through the Coriolis company. We will experiment with sensation, breath, text, and improvisational scores to develop movement-based narratives.

It is not required to audition to attend this workshop, however Christin is casting for a new performance installation screening event, presented by Northwest Film Forum in July 2018 called What is Home an Obscure Kingdom an Opera Buffa It’s You Always You.

Seeking:
An ensemble cast to supplement the core cast of five. The ensemble cast will perform as part of the pre-show installations taking place in the lobby, hallways, and library of the Northwest Film Forum. Performers interested in or having experience with experimental approaches that include vocalization, speaking from text, theatricality, and image/sensation-based movement.

Ensemble cast consists of:
3 Museum Guides—A non-dancing, but performative role as a museum guide for the Home is You Museum. Requires interaction with audience to guide them through the various interactive exhibits of the pre-show installations.

6 Dancers—Strong ballet technique AND a sense of being outside the “ballet box,” be it physically, culturally, ethnically, ideologically, kinetically. Partnering experience a plus.

The right dancers will have the following qualities:
*** willingness to experiment
*** compassion for your peers
*** respect for consistent attendance, call times, punctuality, and timely correspondence
*** an interest in Christin’s artistic voice and in the subject matter of the work

Ensemble cast will receive a $100 performance stipend.

Must be available:
*** Performance dates: JUL 27-29, 2018.
*** Tech week: JUL 20-25, 2018.
*** Rehearsal times for Dancers: 1x/wk.for 2-3 hours either Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Rehearsals will begin in June.

***Rehearsal times for Museum Guides will take place during Tech week only.

ABOUT WHAT IS HOME
What is Home is an immersive evening-length event that inhabits a central question: what is belonging?  In our time and our city, this question holds a complicated response that is both intuitive and pragmatic, psychological and highly environmental.  What Is Home takes on the elaborateness of this response by creating a participatory experience, a museum come to life, that encompasses movement installations, interactive exhibits, dance films, and a layered dance theater performance as “found object assemblage.”  Absurdly imaginary, ridiculously ornate, What is Home also creates a container for a true pathos towards the absolutely vital human experience of feeling at home.

ABOUT CHRISTIN CALL
Christin Call is an assemblage artist and Co-artistic Director of Coriolis Dance.  Her works include the award-winning film (STIFF Best Dance Film) Voluntary Caesura, try to hover (or Private Practice 6), selected for On the Board’s 2011 Northwest New Works Festival, the performance installation An apology for Zeno and the alchemical pattern through a 2012 Project: Space Available Residency,  and the multi-media installation event Unfixed Arias.

MASTER CLASS SERIES: ELENA VALLS
WED MAY 16 / 6PM–7:30PM
Drop-in $15 ($12 Velocity MVP Member)

Elena’s class consists of human research. Constantly embracing and researching the human anatomy. Starting with a lubrication of the joints and mind. Constantly playing with your own creativity to expand your muscles to new limits. Re focusing your brain to connect with your whole body. This all leads to floor work phrases that brings you to endless circles and awareness of the floor and sky. Leading to cardio and contemporary across the floor to a new phrase in creating.

Letting go with an open mind to leave with constant inspirations.

ELENA VALLS GARCIA is a native from Madrid, Spain. Graduated from SUNY Purchase in New York from the Conservatory of Dance in 2011. Miss Valls had the privilege of studying dance and Kung fu at Taipei National University of the Arts in Taipei, Taiwan. She is a two time alumni of SpringBoard Danse Montreal where she worked with Johannes Weiland, Idan Sharabi and Elizabeth Motley. Elena has worked with various choreographers like, Etienne Bechard, Kyle Abraham, Shen Wei, Manuel Vignoulle, Antonio Brown, Andy Noble, Huang Yi, Korhan Basaran, Gregory Dolbashian, Samuel Pott, Augusto Soledade, and Astrid Von Ussar. Elena was rehearsal director for Nimbus Dance Works in Jersey City U.S.A and has re staged works by Korhan Basaran and Huang Yi. She recently choreographed her own piece “From Brazil, with Luv” on the Nimbus Danceworks Company in Jersey City, U.S.A a hip-hop contemporary infused acting piece. She has also performed for two years for Punch Drunk’s “Sleep No More” in NYC. She is currently living in Europe working for Cie Opinion Public in Brussels and Maura Morales in Dusselfdorf.  Elena was also featured as a guest artist/teacher in Spanish TV show “Fama, A Bailar” in Madrid. Elena was

also featured in American Crime Season two, episode five created by John Ridley. Miss Valls is constantly exploring and creating to fulfill the mind and body endlessly.

CREATIVE / PROCESS SERIES III: PERFORMANCE AS PRACTICE / PRACTICE AS PERFORMANCE with AVID

WEDS APR 4–MAY 9 / 6PM–7:30PM
$60 Full Series // Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)
REGISTER >>

Join AVID to delve into the world of ensemble improvisation. Sourcing from our own bodies and each other, we will explore solo, duet, and group scores, both with and without a compositional lens. This series draws from our work practice as performance, performance as practice where the rigor lies in honing group connection as a means to push our own physical, theatrical, and energetic edges. Can we thread in complex impulses and desires while holding the container of the group? What changes when we are witnessed? Classwork will include elements of contact improvisation, contemplative practices, and scores devised to identify and expand our choice making.

AVID is a group of co-creators and inquisitors: Scott Davis, Aiko Kinoshita, Rachael Lincoln, Aaron Swartzman, and Tamin Totzke, committed to interweaving art and life. Part creative process lab, part social blessing, part contemplative dance practice, they share a multiyear history of making, sharing, exploring, and teaching improvisational dance. Their current embodied research practice as performance, performance as practice invites the presence of an audience to magnify the group ecology of togetherness and trust.

DANCE YOUR STORY: MOVEMENT + SELF-EXPRESSION WORKSHOP
with transgender choreographer Sean Dorsey

WED MAY 2 / 4PM–6PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
FREE

Always wanted to dance but didn’t feel comfortable because you are trans / transgender / nonbinary / gender fabulous / queer? This free, all-levels dance and self-expression workshop for trans/nonbinary/LGBTQ people and friends will be led by award-winning transgender dancer/choreographer Sean Dorsey. They will lead us through mindful breathing, meditation, a gentle warmup, and movement exercises, culminating with creative self-expression through movement. This workshop is especially welcoming to beginners, but open to creators of all skill levels. / Photo by Lydia Daniller

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Sean Dorsey is an award-winning San Francisco-based choreographer, dancer, and writer. Recognized as the first acclaimed transgender modern dance choreographer in the US, Dorsey has toured his work to 26 US cities. Dorsey has been awarded four Isadora Duncan Dance Awards and the Goldie Award for Performance. He has been named in Dance Magazine’s 25 To Watch and named “San Francisco’s Best Dance Company” (SF Weekly). Most recently, Dorsey was named in American Theater Magazine as a Top Theater Artist To Watch. seandorseydance.com
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WORKSHOP: TAMALPA LIFE/ART PROCESS: THE FOREST AND THE TREES
DANCE-BASED EXPRESSIVE ARTS WORKSHOP
with Lucie Baker

SATS APR 7–28 / 2–5PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
1st class drop-in: $30 / $85 full series
REGISTER >>

This creative practice series fosters the development of connection, communication, and personal awareness. Inspired by the imagery of trees, we will improvise dances, create drawings, and develop creative writings that help identify ourselves within our greater ecosystems. We will seek ways to nourish ourselves and our communities as trees do their forests.

This workshop is based on the Tamalpa Life/Art Process®. Developed by Anna and Daria Halprin at the Tamalpa Institute, it is an integrated approach that explores the wisdom of the body as expressed through movement, dance, and imagination. We use artistic processes and media to explore and deepen our relationship to psychological life, to social issues, and to creativity itself.

While this is a dance-based experience, it is not a traditional dance class. All abilities and backgrounds are welcome. No experience necessary. Art materials will be provided. Participants are encouraged to bring a journal if they wish. The first class may be taken as a drop-in but the following classes require full enrollment.

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Lucie Baker is a performer, choreographer, teacher, and MFA candidate at the University of Washington in Seattle. She graduated from the 600-hour Teacher Training program for Movement-Based Expressive Arts Therapy at the Tamalpa Institute in 2017 and graduated with a BFA in dance from the Juilliard School in 2008. Founded by Anna and Daria Halprin, the Tamalpa Institute is a pioneering organization in Expressive Arts Therapy and creative somatic practices. Lucie came to Expressive Arts after years of performing interdisciplinary concert dance with artists including Jane Comfort and Company, Tamar Rogoff Performance Projects, Erica Essner Performance Co-op, Phantom Limb Company, Adam Barruch, Sidra Bell, Carlye Eckert, Tiffany Mills, Coleman Pester, ilvs strauss, Cindy Salgado, Annika Sheaff, Yara Travieso, Wade Madsen, Seattle Opera, and Arc Dance, among others. Lucie started her teaching career in community outreach with the non-profit organization Artists Striving to End Poverty in 2005. With ASTEP, she taught dance to diverse populations in schools, universities, prisons, hospitals, orphanages and disaster zones around the world. Viewing dance in a cultural context informs her studio based classes. Lucie is committed to engaging the wisdom of the body and the transformative power of art as resources for healing. She is thrilled to be bringing Expressive Arts to the community at Velocity Dance Center. luciebaker.com + tamalpa.org  

CI FUNDAMENTALS SERIES IV: TAMIN TOTZKE

SUNS FEB 25–APR 1 / 1:30PM–2:50PM
$60 Full Series // Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)

Refreshing the Basics. In this contact series we will build foundational CI skills, such as rolling point of contact, giving and receiving weight, off-center dancing, and the joy of disorientation. Skeletal alignment and efficiency will be emphasized to find strength through structure instead of force. Playing between image-based and athletic sensibilities, we train our attention to stay curiously responsive. We will tune to the forces of gravity and momentum- releasing tension in our minds and bodies to find ease and vitality. Come find readiness, pliability, humor, connection and flight.

TAMIN TOTZKE is a Seattle-based choreographer, dance educator and movement improviser. She has toured nationally and internationally, with notable projects including: teaching and performing with Cloud Gate Dance Theater, Taipei Dance Forum, Cambodia’s 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, 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.

MASTER CLASS: BEBE MILLER + ANGIE HAUSER

FRI MAR 16 / 1:30PM–3:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in: $15

Join Velocity and On the Boards for a master class with celebrated choreographers Bebe Miller and Angie Hauser, in conjunction with the performances of In a Rhythm by Bebe Miller Company (Ohio) at On the Boards (March 15–18). The class will begin with a structured warm-up and guided technical material, working towards our practice of compositional improvisation. / Photo by Robert Altman

WORKSHOP/AUDITION: ALICE GOSTI

SUN MAR 4 / 6–10PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop in: $20 MVP Member ($25 regular)

Explore and learn movement materials + improvisational scores around the primary themes of Alice Gosti’s new work Material Deviance in Contemporary American Culture (MDICAC), which will premiere at On the Boards March 29–April 1, 2018. MDICAC takes a sideways look at our object-based reality. Reflecting stuff-centered culture back to ourselves, this dream state passes through shame, nostalgia, patriotism, and the weight of inheritance. Choreographer and hybrid performance artist Alice Gosti asks, Do objects imbued with so much of our worth start to take over and take on a life of their own? This cluttered landscape expands like a hoarder’s collection and contracts like an immigrant’s suitcase. It breathes like capitalism, filling an existential void whose appetite is endless. Material Deviance helps us uncover what is buried under the steep piles along the path from our bed to the bedroom door. We hold it in our hands. Dancers will be selected to be part of the Seattle performances. Performers of all backgrounds and types are encouraged to audition!

Dancers need to be available for tech rehearsals beginning March 17. Shows are March 29–31 at 8pm and April 1 at 5pm.

ABOUT THE ARTIST 
Alice Gosti is an Italian-American choreographer, hybrid performance artist, curator, DJ, and architect of experiences, working between Seattle and Europe since 2008. Gosti’s work has been recognized with numerous awards, commissions, and residencies including the 2012 Vilcek Creative Promise in Dance Award, the 2012 danceWEB scholarship, Velocity’s 2015 Made in Seattle program, and a 2017 Artist Trust fellowship. 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.” gostia.com

WORKSHOP/AUDITION: RAINBOW FLETCHER | HYPERNOVA

SAT FEB 24 / 2PM–4PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in: $20

HYPERNOVA contemporary dance company seeks to cast 6–9 guest artists in their newest work, Eleven Eleven: A High-Energy Meditation on Coincidence. This piece will debut in Northwest New Works at On The Boards, June 16 + 17. In addition, future performances are set for fall 2018.

This workshop/audition will be an opportunity for dancers to share in the experience of trying on a new aesthetic and vocabulary of movement. Attendees can expect athletic, full-bodied phrase work that takes you through space with detailed, fast-twitch speed and articulation. Auditioning is encouraged, but not required to attend. The ideal cast will be comprised of versatile dancers with performance experience, technique, physicality, and personality.

Weekly rehearsals begin March 5 on Mondays from 2:30pm–5:30pm at Velocity. The cast will also be required to attend a handful of spacing/filming/tech rehearsals that will be held at On the Boards later in spring (exact dates TBD). Dancers will receive a performance stipend. / Photo by Jules Doyle

HYPERNOVA was founded in 2014 by Artistic Director Rainbow Fletcher. The company is an ongoing representation of Rainbow’s work, which is known for its unmistakable originality, complexity, and modern sensibility. Hypernova is an amalgam of Rainbow’s past experiences, rooted in contemporary dance but influenced by the spectacle of cabaret, the grounded energy of flamenco and martial arts, and the specificity of ballet. All elements from concept to movement are generated in a rehearsal process where the company as a whole can share ideas. Each project created is conceptualized by a collaborative team of artists that strive to deliver authentic and stylistically charged art experiences to the public. hypernovadance.com

ABOUT THE ARTIST
Rainbow Fletcher creates dance-based art that is dynamic, emotionally driven, and elegantly athletic. As a freelance artist she has performed and set works for a variety of dance companies, festivals, venues, music videos, and commercial productions located in and around the Pacific Northwest area. Beyond her own work, Rainbow is Co-Artistic Director of The Offshore Project, a longstanding creative partnership with fellow artist and collaborator Ezra Dickinson. Rainbow is well-known for her past groundbreaking work as the Choreographer and Dance Director of the Can Can Castaways, the original in-house group of Can Can Kitchen and Cabaret. She performed with the Castaways for nearly a decade in over a dozen full-length productions. Rainbow graduated with a BFA in Dance from Cornish College of the Arts in 2004. rainbowfletcher.com

MASTER CLASS: MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP

SAT FEB 17 / 2PM–3:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)

Mark Morris Dance Group company member Durell Comedy will lead an intermediate/advanced level modern master class. The class will also serve as an audition for MMDG Summer Intensive for students aged 16 years or older. This class is being offered in partnership with STG, presenting Mark Morris Dance Group’s Sgt. Pepper at 50: Pepperland at the Moore Theatre February 16–18, 2018.

Founded in New York in 1980, the internationally-renowned Mark Morris Dance Group (MMDG) has been called “the preeminent modern dance organization of our time” (Yo-Yo Ma). After spending three years residing in Brussels’ Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie as Belgium’s national dance company, MMDG returned to the United States in 1991. MMDG has received “highest praise for their technical aplomb, their musicality, and their sheer human authenticity” (Bloomberg News). The Dance Group is distinguished as the only modern dance company with a commitment to live music at every performance, founding the MMDG Music Ensemble in 1996. In addition to the ensemble, MMDG regularly collaborates with eminent musicians across many genres. Community engagement is also a vital component of the Dance Group. Through the organization’s Access/ MMDG programming, MMDG integrates opportunities for dance, music, talks, and education at its Brooklyn home, the Mark Morris Dance Center, as well as on tour around the world.

MASTER CLASS: LAVINIA VAGO

FRI FEB 9 + 16 / NOON–2PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)

While analyzing the relationship between the mind and the body, we will ride the thin line between losing control and holding control. We will use different improvisational channels and tasks to explore unknown possibilities, pushing our movement further until finding comfort on the floor, standing, in mid space. We will be drilling pathways of movement to gain access to new improvisational experiences. The goal is to push our physical imagination so our bodies can arrive in the most distorted places, and our minds can master them. And vice versa. We will fail together, and that is ok.

Lavinia Vago is a dance artist, educator, and performer from Italy, based in Seattle, working between Montréal, New York, and Berlin. She has created, performed, and toured internationally with Sidra Bell Dance New York, Loni Landon Projects, Vim Vigor Dance Company, Saint Genet, more extensively with RUBBERBANDance Group and with Kate Wallich + THE YC since 2010. She is exploring her solo practice, collaborating with Berlin based sound artist Harald Stojan. As an educator and choreographic assistant she has taught and trained dancers at Springboard Danse Montréal, Strictly Seattle, Domaine Forget, Marymount College, Purchase College, The Juilliard School, The Ailey School, L’ècole de danse contemporaine de Montreal, L’école superieur de ballet du Québec. Lavinia teaches her own contemporary class combining all elements of her training in performance and her own choreographic exploration, as well as Dance Church™  and The RUBBERBAND Method. laviniavago.com 

2017

CI FUNDAMENTALS SERIES III: KAITLIN MCCARTHY

SUNS JAN 7–FEB 11 / 1:30PM–2:50PM
$60 Full Series // Drop-in $12 MVP Member ($15 regular)

Part social dance, part physics lesson, part anarchy—come experience Contact Improvisation! This open-ended and non-hierarchical dance form is based on a few concepts that lead to endless creativity. Designed to give students the physical and social tools to enter the jam setting, this guided practice is great for those new to the form, those who like a structured pathway into touch, or for any kind of dancer looking to expand their practice. The class seeks to provide starting points for personal investigation and expression. Beginning with solo work, the class builds to spontaneous physical dialogue though internal sensing, observation of weight, and organic development of touch in a supportive environment.

KAITLIN MCCARTHY is a dance artist, writer, and teacher living in Seattle since 2010. She has performed with over a dozen local artists, including regularly with Alice Gosti, and has presented her own work at venues across the city including Velocity, On the Boards, SOIL Gallery, BOOST Dance Festival, and many others. She began practicing Contact Improvisation at Mt Holyoke College where she obtained her dance degree, and has spent the last decade in continual investigation of the form. Kaitlin also teaches Beginning Modern and Beginning Ballet at Velocity Dance Center.

TOM WEINBERGER: GAGA CLASS

SAT FEB 10 / 8:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop- in $15 (cash only)

MASTER CLASS: GRACIE WHYTE

TUE JAN 2, 2018 / 9:30AM-11:15AM
FRI JAN 5, 2018 / 9:30AM-11:15AM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

This class will focus on utilizing floorwork technique principles to improve skills in smoothly changing levels with emphasis on softening into the floor, clarity of dynamic movement qualities, and traveling through space by lowering the center of gravity. The first hour of class is focused largely on upper-body conditioning, warming the arms and wrists, and transitioning in and out of the floor through improvisational tasks and progressions across the floor. The speed and repetition of the first hour of class encourage dancers to move without thinking, allowing the inherent alignment of their bodies to move naturally through space. The class culminates in learning a more full-bodied phrase, concentrating on spinal articulation, suspension and release, and the command of space while smoothly changing levels. Dancers will use the framework provided as a skeleton to find their own artistic individuality, employing various movement dynamics, textures, and qualities, allowing the dancer to be creatively and physically expressive in their inherent, unique way of moving. 

GRACIE WHYTE received her professional training from London Contemporary Dance School, where she was awarded a Master’s degree with Merit in Contemporary Dance Performance while dancing for the postgraduate touring company, EDge. In 2014, Gracie relocated to Los Angeles, where she co-founded WHYTEBERG, a collaborative choreographic duo with Laura Berg. WHYTEBERG has showcased live work at REDCAT, Musco Center for the Arts, Electric Lodge, Bootleg Theater, Tempe Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Ballet Academy, among others. The company also creates full-length site-specific collaborations (LAX Fest, Project Flux), choreographs for music videos (Mac Miller, Anderson .Paak), production companies (Warner Bros., EUX Media, Valentine Street), multi-media collaborations (Emmy-award winning animation director Jacob Streilein), and co-founded the weekly professional floorwork class series, Ground Grooves. In addition to dancing for WHYTEBERG and other Los Angeles-based choreographers, Gracie currently teaches floorwork and release techniques at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

MASTER CLASS: MADBOOTS DANCE
DEC 16 + 17, 2017 / 3PM-5PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

Class begins with a highly physical warm-up creating a grounded awareness of the body. Through spinal focus and imagery-driven improvisation, dancers will connect to risk and expression. Class builds into a challenging phrase sourced from current MADBOOTS DANCE repertory and research.

MADBOOTS DANCE, the hyper-physical, provocative dance company led by Jonathan Campbell and Austin Diaz, was named “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine in 2016 and has reached audiences nationally and internationally, tackling topics of male identity and queer culture.

CI FUNDAMENTALS SERIES II: KATHERINE COOK

SUNS OCT 29 – DEC 3, 2017 / 1:30PM-2:50PM
$60 Full Series // Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

In this class we’ll build the perceptive and physical capacities that make possible the spontaneous acrobatics characteristic of CI. Working with weight, momentum, gravity, tone, and the raw honesty of the kinetic body, we’ll see Contact Improvisation become clearer, crisper, and more illuminated. Though this class will build on Session One, the material stands on its own and new participants are welcome.

KATHERINE COOK is a dancer, teacher, and mathematician based in Seattle WA. Her teaching incorporates a love of improvisation with awareness and somatic practices, along with a pinch of mathematical thinking and a bit of of 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, Brad Stoller, and Kris Wheeler, among others.

WORKSHOP/AUDITION: CHRISTIN CALL/CORIOLIS DANCE

SAT DEC 9, 2017 / 2PM-4:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Sliding scale: $5-$20

1:45PM – Registration/self warm-up (come earlier to warm-up in the lobby)
2PM-3PM – Postballet Technique
3:05PM-4:30PM – Improvisation/Choreography
4:30PM-5PM – Check-in, closing words

Come experience Co-Artistic Director Christin Call’s artistic process for the creation of interdisciplinary performance work and the Coriolis company’s Postballet Technique. In this workshop/audition you will use classical vocabulary as a base language from which to draw out rich, embodied, and articulated movement experiences that are central to the Coriolis style. You will also play with sensation, breath, writing, and improvisation to experiment with group consent, character generation, and movement-based narratives.

It is not required to audition to attend this workshop, however Christin is casting for a new performance installation screening event, presented by Northwest Film Forum in July 2018 called What is Home an Obscure Kingdom an Opera Buffa It’s You Always You.

Seeking:
Core group of five classically-trained dancers interested in or having experience with experimental approaches that include vocalization, speaking, theatricality, and image/sensation-based movement.

The right dancers will have the following qualities:

• strong ballet technique AND a sense of being outside the “ballet box,” be it physically, culturally, ethnically, ideologically, kinetically
• willingness to experiment
• compassion for your peers
• respect for call times, punctuality, and timely correspondence
• an embodied movement practice (e.g. ballet, gaga, yoga, hip-hop. If hired you will be required to keep up your practice outside of rehearsals at least twice a week for the duration of your contract.)
• an interest in Christin’s artistic voice and in the subject matter of the work

The core five will receive $12/hr. for rehearsals and a performance stipend.

Must be available:
Performance dates: JUL 26-28, 2018
Tech week: JUL 20-25, 2018
Rehearsal times: 2x/wk.for 4 hours

Rehearsals will be ongoing until performance with a few, planned exceptions.

ABOUT WHAT IS HOME
At the heart of this work is the question: what is belonging? The complicated response each of us has to this question is both intuitive and pragmatic, psychological and highly environmental. What happens when our homes, both the inner kingdom and the physical structure, are taken away? Living in a city that seems to be gorging itself and swallowing its citizens in the process, this work will create a scenario in which it may be possible for us to feel like a community.

Examples of Christin Call’s past work:
Performance/Choreography Reel 
Dance Film
What is Home trailer

“…proving that the human body is capable of moving in ways that never seemed possible.”—Whitman College Pioneer

“…significant classical training brought into the contemporary realm… deftly integrating the bizarre…”—SeattleDances

“[Christin’s works] often employ the dance equivalent of musical polyphony—multiple staging areas, movements in and out of phase with each other, mimetic gestures that proceed like a musical canon—and they employ them with an exquisite richness.”—Seattlest

“…an overwhelming sense of painstaking architecture: a feeling that even the breath of the audience was planned for and choreographed.”—SeattleDances 

WORKSHOP: KRUMP WITH MARCUS “CRVWNZ” COOPER AKA LIL NY

THU DEC 7, 2017 / 8:30PM–10:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

 RawMovement, RawFeeling, RawExpression.

This workshop is for all ages and skill sets and features Krump Foundation, Battle Tactics, Musicality, Concept & Character.

MASTER CLASS: GRACIE WHYTE

TUES NOV 21, 2017 / 6:15PM–7:45PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

This class will focus on utilizing floorwork technique principles to improve skills in smoothly changing levels with emphasis on softening into the floor, clarity of dynamic movement qualities, and traveling through space by lowering the center of gravity. The first hour of class is focused largely on upper-body conditioning, warming the arms and wrists, and transitioning in and out of the floor through improvisational tasks and progressions across the floor. The speed and repetition of the first hour of class encourage dancers to move without thinking, allowing the inherent alignment of their bodies to move naturally through space. The class culminates in learning a more full-bodied phrase, concentrating on spinal articulation, suspension and release, and the command of space while smoothly changing levels. Dancers will use the framework provided as a skeleton to find their own artistic individuality, employing various movement dynamics, textures, and qualities, allowing the dancer to be creatively and physically expressive in their inherent, unique way of moving. 

GRACIE WHYTE received her professional training from London Contemporary Dance School, where she was awarded a Master’s degree with Merit in Contemporary Dance Performance while dancing for the postgraduate touring company, EDge. In 2014, Gracie relocated to Los Angeles, where she co-founded WHYTEBERG, a collaborative choreographic duo with Laura Berg. WHYTEBERG has showcased live work at REDCAT, Musco Center for the Arts, Electric Lodge, Bootleg Theater, Tempe Center for the Arts, Los Angeles Ballet Academy, among others. The company also creates full-length site-specific collaborations (LAX Fest, Project Flux), choreographs for music videos (Mac Miller, Anderson .Paak), production companies (Warner Bros., EUX Media, Valentine Street), multi-media collaborations (Emmy-award winning animation director Jacob Streilein), and co-founded the weekly professional floorwork class series, Ground Grooves. In addition to dancing for WHYTEBERG and other Los Angeles-based choreographers, Gracie currently teaches floorwork and release techniques at University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

MASTER CLASS: STG PRESENTS L-E-V DANCE COMPANY

This class was canceled due to a power outage.

MON NOV 13, 2017 / 6:15PM–7:45PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15/$12 MVP

Company member Keren Lurie Pardes, from Sharon Eyal and Gai Behar’s critically acclaimed Israeli company L-E-V, will teach choreography from the repertoire and technique before their upcoming show OCD Love at The Moore Theatre on November 14, 2017.

L-E-V DANCE COMPANY is proud to present a new L-E-V creation, OCD Love. The creation is about love, love that always misses, or lovers who keep missing each other. Out of sync. Like one person comes to bed and the other gets up. Like something that is full and intact, but has many holes in it. This work is about the holes. Once again, the dancers are dancing to the pulsating beats created by Ori Lichtik.

KEREN LURIE PARDES was born in the USA in 1991. Went to the Arts High School in Jerusalem and graduate at the dance training program directed by Naomi Perlov and Ofir Dagan at Bikurei Haitim. 2010-11 was a trainee at the Batsheva Ensemble and participated in a project by Idan Sharabi. Between 2011-13 was a member of the Batsheva Ensemble and took part in the works of Ohad Naharin and Sharon Eyal & Gai Behar in Lost Cause among others.

MASTER CLASS: JOANNA KOTZE + NETTA YERUSHALMY

SAT NOV 4, 2017 / 12:15PM + 2PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
Drop-in: $25 (both classes) / $15/$12 MVP (per class)

12:15PM–1:45PM Technique Laboratory with Joanna Kotze
Both laboratory and technique, this class will delve into the body’s architecture and its unique potential, gaining more information, trust, and range. Through technical studies, set movement phrases, and improvisational practices, we will discover and challenge habits and pre-conceived notions while practicing our relationship to time, space, and each other. Concentrating on the forces through the legs into the floor will lead us to finding more range, opposition, and weight in the body. We will culminate by learning repertory movement from It Happened It Had Happened It Is Happening It Will Happen.

2PM–4PM Creative Process with Netta Yerushalmy
Choreographer and performer Netta Yerushalmy will lead a two-hour Creative Process workshop based on her choreographic process. Yerushalmy, awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, dances in Joanna Kotze’s piece It Happened It Had Happened It Is Happening It Will Happen.

JOANNA KOTZE is an award-winning New York choreographer. She has had residencies at The Camargo Foundation, Marble House, Jacob’s Pillow, Baryshnikov Arts Center, Djerassi and the Bogliasco Foundation. Joanna was a Fellow for Ailey’s New Directions Choreography Lab, a Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Swing Space resident and has worked in residence at Mount Tremper Arts.

NETTA YERUSHALMY was awarded a 2012 Guggenheim Fellowship in Choreography, a Jerome Robbins Fellowship from the Bogliasco Foundation, and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, and Six Points. Her work has been presented by Danspace Project, The Joyce Theater, American Dance Festival, HAU Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Harkness Festival, La Mama, Suzanne Dellal Center (Tel-Aviv), and others. Read more >>

WORKSHOP: CONTACT IMPROV BOOK CAMP (8-WEEK SERIES)

SATS AUG 26–OCT 14, 2017 / 2PM–5 PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$140 Full Series / Drop-in $20

The purpose of this course is to become better dancers through rigorous physical training for contact improvisation.  By systematic training in classical CI skills (rolling point of contact, crescent rolls, spiral rolls, lifts mechanics, descent pathways, etc.), we will open up new dimensions in our dancing, inviting more possibilities, surprises, and fun.  In addition, we will explore promising new ideas for contact improvisation inspired by aikido and other martial arts. 

The course will be suitable for practitioners of all skill levels, although it is expected that participants will have some previous experience with contact.  Each session will consist of a two-hour class followed by a one-hour open jam (for the participants only) in which we will apply and integrate what we have learned each day.  The culmination will be an open showing at Velocity to present the results of our work.  

The instructor, JONATHAN LILLY, has been dancing contact improvisation for four years, after 20 years of training in the martial art of aikido. His teaching style uses step-by-step exercises to make learning new physical skills safe and accessible, and enabling participants to understand body mechanics from the inside out, based on their own personal experience. He is assisting Mark Young in leading this summer’s three-week intensive “Foundations to Contact Improvisation” at Leviathan Studio on Lasqueti Island, July 9–29. Jonathan also performs improvisational dance as part of JKLM Studio. The group’s most recent performance, Indigo, was shown at Velocity this June.

MASTER CLASS: CUNNINGHAM TECHNIQUE ^TM

FRI + SAT OCT 13 + 14, 2017 / 4PM–6PM, SUN OCT 15 / 5PM–7PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$30 Full Series // Drop-in $15/$12 MVP

Immerse in the technique and educational philosophy of Merce Cunningham—a driving force in modern dance for more than 50 years. Starting in Seattle, Cunningham changed the field of dance internationally.

THOMAS HOUSE was born and raised in Virginia Beach, VA. He began his formal training at Purchase College, SUNY where he graduated in 2014. While in school he performed works by Lar Lubovitch, Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, Doug Varone, Twyla Tharp and had the opportunity to study dance abroad for 4 months in Taipei, Taiwan. In March Thomas moved to Seattle from Brooklyn where he worked as a freelance dance artist. In Seattle he is a primarily a dancer with Kate Wallich + The YC and also teaches and choreographs locally. He continues to perform internationally with NYC based company Abraham in Motion. He has also performed & worked with companies Aszure Barton & Artists, KT Neihoff, LoniLandonDanceProjects and Zoe|Juniper. This summer he recently participated in a Cunningham Technique training program through the Merce Cunningham Trust.

SERIES I: AARON SWARTZMAN

SUNS SEP 10–OCT 15, 2017 / 1:30–2:50PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave

Contact Improvisation is what you make it. Make it magical! Come participate in physical and awareness practices to grow your toolkit. Together we will work to gain the foundational skills necessary to safely take risks and grow as CI dancers (and possibly as humans). Giving and receiving weight, falling and rising, and surrendering and instigating are some of the polarities we will work with, as well as the fierce sense of curiosity and play that make CI such a rich art form.

Fascinated by the body in motion (and at rest), AARON SWARTZMAN has been teaching and performing dance for over 15 years, including long stints with LINGO dancetheater, Legendre Performance, and UMAMI Performance, which he co-founded with Aiko Kinoshita. He has performed nationally and internationally, is a treinel in Capoeira Angola, a father of two, and a lover of CI.

WORKSHOP/AUDITION: AJNC DANCE-THEATER

SUN OCT 8, 2017 / 6:30PM–9PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$20 / $17 MVP

Velocity Dance Center is excited to present AJnC Dance-Theater’s Workshop + Audition aimed at professional dancers. Lead by director/choreographer Amy J Lambert, the workshop will feature an introduction to the company’s rehearsal and choreographic process, style of technique, and play with tools to develop personality and theatricality in performance.

This workshop will serve as an audition for AJnC Dance-Theater’s next evening length work, Young Manic. Selected dancers will perform with the company at Velocity Dance Center Founders Theater, February 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 2018. Dancers will be paid a performance stipend for these performances.

Dancers will also have an opportunity at this time be seen for AJnC’s next project, a dance-theater adaptation of The Tempest, to be presented the following season.

What we’re looking for:

• Performers with strong technique and performance skills
• Must be able to learn choreography
• Be willing to explore creative tasks set by Choreographer
• Dancers of all ethnicity are encouraged to participate.

Please bring your resume with you to the audition.

Rehearsals for Young Manic are expected to begin immediately in early October. The rehearsal schedule is subject to dancer’s availability. 

AJnC DANCE-THEATER was formed in 2013 in Seattle, Washington and is a project based dance company. Director/Choreographer Amy J Lambert playfully choreographs and directs in both the realms of musical theater and concert dance. Constructing new work inspired by literature and historical research, AJnC Dance-Theater strives to make work that combines strong dance aesthetic with the principles of fine art and live performance. In 2015 AJnC Dance-Theater premiered their first evening length production, Believe Me Or Not, at 12th Avenue Arts, and has continued to present work locally in Seattle. Amy J is an Artist in Residency at eXit Space Dance. www.AmyJLambert.com

VIDEO: https://vimeo.com/220905275

PHOTO TIM SUMMERS

WORKSHOP/AUDITION: THE THREE YELLS

SAT AUG 26, 2017 / 10:30AM–1:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$20 full / $17 MVP

Velocity Dance Center is excited to present The Three Yells Workshop + Audition aimed at professional dancers. The workshop is a concise introduction to Seattle based choreographer Veronica Lee-Baik’s movement technique and her philosophy including repertoire exercises from Lee-Baik’s recent creations. Get an inside look to her creative process, explore her movements and see if there might be a shared future.

This workshop will serve as an audition to expand The Three Yells casting for the restage of her evening length work, Giselle Deconstruct. Selected dancer/s will perform with the company at Cornish Playhouse At Seattle Center, January 12&13, 2018.

Rehearsals (commencing September 7th) are Tuesdays and Thursdays (9.30-12pm). This is a performance stipend gig. The audition is also to potentially fill 1-2 spots in the company for their 2018 season. This is the only audition opportunity for The Three Yells for 2017-18.

What we’re looking for:

• Performers with strong technique and performance skills
• Must be able to learn choreography
• Be willing to explore creative tasks set by Choreographer

Dancers of all ethnicity are encouraged to participate.

VERONICA LEE-BAIK’S approach to movement activates the senses to become fully alive and involved. The goal is always to nourish the dancer’s potential, helping the dancer express with more clarity and honesty. Lee-Baik’s distinctive style fuses elements from her background in ballet, modern dance and a wide range of Asian traditions. Her work has been described as “a combination of powerful athleticism and delicate gestures” and “hypnotizing and super-creepy display of a powerful feminist”. Lee-Baik is a visual artist whose medium of choice is the body. Born and raised in Singapore, she moved to the United States in 1996. Lee-Baik founded The Three Yells Performance Company in 2000 to explore and translate modern dance through collaborative performance, activism and education. Described by SeattleDances as having, “a clear eye for an unusual landscape—her stage pictures are distinctive and disturbing.” For more information about The Three Yells and Veronica Lee-Baik: thethreeyells.com + facebook.com/thethreeyells

MASTERCLASS: ALEX KETLEY

SAT AUG 12, 2017 / 7:30PM–9:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 Drop-in / $12 MVP

Alex Ketley will build a new phrase of choreography with the students and use this as a platform to explore a number of concepts used in the development of his pieces. This includes ideas about how we as artists develop a sense of contrast and color in our dancing, and ways of looking at the idea of  performer presence as something that can be dissected and developed. The class will be very physical and all are welcome regardless of what their training history consists of.

ALEX KETLEY is an award winning choreographer, filmmaker, and the Director of the San Francisco based company The Foundry. Formally a classical dancer with the San Francisco Ballet, he has spent the past twenty years developing work from a broad range of creative entry points. All his projects start from a platform of instability with the idea that how he grows as an artist in to engage in ideas where he is initially genuinely lost. For more detailed information visit alexketley.com.

WORKSHOP/AUDITION: KIM LUSK

THURS JUL 6, 2017 / 5PM–8PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$20 / $17 MVP

Get a look inside Kim’s process as she begins creating her new evening-length piece “A Dance for Dark Horses”. The workshop will begin with a short warm-up, then move into learning a full-bodied phrase. Participants will play with rhythm, intricate formations, clarity of dynamics, and how to show personality through a dead-pan face. This workshop serves as an audition to identify artists for this upcoming project and future collaborations.

“Dark Horses” premieres March 9-11, 2018 as part of Velocity’s Made in Seattle program. The audience experiences the magic generated by an exuberant group focused on a single goal in a celebration of the ultimate power of the unlikely winner. Kim’s work is subtle, funny, and jam packed with high-energy movement and a bit of country giddy-up. The movements are rhythmic and rigorous with a nod to both ballet and alone-in-your-room-groove-your-fu*king-heart-out dancing. Questions? Contact Kim at lusk.kimberly@gmail.com / Photo by Ryan Hume

WORKSHOP: BRAD STOLLER + KATHERINE COOK
Territory

SAT JUN 17, 2017 / 2PM–6PM
Velocity  1621 12th Ave
$30 / $26 MVP
Drop Ins welcome depending on availability.

How can we create new territory in a dance and what to do when we find it? In this Contact Improvisation workshop, we will explore the physicality of territory: ways to create rich micro environments and discover new pathways by decomposing ourselves into smaller pieces and creating more surface area to dance in. Other times we’ll find ourselves in fast-moving, wildly changing territory, developing the skills that help us survive collisions, falls, sudden points of leverage, and shifting weight. How we respond to the brand new territories we discover in the dance is part of the sport of Contact Improvisation. How we create those territories in dialogue with our partners is part of the art of Contact Improvisation. Working with practical principles of CI–gravity, weight, momentum, pressure, openness, softness, and tone–we’ll take our dancing towards new territory and find deeper relationships with ourselves and our partners in the adventure.

BRAD STOLLER began his study of Contact in 1979 in the SF Bay area with several members of Mangrove. He began teaching Contact in 1984 at Sonoma State College and has continued to teach in university settings as well as privately at festivals and workshops. He is the theatre director at Piedmont VA Community College and teaches Contact at UVA. Brad furthered his research into CI by embracing Aikido and The Alexander Technique finding that both revealed universal principles that CI dancers have been fortunate to rediscover in this playful form.

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.

WORKSHOP: NITA LITTLE
Dancing in Communion: Embodied Communication in Contact and Ensemble Improvisation

FRI MAY 19, 2017 / 4PM–8PM + SAT MAY 20, 2017 / 2PM–6PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave 
$60-$90 per person sliding scale
To register please contact erinjohnson@velocitydancecenter.org

This two day (8 hour) workshop engages Contact Improvisation dancers in the study of CI’s extension into ensemble dancing. Through physical training, attention training, scores, labs, and discussions, we will experience forms of embodiment and states of being that further communication into communion. We will honor and move across and beyond boundaries of the self.  Learning to re-cognize and release into new skills we will press upon our previously defined limitations, discover our peripheral intelligence, and invite one another to be danced while dancing. We will gain new skills of not only physical listening, but of sharing the possibilities inherent in each moment. Brilliant in our physicality, we will come to know attention as a form of touch, and feel its force. While gaining new language, we will investigate the skills which lead us to become one and more than one. We will then embody our larger sense of self.

Choreographer, teacher, and theorist in the field of improvisational dance and Contact Improvisation, NITA LITTLE is invited to work with dancers worldwide. A physical researcher as well as touring artist, Little participated in the emergence and development of Contact Improvisation. She received her PhD in 2014 from the University of California, Davis. Little’s work orients around creative actions of embodied attention in dance. Her writing investigates ecological actions of attention and the creative potentials present in entangled relations. Touring on a regular basis she can be found making work, performing, lecturing, and teaching technical, relational, and creative skills to dance companies and at festivals and schools around the globe. She happily moved to Seattle recently after having been Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Florida, School of Theater and Dance.

MASTER CLASS: LIZ HOULTON

SAT MAY 6, 2017 / 3PM–4:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/class card

Release-based technique allows for movement to flow through the body and out into the space, threading each step to another, circling back to the very center of the core. Fast movements are efficient, never rushed or contracted. Using these ideas and integrating some theories in challenging both memory and stamina, the body will feel awake and open to interpreting new information. Starting on the floor we will find efficiency in non-weight-bearing exercises, using long combinations to warm up trust in the floor and ourselves, as well as our ability to follow through movements. This class is for the advanced dancer wanting to challenge their balance and trust their instincts.

LIZ HOULTON in a Minneapolis, MN native and graduate of California Institute of the Arts, currently residing in Seattle, WA. Liz has presented works with Capitol Hill Arts Walk at LoveCityLove, Seattle International Dance Festival, Seattle Fringe Festival, Chop Shop Contemporary Dance Festival, and with Velocity Dance Center’s Bridge Project. Her work “Close Quarters in a Large World” was commissioned by Minnesota Dance Theatre for their Fall 2015 season, as well as performed by the students of MDTS at the Cowles Theater that same year. She was fortunate enough to have received creative residencies with Velocity Dance Center and the Argento Dance Grant its inaugural year. Liz teaches a Release-based technique class to find and encourage authenticity in resolving falling motivations.

MASTER CLASS: TOM WEINBERGER

SAT APR 15, 2017 / 12:15PM–1:45PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/class card

Gaga is a movement language which Ohad Naharin developed over the course of many years and which is applied in daily practice and exercises by the Batsheva Dance Company members.  The language of Gaga originated from the belief in the healing, dynamic, ever-changing power of movement, and it continues to evolve today. 

Gaga is a new way of gaining knowledge and self-awareness through your body. Gaga provides a framework for discovering and strengthening your body and adding flexibility, stamina, and agility while lightening the senses and imagination. Gaga raises awareness of physical weaknesses, awakens numb areas, exposes physical fixations, and offers ways for their elimination. The work improves instinctive movement and connects conscious and unconscious movement, and it allows for an experience of freedom and pleasure in a simple way, in a pleasant space, in comfortable clothes, accompanied by music, each person with himself and others.

Gaga has two tracks: Gaga/people and Gaga/dancers.

TOM WEINBERGER was born in Israel in 1987.  Tom graduated from the Amal School of Arts and Sciences and upon graduation joined the Batsheva Ensemble in 2005.  He continued to the Batsheva Dance Company from 2008 to 2011, where he worked with Ohad Naharin and Sharon Eyal.  In 2012, Tom began freelancing and worked with Barak Marshall, as well as Company E in Washington, DC, where he set both Ohad and Sharon’s work and served as rehearsal director. Tom was a founding member of Sharon Eyal and Guy Behar’s Company , L-E-V, and danced with the Gothenburg Ballet where he performed works by Peeping Tom, Marie Chouinard, and Alex Eckman.  He was a guest artist with Michael Keegan Dolan’s-Fabulous Beast Dance Theater (2013), with the Batsheva Dance Company (2014) and with the Forsyth Company (2015). He has been teaching Gaga for the past 9 years, and has taught Gaga, Ohad’s repertoire, Sharon Eyal’s repertoire as well as creating his own work in schools such as the Netherlands Dance Theater Summer Program (2010 – 2014), the San Francisco Conservatory of Dance, the Taipei National University of the Arts, Springboard Dans Montreal and more. He began creating his own work through Batsheva Dancers Create during his time with the Company. In 2014 he won the International Solo Tanz Theater Festival with his solo work, which toured in Brazil and Germany. Most recently, Tom was a guest artist at SUNY Purchase University through the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Foundation residency program. / Photo by Michael Slobodian

MASTER CLASS: ZOE SCOFIELD

SAT FEB 25 + MAR 4 + MAR 11 + APR 8, 2017 / 12:15–1:45PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/credit card/class card

zoe | juniper classes utilize a somatic approach to technique. Classes are physically rigorous, deep, and kinesthetically challenging; a space where product orientated results takes rest and active experience reigns. We combine musicality, visual and physical metaphors in both improvisation and structured forms as a vehicle to surprise and further each dancers’ potential.  As teachers, it is our desire to help students foster a body that is available, aware and in command of its’ senses, intuition and physicality.

ZOE SCOFIELD, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, is a dance and visual artist based in Seattle. Since 2004, Zoe collaborates with video and visual artist Juniper Shuey. Their company, zoe | juniper, has been commissioned and presented by The Joyce, American Realness, Bates Dance Festival, CAC New Orleans, CalArts, Columbia College Chicago, Cornish College, DancePlace, FringeArts, Frye Art Museum, Jacob’s Pillow, On the Boards, Pennsylvania Ballet, PS122, PuSh Festival, REDCAT, and Velocity Dance Center among others. zoe | juniper’s residencies and awards include The MacDowell Colony, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National Performance Network, NEFA’s National Dance Project, Princess Grace Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding. zoe | juniper’s latest work, Clear & Sweet, made it’s PNW premiere at On The Boards in October, and will continue to tour nationally in 2017. / Photo by Juniper Shuey

MASTER CLASS: BELLINGHAM REPERTORY DANCE

SAT APR 8, 2017 / 2:30PM–4PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/class card

Join Bellingham Repertory dancer Alethea Alexander for a squishy, expansive exploration of contemporary technique and repertory. Inspired by the breadth of styles and vocabulary explored in the company’s national survey of current dance makers, we will explore contemporary approaches to spirals, space, focus, sensation and reach. 

Alethea Alexander is an M.F.A. candidate in Dance at the University of Washington and has been a member of BRD for four seasons. She is constantly examining the social and political practices that are embodied in dance culture, and how those trends are expressed in studio communities and within each individual. 

Bellingham Repertory Dance is a collective of highly accomplished performers sourcing original and repertory works from accross the U.S. Commissioning local work for over a decade, they have supported Seattle choreographers by presenting vibrant, high-quality dance from local artists to our regional community. 

See Bellingham Repertory Dance’s “no such place” at Velocity Dance Center, April 7 + 8, 8pm. More info >>

MASTER CLASS: MATT DREWS (SAINT GENET)

SAT APR 1, 2017 / 12:15PM–1:45PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/class card

This class is crafted to be accessible for all bodies and skill levels. We will begin with a guided improvisation embedded with textures, images, states, and rhythms from the choreographic methodology and conceptual underbelly inspiring Saint Genet’s newest work Promised Ends: The Slow Arrow of Sorrow and Madness. Assisted by Lavinia Vago (Saint Genet | RUBBERBANDance Group | Kate Wallich + the YC) the class will culminate in learning movement material from the opus. A kinetic language that draws on durative movements to excavate the body’s potential ability to articulate with virtuosity and power, subtlety and softness. While we attune to compositional perspectives between the individual and the communal.

PRESS Confronting the Intangible – City Arts, December 24th, 2015
Photo by David Višnjić – “Frail Affinities” by Saint Genet – Donau Festival 2016.

MASTER CLASS: MADBOOTS DANCE

THU MAR 23 + 30, 2017 / 9:30AM–11:15AM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/credit card/class card

Class begins with a highly physical warm-up creating a grounded awareness of the body. Through spinal focus and imagery-driven improvisation, dancers will connect to risk and expression. Class builds into a challenging phrase sourced from current MADBOOTS DANCE repertory and research.

MADBOOTS DANCE, the hyper-physical, provocative dance company led by Jonathan Campbell (The Juilliard School ’10) and Austin Diaz (NYU Tisch School of the Arts ’11), was named “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine in 2016 and has reached audiences nationally and internationally, tackling topics of male identity and queer culture. MADBOOTSDANCE.COM

MADBOOTS DANCE is in residence at Velocity in March for SPLIT BILL, a raw premiere of two new works by Kate Wallich + The YC and MADBOOTS, co-presented with Velocity Dance Center, June 29th – July 2nd. More info >> 

MASTER CLASS: THOMAS HOUSE

SAT MAR 25, 2017 / 12:15PM–1:45PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/class card

Drawing inspiration from his freelance career, Thomas’s class is a fusion of contemporary, somatic and modern training. The goal is to allow the dancer to find the their artistic voice to use in todays contemporary dance world while moving through the layers of class. His love for Cunningham technique will be intergraded to remind the body of its modern training while challenging that with balance and patterns. Each class will end with phrase work inspired by the choreographers he’s worked for including Kyle Abraham, Aszure Barton, Loni Landon and Kate Wallich.

MASTER CLASS: DANIELLE AGAMI / Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY 

FRI MAR 3, 2017 / 9:30AM–11AM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/credit card/class card

Join Danielle Agami (Artistic Director) and Ate9 company members for special Master Classes inspired by Gaga, Ohad Naharin’s movement language. Gaga is a practice of research and discovery that brings new possibilities and healing to the body through constant and mindful movement. Using imagery to guide students through improvisational tasks, Danielle encourages participants to experience a wide range of sensations from within the body. Class works to foster strength, flexibility, and sensitivity throughout the body and mind. Come get groovy, heal your body, and push your physical limits. Classes are open to dancers and all types of movers alike – new movers, voices, and faces enhance the experience in the studio and bring inspiration. Everyone is encouraged to join!

DANIELLE AGAMI / Ate9 is considered one of America’s most important, emerging dance companies. Agami was a member of Batsheva Dance Company from 2005-2010 under the artistic directorship of Ohad Naharin. She also served as the company’s rehearsal director and in 2009 received the Yair Shapira Prize for Excellence in Dance. Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY, based in Los Angeles, was founded at Velocity Dance Center, and tours internationally.

See Danielle Agami’s latest work, Calling Glenn, at The Moore Theatre, MAR 3 at 8PM, performed by Ate9 with live music by the rhythmic anchor of the beloved band Wilco, Glenn Kotche. More info >> / Photo by Cheryl Mann Productions

MASTER CLASS: BRYN COHN

FRI FEB 17, 2017 / 4PM–5:30PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/credit card/class card

THE GET DOWN: A MOVEMENT EXPERIENCE WITH BRYN COHN + ARTISTS

Bryn Cohn + Artists’ class integrates principles rooted in contemporary, hip-hop and classical ballet and modern techniques to facilitate playful, rigorous and technical investigation.  Warm up begins with both crafted and improvisational exercises that ground the body and center the mind.  We calibrate our systems by drawing upon alignment, weight shift, sequencing, momentum, initiation and morphing in and out of form to build a foundation from which to venture on a visceral adventure.  The malleable, acute and architectural qualities cultivated provide a springboard to launch into dynamic – based, athletic and gestural vocabularies.  Music sourced from electronic to trance to pop genres generate a pulsing, beat – driven auditory landscape to incite tangible ways of connecting to syncopation and rhythmic nuance.

BRYN COHN: Described as having “a brilliant mind” (Dance Enthusiast) Bryn Cohn founded the New York-based dance company Bryn Cohn + Artists whose work has been performed at Danspace Project, Gibney Dance, 92nd Street Y, 14th Street Y, Ailey Citigroup, Jazz at Lincoln Center, Symphony Space, Boston University, Nazareth College, Dixon Place, Judson Church, Abrons Arts Center and Triskelion Arts among others.

Cohn has been commissioned by The Big Muddy Dance Company, Missouri Contemporary Ballet, Grand Valley State University, Billy Bell’s Lunge Dance, California State University, Fullerton, Betsey Johnson on a site – specific installation and The Youth America Grand Prix.  She received a full feature in Dance Teacher Magazine in 2016.  Cohn has taught at Gibney Dance, Peridance, Temple University, Shenandoah University, Rutgers University, CalArts, Loyola Marymount University, Velocity Dance Center and California State University, Los Angeles.  BC + A has received awards from Kaatsbaan, The Alfred Z Solomon Charitable Trust, SILO Residency through DanceNOW, The Far Space Residency through The Field, and Inception to Exhibition. / Photo by Jaqlin Medlock

MASTER CLASS: BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY

SAT FEB 11, 2017 / 10:15AM–11:30AM ***CLASS ADDED DUE TO DEMAND

SAT FEB 11, 2017 / 11:30AM–12:45PM
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/credit card/class card

Gaga/dancers classes are open to professional dancers or advanced dance students ages 16+.

These classes last for an hour and fifteen minutes and are taught by dancers who have worked closely with Ohad Naharin. Gaga/dancers classes employ the specific vocabulary and skills that are part and parcel of a dancer’s knowledge. The layering of familiar movements with Gaga tasks presents dancers with fresh challenges, and throughout the class, teachers prompt the dancers to visit more unfamiliar places and ways of moving as well. Gaga/dancers deepens dancers’ awareness of physical sensations, expands their palette of available movement options, enhances their ability to modulate their energy and engage their explosive power, and enriches their movement quality with a wide range of textures.

BATSHEVA DANCE COMPANY has been critically acclaimed and popularly embraced as one of the foremost contemporary dance companies in the world. Together with its junior Batsheva Ensemble, the Company boasts a roster of 34 dancers drawn from Israel and abroad. Batsheva maintains an extensive performance schedule locally and internationally with over 250 performances and over 100,000 spectators per year.  Artistic Director, Ohad Naharin, is also the originator of the innovative movement language, Gaga, which has enriched his extraordinary movement invention, revolutionized the company’s training, and emerged as a growing international force in the larger field of movement practices for both dancers and non-dancers.

This class is in support of the Batsheva Dance Company performance at The Paramount Theatre Saturday, February 11, 2017.

WORKSHOP: LISA NELSON
Tuning Scores Laboratory –Composition, Communication, Attention, and the Sense of Imagination

FEB 3–8, 2017 / 10AM–5PM
Base: Experimental Arts + Space 6520 5th Ave S #122
Velocity 1621 12th Ave
$300–$500 sliding scale or $250 low-income
Register: heartgreen@yahoo.com or 503-740-0523
Full time only please

Tuning Scores offer a multi-sensorial approach to the questions: what do we ‘see’ when we look at dance? what do we ‘see’ from within the dance?’ The scores offer inner and outer communication tools and practices that make apparent the ways each of us sense and make sense of movement. Initiating a playful and rigorous dialogue-in-action about space, time, movement, and the innate desire to compose our experience. Performers/creators of all disciplines (dance, music, visual art, theater) are welcome.

LISA NELSON is a dance-maker, improvisational performer, videographer, and collaborative artist who has been exploring the role of the senses in the performance and observation of movement since the ’70s. Stemming from an investigation of video and dance, she developed an approach to real-time editing and performance she calls ‘Tuning Scores.’ 

Nelson travels widely to perform, teach and create dances and maintains long-term collaborations with other artists, including Steve Paxton, Scott Smith, Daniel Lepkoff, and Image Lab. She’s received various encouragements over the years, including an Alpert Award in the Arts in 2002. She has co-edited Contact Quarterly international dance and improvisation journal since 1977, and lives in Vermont, USA. / Photo by Dylan Ward 

2016 MASTER CLASSES + WORKSHOPS

MASTER CLASS SERIES: SHANNON STEWART
THURS + FRI DEC 22 + 23 / 9:30-11:30AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/credit card/class card

Shannon’s contemporary class includes somatic tuning, guided improvisation, technical, endurance and strengthening exercises that allow dancers to increase range of motion, physical capacity and the potential for alternative virtuosities. Shannon works equally with physical and mental rigor, attention to detail, play and experimentation, and ends class with phrase work. Her training encompasses classical forms, somatic practices, martial arts and breakdancing. She is a certified Gyrokinesis®, and Gyrotonic® instrcutor and has trained abroad with in Forsythe improvisation, CounterTechnique and with Crystal Pite.

SHANNON STEWART is based in New Orleans with her heart tethered to the west coast and Europe. She has performed nationally and internationally with her own work as well as with tEEth, zoe | juniper, Tino Seghal, and in an adapted solo of Deborah Hay’s. She has taught for over a decade in contemporary dance centers (Velocity, ODC, Conduit PDX, Dancing Grounds) and as a guest artist in Universities in the United States and Canada. She will complete her MFA in interdisciplinary performance in 2017. 

 

PHOTO JUNIPER SHUEY

MASTER CLASS SERIES: ZOE SCOFIELD
WED DEC 21 / 6:15-7:45PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP each class
cash/check/credit card/class card

zoe | juniper classes utilize a somatic approach to technique. Classes are physically rigorous, deep, and kinesthetically challenging; a space where product orientated results takes rest and active experience reigns. We combine musicality, visual and physical metaphors in both improvisation and structured forms as a vehicle to surprise and further each dancers’ potential.  As teachers, it is our desire to help students foster a body that is available, aware and in command of its’ senses, intuition and physicality.

ZOE SCOFIELD, a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, is a dance and visual artist based in Seattle. Since 2004, Zoe collaborated with video and visual artist Juniper Shuey. Their company, zoe | juniper, has been commissioned and presented by The Joyce, American Realness, Bates Dance Festival, CAC New Orleans, CalArts, Columbia College Chicago, Cornish College, DancePlace, FringeArts, Frye Art Museum, Jacob’s Pillow, On the Boards, Pennsylvania Ballet, PS122, PuSh Festival, REDCAT, and Velocity Dance Center among others. zoe | juniper’s residencies and awards include The MacDowell Colony, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, MAP Fund, National Performance Network, NEFA’s National Dance Project, Princess Grace Foundation, The Mellon Foundation, and The Trust for Mutual Understanding. zoe | juniper’s latest work, Clear & Sweet, made it’s PNW premiere at On The Boards in October, and will continue to tour nationally in 2017.

MASTER CLASS SERIES: BIANCA CABRERA
TECHNICAL PRACTICE FOR THE ADVENTUROUS DANCER
TUES DEC 20 / 9:30-11:30AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP
cash/check/credit card/class card

Students will take up space like a tiger and move stealthily through a fierce, focused flow that wakes up awareness of innate kinnetic sensibilities. Attack and risk will nuzzle up to graceful extension and freedom in the joints. Floor work and inversions are emphasized and connected to sound vertical alignment. Nosh on fat, beefy phrases, fill up on fierce expressivity and chew on ideas about creating a larger context for the joy of being in the body. Class is strongly influenced by Yoga and Break Dancing and Release, Graham and Lewitsky techniques. With a teaching philosophy rooted in authorship, interpretation, and integration, Cabrera’s classes illuminate and amplify the tenor of the body through expressive prowess. Her intentional physical practices aim to build multiple vantage points of virtuosity, encouraging risk taking and yea saying. With conventional class structures reimagined as a participatory think tank, students become powerful peers for one another while propelling technique forward through inquiry and investigation.

Driven by the bias Bacchus before Buddha, BIANCA CABRERA‘s work is informed by a vibrant amalgamation of baton twirling, go-go dancing, cabaret, camp and burlesque as well as her professional contemporary dance education. She received early training at the Chicago Academy for the Arts and later studied at the Alvin Ailey School, the Martha Graham Center and Point Park College, before receiving her BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts. Her performing career includes work with celebrated dance artists and companies: Lingo Dance/KT Niehoff, Amii LeGendre, Paige Barnes, Kristen Tsiastios, Kim Epifano, LevyDance, Christine Bonansea, et al. and is working with Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions in 2017.

In 2012, she founded the Bay Area performing company, Blind Tiger Society, creating 7 new full length works and many more short works with performances and commissions for The Garage, ODC Theater, ODC Youth Company, CounterPULSE, vîv dance collective, SAFEhouse Arts, the Seattle Inter|National Dance Festival, Links Hall/Midwest Nexus and Kate Mitchell Creative. Cabrera is a two-time participant of ODC’s Pilot program in San Francisco and has been awarded residencies from Bandaloop Studio, LEVYstudio, The Garage, SAFEhouse Arts and 10 Degrees. Her work has been nominated for a 2014 Soul of Oakland award and has been supported through the Fleishhacker and Rainin Foundations.

WORKSHOP SERIES:Express Train to States of Grace
A CI + Underscore Workshop with Nancy Stark Smith
WORKSHOP //NOV 30 + DEC 1 + DEC 2 + DEC 3 / 10-6PM
Velocity: V21525 11th Ave
REGISTER $350 Workshop Only / $400 Workshop + Symposium
(includes admission to the Underscore Dec 3)

“States of grace” is what can happen when all the balls are in the air at once: solo dancing, contact improvisation, non-CI improvisation, composition, contemplation, listening, performance/art, mystery, and humanity. This three day workshop aims to weave these strands into satisfying, focused, curious, embodied, and engaged solo, duo, and group improvisations. The Underscore on Saturday, December 3 will be the culminating vehicle for our discoveries.

 

PHOTO DYLAN WARD

MASTER CLASS SERIES:
CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES w/ Patrick Kilbane
gather.dance.sweat.inspire
TUES OCT 25 + NOV 8 / 9-11:20AM
Velocity’s Kawasaki Studio
$15 / $12 MVP

Develop the tools required of today’s contemporary dance artist. Get curious and dive into a supportive and challenging environment while waking up to your experience. Explore form, improvisation, strength + stamina, choreographic material and the pursuit of pleasure. Some dance experience suggested but not required. All levels.

PATRICK KILBANE is from Bainbridge Island, WA. He trained at Pacific Northwest Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, School of American Ballet and others. After being exposed to contemporary dance Patrick joined NW Dance Project in Portland, OR where he danced for 6 seasons and worked with an incredible array of international dance makers. He is thrilled to be back in Seattle working as a freelance performance artist, choreographer and teacher. Patrick dances with Kate Wallich + The YC and Whim W’him. His new ongoing Saturday afternoon class “Contemporary Practices with Patrick Kilbane” begins on Oct 29th.

 

PHOTO EPHRIAM NAGLER

WORKSHOP / AUDITION: ALICE GOSTI
NOV 5+6 / 2-4PM
Velocity: V21525 11th Ave
REGISTER $35 Full / $30 MVP / $20 One day drop In

Within a creative energetic workshop/audition, we will warm-up. Investigate and explore movement materials and improvisation scores around the primary themes of Alice’s new body of work. Material Deviance In Contemporary American Culture (MDICAC) is an immersive installation, dance performance, and communal ritual. It grapples with the complexity of living in an object-based society where we define our identity through the objects we own. The performance interweaves the stories and physical histories of: immigrants and refugees who carry their homes on their shoulders; hoarders who compulsively accumulate anything and everything; and America’s growing homeless population. MDICAC combines dance, theatre, immersive installation and durational performance.Performers of all ethnic backgrounds are encouraged to audition!Dancers will be selected to research and perform in Alice’s next project. Premiere in Winter 2018 with touring in the Spring and Fall of 2018. Workshop proceeds go directly into supporting this project.

Actors Auditions will be held at the beginning of December. If interested rsvp at the e-mail below.

For any questions contact alice@gostia.com

Alice Gosti is an architect of experiences. She aims to create spaces, performances and events where people can exist, moments that become catalysts for ideas, memories, dreams and desires. She has received grants from the NEFA, Bossak/Heilbron, Artist Trusts, Seattle Office of the Arts and Culture, the Vilcek Foundation. Alice Gosti’s work has been presented/commissioned by universities, galleries, theaters and festivals worldwide. For more information gostia.com

MDICAC is made possible by the New England Foundation for the Arts’ National Dance Project, with lead funding from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: JULIA BURRER

TUES OCT 11 + 18 + NOV 1 / 9-11:20AM
Velocity’s Kawasaki Studio
$15 / $12 MVP

We will start by honing in and focusing on an idea, image, and/or landscape of the body, investigating its architecture and how gravity and intention can broaden our perception of our personal movement patterns. From there, we will expand outwards into a wider view using shorter exercises to get our bodies articulating and gaining alertness and spatial awareness. As we move forward, we will build experientially – in size and space, in musicality and in sensation. We will access moving from our bones and finding ease in our joints, as well as fully engaging our musculature and using momentum to our advantage. Class will culminate with a hefty-sized phrase.

Originally from Austin, Texas, JULIA BURRER received a BFA in dance performance from SUNY-Purchase College. Julia was a member of Doug Varone and Dancers from 2007 to 2015. She has staged various Varone works on companies and universities throughout the U.S., including assisting with his 2013 remounting of Les Troyens at the Metropolitan Opera. During her time in New York, she also danced professionally with Colleen Thomas, Bill Young, Gwen Welliver, and the Median Movement. She has served as adjunct professor at Marymount Manhattan College and Barnard College, as well as, directed 92nd Street Y’s teen performing company, Harkness Repertory Ensemble, from 2011-2015. Julia has been a guest artist at Bates Dance Festival and Gibney Dance Center and has led workshops and master classes in the U.S. and abroad.  She is currently completing her MFA at University of Washington where she is focusing on teaching methods, alternative somatic practices, and dance history.

 

PHOTO FRANZISKA STRAUSS

MASTER CLASS: TROY OGILVIE
SAT OCT 22 / 12:15-1:45PM
Velocity’s Founders Studio
$15 / $12 MVP

When gut, heart, and brain are trusted, a dialogue forms between conscious and intuitive physicality. The tension between abstraction and narrative – form and content – adds context to this dialogue. Class physically and mentally prepares dancers and/or actors to contribute to this conversation whether they produce their own work or interpret the work of others. Warm-up begins with meditative form and graduates to rigorous alignment. Blood pumping continues with improvisation techniques and games; both known and unknown. Class finishes with phrase work and related improvisations. Come as you are! Let’s go places together.

TROY OGILVIE has danced for and collaborated with choreographers – Andrea Miller, Sidra Bell, Zoe Scofield, Gabriel Forestieri, Idan Sharabi, Itzik Galili, Shannon Gillen, Margie Gillis (as a participant in the The Legacy Project/Le Projet Heritage), Austin McCormick, Harumi Terayama, Malcolm Low, Patricia Noworol, and Belinda McGuire; violinist – Liv Heym; theater company – Punchdrunk (in the role of Lady Macbeth); and director – Peter Sellars (in the role of Mary Magdalene in The Gospel According to the Other Mary).  She teaches an improvisation class and is one of the creative directors for The McKittrick Hotel’s (home of Sleep No More) SUPERCINEMA parties.  Additionally, Troy is the Secretary of Springboard Danse Montreal’s Canadian Board as well as a Founding Collaborator & Associate Director of NYC’s Movement Invention Project.  She was one of Dance Magazine’s 2011 Top 25 to Watch and graduated with a B.F.A. from the Juilliard School in 2007. www.troyogilvie.squarespace.com

PHOTO LAUREN CREW

MASTERCLASS: DAVID HARVEY
Dancing as the act of listening
SAT SEPT 24 / 12:15-1:45PM
FOUNDERS STUDIO 1621 12TH AVE
$15 / $12 MVP
cash/check/class card only

This class will consist of a short warmup, spontaneously generated movement, and experimenting with learned material.We’ll try to detach from our egos, enable our integrity, and clarify our communication in order to allow our best attempt at honest dancing.

DAVID HARVEY was a member of Alonzo King Lines Ballet for seven years, where he was involved in the creation of 12 of Alonzo’s new works, and danced in over 20 of his ballets. He teaches for the Lines Ballet education programs, including the BFA program through Dominican University and has taught as guest faculty at various dance schools, summer training programs, and workshops across the United States. Since 2012 he has worked closely as a dancer/collaborator with Bobbi Jene Smith, and he is currently a member of Kate Wallich + The YC. His own choreographic work has been performed at several SF venues, including The Novellus Theater at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theater, the Dolby Chadwick Gallery, and Zspace. Harvey recently premiered a solo work at the On The Boards Northwest New Works Festival. He will perform this work as a part of Velocity’s Fall Kick Off on Sat, Sept 24th, 7:30PM.

PHOTO TIM SUMMERS

WORKSHOP + AUDITION: THE THREE YELLS 
SUN SEPT 18 / 10-1:30PM
Velocity: V2 1525 11th Ave
$20 full / $18 MVP

A rare opportunity presented by Velocity Dance Center to participate in a workshop with Veronica Lee-Baik. Known for her uncanny ability to wield the fire out each individual, Lee-Baik will offer unique movement exploration techniques that draw from her varied background in contemporary and Butoh dance. Participants will harness their individual expression, experience the collaborative process with Lee-Baik, and learn structured material to discover an ensemble connection. You will dance. You will sweat. You will be alive.

This workshop will serve as an audition to expand The Three Yells casting for their latest evening length work, Giselle Deconstruct. Selected dancer/s will perform with the company at Cornish Playhouse (produced by Cornish Presents) January 6 & 7, 2017. Rehearsals are Mondays (12-2.30pm) and Thursdays (9.30-12pm) at Fremont Abbey Arts Center. Performance stipend gig.

Described by SeattleDances as having, “a clear eye for an unusual landscape—her stage pictures are distinctive and disturbing.” Lee-Baik is a visual artist of the body. She collaborates with cross-disciplinary artists to install visceral environments that invite new perspective on important social/civic issues. Lee-Baik has presented work at Velocity Dance Center, Cornish Playhouse, On The Boards and Frye Art Museum since returning to her work in 2014. She is a recipient of the Artist Trust GAP Grant, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture smART Ventures Grant and 4Culture Art Projects Award.

PHOTO WITTYPIXEL PHOTOGRAPHY

WORKSHOP + AUDITION: ALANA O ROGERS
SUN SEPT 11 / 10:30-1PM
Velocity: V2 1525 11th Ave
$20 full / $18 MVP

Delve into the creative process and learn material for Alana’s upcoming work Into Ice at Velocity Dance Center. Dancers and movers of all skill levels and backgrounds encouraged; dance training not required but a sense of body knowledge and movement awareness is essential. The workshop will include a brief warm-up, followed by learning set material and playing with improvisational scores inspired by: coldness, glaciers, exploration, isolation, avalanches, caribou, and getting lost.

6-8 ensemble performers will be selected from the workshop to perform in November. Rehearsals are all Thursdays in October (10:30-12:45) at Velocity, and Tuesday Oct 25 & Nov 1 (9:30-1:30) at Fremont Abbey. 1 additional weekend rehearsal is possible. Tech week is Nov 7-10, Performances Nov 11-12, 18-19 at Velocity. 

ALANA O’FARRELL ROGERS is the artistic director of Alana O Rogers Dance Company. After studying dance in Ireland, France, New York, and Massachusetts, she returned to Seattle in 2000 where she has been making dance works ever since. As an artist, Alana is interested in the human condition, culture, science, and the natural world. She believes in the power of art to leave etchings on our collective experience that remain after the viewing has past. Her choreography has been commissioned by ChopShop, Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards, the BOOST Dance Festival, and the Seattle International Dance Festival, among others. She holds a Doctorate of Physical Therapy from the University of Washington, a career that has allowed her to meld her passions of movement and science. www.alanaorogers.org

 

PHOTO RJ MUNA

 

WORKSHOP + AUDITION: RACHAEL LINCOLN
SAT JULY 23 / 11 – 1:30PM

Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

 

Lincoln’s workshop explores the duet form with particular attention to attunement in performance. Participants will improvise, learn solo and partnered material, animate objects, and work with structured scores of mundane virtuosity and precise physicality.

This workshop will serve as an audition for one to two dancers needed to understudy and perform “an attic an exit,” an evening length duet by Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters. Selected dancer/s will perform once during a two-week run at ACT Theater Oct. 26-Nov. 6th and must be available to tour Nov. 7-13th.

In addition, Lincoln is looking for up to 5 dancers for a new work beginning in 2017.

Cited by Dance View Times as a “fresh, literate director with a mastery of dramatic timing,” RACHAEL LINCOLN has been making physical dance theater since 1997. Her work has been presented in venues including Sopiensaele Theater in Berlin, Theater Artaud in San Francisco, The Dublin Fringe Festival, The Bytom Dance Festival in Poland, UCLA, and The Indonesian Dance Festival. Lincoln was a member of The Joe Goode Performance Group and Jo Kreiter’s Flyaway Productions, and has collaborated with Sara Shelton Mann, Bebe Miller, Kathleen Hermesdorf and Kim Epifano in the US and with wee dance company, Sommer Ulrickson, and Jess Curtis in Berlin. With Leslie Seiters, she is co-founder and co-director of the duet company Lean-to-Productions. Rachael has been a member of Bandaloop since 1998 and is currently an Assistant Professor in the dance program at The University of Washington.

Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters’ collaboration spans two decades. Intent on expanding definitions of dance, they choreograph movement, props, rigging, and sound to engage their audiences in an evocative aesthetic experience. In the worlds they create, movement becomes language, objects become characters, and everyday logic is suspended. With equal concern for precision and wonder, Lincoln and Seiters integrate influences from contemporary dance, visual art, fiction, aerial dance, and theater.

 

WORKSHOP + AUDITION: HEATHER KRAVAS
FRI JULY 8 / 4:30 – 6:30PM
SAT JULY 9 / 2:30 – 6:30PM

Velocity: V2 1525 11th Ave

 

performing gender together, over and over again

This workshop/audition will focus on repetitive actions and their potential to change meaning for the performer and spectator. We will shake, stomp, and tendu durationally, allowing ourselves to move and be moved. We will utilize obsessive/compulsive structures to push our words and movements beyond the recognizable. Paying close attention to how gender may be expressed and repressed, we will examine the performance of feminine and masculine as a daily activity and formal dance.

 

HEATHER KRAVAS is a Seattle-based choreographer and performing artist investigating choreographic, improvisation, and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the limits of choreography. Her work has been presented inter/nationally including On the Boards, American Realness, The Chocolate Factory, The Kitchen, and P.S. 122.

 

Her upcoming project, visions of beauty, through accident, failure, and poetry, aims to undermine preconceptions of power and masculinity. visions of beauty is a Creative Capital project, co-produced by On the Boards and P.S. 122. It premieres at On the Boards March 2017.

 

PHOTO DAMIR ZIZIC

MASTER CLASS/AUDITION SERIES: PETRA ZANKI
SAT JUNE 18 / 9:30-11:30AM(Steward 9:30-10:30 / Kawasaki 10:30-11:30)
SAT JUNE 25 / 10:30-11:45AM (Kawasaki)
with post-masterclass discussion 12-12:30PM (Steward)
$15 / $12 MVP each day
cash/check/class card 

This two-day audition and dance workshop is about utilizing physicality, concept, and dance dramaturgy to create intelligible, and visually captivating dance proposals. The participants will become familiar with the material for the performance “365” that is scheduled to premier this Fall. We will create short solo proposals, and interact with the images, text, light, and music that appear in the original work. We will also create collaborative dance scores for each other, and create new dance material in collaboration. The concept of movement dramaturgy will be introduced and highly reflected in this workshop.

Participants will be considered for the evening dance production that will premiere at Velocity on September 1^st – 2^nd of 2016 as well as for a full-evening production, and a site-specific planned for 2017. Petra looks to work with dancers with the strong dance technique, who are curious and interested in exploring the movement outside of their dance safety zones. The dancers with the affinity for movement research, visual sensibility, and concept-thinking, are highly encouraged to apply. Some home preparation will be required.

PETRA ZANKI is a dance and performance maker who studied movement with renown choreographers and performing artists such as Emio Greco, Jonathan Burrows, Patricia Bardi, Goat Island, Sjord Vreugdenhil (Forsythe Improv Technologies), Deufert & Plischke, and Gob Squad. In 2010 Petra was awarded the best Croatian choreographer at XI. Platform of Young Choreographers, and from 2011 to 2013 was artist-in-residence at the Zagreb Dance Center. In 2012 she was selected among six European choreographers to receive the two-year choreography scholarship SPAZIO from HIPP and The ICK- Amsterdam of Emio Greco. Her dance and theatre works were presented on festivals and venues across Europe, in the US, and Australia. In the US she collaborated with On The Boards, La Mama, Velocity, and PS122.

JOIN THE FACEBOOK EVENT FOR DETAILS + UPDATES >>

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: PARTNERING withERIN CARDINAL

SUN MAY 29 + JUN 5 + 12 + 19 / 2-3PM

Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave

$40 / $32 MVP / day drop ins $15 / $12 MVP

drop ins are cash/check/class card only

 

Erin’s partnering technique is the result of an intense study of what lies beneath the methods and approaches to various partnering choreography. The research and development has been translated into a technique class in order to share these essential skills needed to develop an individualized understanding of partnering while maintaining safety, promoting longevity and the shared experience of how to truly partner another. Putting aesthetic and movement vocabulary aside, we will address some of the essential elements such as stability, timing and kinesthetic awareness of both dancers. Building on the elements found in contact improvisation, we will learn the basics of sharing weight: how to lift and how to be lifted. We will explore the endless balance points of their partner’s landscape, counterbalances, cantilevers and supports throughout the body. This artful scientific approach to partnering can be implemented into any genre—from ballet to tango to modern dance.

JOIN THE FACEBOOK EVENT FOR DETAILS + UPDATES >>

 

PHOTO EPHRAIM PENISTON

MASTER CLASS SERIES: BIANCA CABRERA
FRI JUNE 10 / 9:30-11:30AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP
cash/check/credit card/class card

Technical Practice for the Adventurous Dancer is a Radical and Reverent Technique class.

Take up space like a tiger and move stealthily through a fierce, focused flow that wakes up awareness of innate kinetic sensibilities. Attack and risk will nuzzle up to graceful extension and freedom in the joints. Develop honing techniques, explore patient yet pleasure-seeking response systems, learn tactics for staying pliant and resourceful and build strategies in tone, extension, instability, risk and rebound. Floor work and inversions are emphasized and connected to sound vertical alignment. Nosh on fat, beefy phrases, fill up on fierce expressivity and chew on ideas about creating a larger context for the joy of being in the body. With a teaching philosophy rooted in authorship, interpretation and integration, Cabrera’s classes illuminate and amplify the tenor of the body through expressive prowess. 

BIANCA CABRERA is a Bay Area based teacher, dancemaker and performer.  Driven by the bias Bacchus before Buddha, her work is informed by a vibrant amalgamation of baton twirling, go-go dancing and cabaret as well as her professional dance education. She received early training at the Chicago Academy for the Arts and later studied at the Alvin Ailey School, the Martha Graham Center and Point Park College, before receiving her BFA in dance from Cornish College of the Arts. Her extensive performing career includes work with celebrated dance artists and companies: Lingo Dance/KT Niehoff, Paige Barnes, Amii LeGendre, Ricki Mason, Kristen Tsiatsios, Kim Epifano, LevyDance and Christine Bonansea among many others. She has created 7 fun length works between 2012 – 2016 with her company Blind Tiger Society, enjoying performances and commissions for ODC Theater, CounterPulse, vîv, SAFEHouse Arts, SIDF and Links Hall. Cabrera is a two-time participant of ODC’s Pilot program in San Francisco and has been awarded residencies from Bandaloop Studio, LEVYstudio, The Garage, SAFEhouse Arts and 10 Degrees. Her work has been nominated for a 2014 Soul of Oakland award and has been supported through the Fleishhacker and Rainin Foundations. www.blindtigersociety.com

JOIN THE FACEBOOK EVENT FOR DETAILS + UPDATES >>

 

PHOTO BAMBERG FINE ART

MASTER CLASS SERIES: WHIM W’HIM
SAT JUN 4 / 2-4PM
Velocity Kawasaki and Founders Studios 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP
cash/check/class card only

Explore the work of guest choreographer James Gregg. Warm up is led by Whim W’Him dancer Thomas Phelan and then the choreographer takes over. Participants will learn an excerpt from their new creation, which will premiere at Whim W’Him’s June production, OUT-spoken.

THOMAS PHELAN—originally from Fort Collins, CO, where he received his BA in Performing Arts from Colorado State University. He danced for Alaska Dance Theater in Anchorage and Whim W’Him since 2014. Since living in Seattle Thomas has had opportunities performing with Ballet Bellevue, Alana Rogers, The Robbie Turner Review, The House of Verlaine, Olympic Ballet Theatre, and International Ballet Theatre.

 

JAMES GREGG— was raised in Oklahoma and started dancing at the age of nine. He trained with Ballet Oklahoma, Houston Ballet, Bolshoi Ballet Academy, The Edge Performing Arts Center (LA), and Lou Conte Dance Studio. James moved to Chicago to dance with River North Chicago Dance Company in 1999. He was with RNCDC for several years before moving to Montréal, where he danced with Les Ballet Jazz de Montréal. He has performed the works of many renowned choreographers including Aszure Barton, Mauro Bigonzetti, Frank Chaves, Danny Ezralow, Harrison McEldowney, Mia Michaels, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Rodrigo Pedernieras, Crystal Pite, and Edgar Zendajas. James started choreographing as a youngster in school but really found his passion when he arrived in Chicago, where he dove into working with different dancers and companies. He has set works on River North Chicago Dance Company, Northwest Dance Project’s Pretty Creatives Competition, Les Ballet Jazz Workshop, and for Springboard Danse Project.

JOIN THE FACEBOOK EVENT FOR DETAILS + UPDATES / JUNE 4 >>

 

WORKSHOP + AUDITION: DYLAN WARD
Applying Method
FRI MAY 27 / 4-7PM
Velocity: V2 1525 11th Ave
$30 full / $24 MVP / 3hrs of volunteering at V2

Join Ward in a simple movement/dance workshop about acquiring, processing, and utilizing performance methods and concepts from varied physical practices in Theater and Dance. Participants will learn choreography, create original group performance events in collaborative process, and will approach text. 

Participants will be considered for upcoming Sleep Nod projects, including the performance of “JONAH” at INKA gallery in July, the workshop of “Burnt Offering,” a new play by Denver playwright Dakota Hill, and “Sophia,” a dance choreographed by Ward at a month long residency at BASE, a new arts space in Georgetown, and the projected full production of these works in early 2017. 

Sleep Nod seeks to work with both dancers and actors and the workshop will be structured to allow all to display their strengths.

Dylan Ward is a dance/theater/film maker operating under the project name Sleep Nod.  He has produced original performance work, interventions and film for over a decade in Denver, CO, Cusco and Lima, Peru, and Seattle, WA, and has received support, awards and residencies from the Martin Family Foundation, The Seattle Office of Arts and Culture, the University of Washington departments of Dance and Drama, Velocity Dance Center, Base, and the Glenn Kawasaki Foundation. Sleep Nod offers special thanks to Case van Rij, Jerry O’ Leary, Steven Ripley, Jennifer Salk and many more individual supporters. 

 

PHOTO PETER MUMFORD

WORKSHOP + AUDITION: MARY SHELDON SCOTT
SAT APR 23 / 2-5PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$25 / $20 MVP

 

Beginning with a structured improvisational warm-up, Scott’s workshop examines the solo form through a series of choreographed phrases, action words and visual scores. Material from Scott/Powell’s Made in Seattle commission, The SOLO(s) Project, will form a key resource for our investigations. Tools for manipulating and developing material for performance will underscore our work. This workshop serves as an audition to identify an 8th soloist for the project.  

Scott: “As a choreographer I have been exploring the solo form for the 22-plus years of Scott/Powell’s history, with many of these solos embedded within the framework of larger group structures. The SOLO(s) Project allows me to isolate, question and test the solo form through diverse creation tools including transposing and recasting fragments of past choreography, using visual scores constructed from still images to inspire movement invention, one-on-one engagements within defined processes with each of the solo performers, and my own visceral response to carefully selected action words with physical outcomes. Explorations with costume artifacts, props, and set pieces form a key part of my exploration. Each solo is intended to be a separate act – and one of the key challenges I face in this project is ensuring that each story holds to a unique sense of character, energy, place.”

The SOLO(s) Project is a multi-media performance concept by choreographer Mary Sheldon Scott and composer Jarrad Powell. Built in intensive one-on-one rehearsals with eight performers over 7 months, SOLO(s) unfolds through three distinct experiments – a proscenium performance featuring eight unique dance solos, site-specific events that explore the transposition of select solos into Pacific Northwest landscapes, and dance-on-film experiments that explore the translation of individual solos into the medium of film.  The eight soloists include Mark Haim, Jade Solomon Curtis, Alice Gosti, Corrie Befort, Jim Kent and Linsyanne Owen. SOLO(s) is a Made in Seattle project commissioned by Seattle’s Velocity Dance Center and supported in part through grants from 4Culture and the Mayor’s Office of Arts & Culture/Seattle.  SOLO(s) premieres November 3-6, 2016 at Velocity Dance Center.

 

 

PHOTO TIM SUMMERS

WORKSHOP SERIES: FUNDAMENTALS OF CONTACT IMPROV with Kaitlin McCarthy
SUN APR 17 + 24 + MAY 1 + 8 / 2-3PM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave

Part social dance, part physics lesson, part anarchy—come experience Contact Improvisation! This open-ended and non-hierarchical dance form is based on a few concepts that lead to endless creativity. Designed to give students the physical and social tools to enter the “jam” setting, this four week series will develop physical listening through the point of contact, introduce basic weight sharing, and build to spontaneous physical dialogue though internal sensing, observation of weight, and organic development of touch in a supportive environment. This class includes admission to Velocity’s weekly movement jam, directly following class. All bodies are welcome, anyone with specific needs please contact instructor in advance (kaitmccarthy@gmail.com). Great for those totally new to the form.

 

 

 

 

WORKSHOP + AUDITION: KARIN STEVENS DANCE
The Art and Practice of Movement
WED APR 13 / 12-3PM
THURS APR 14 / 3-6PM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave
$30 one day / $25 MVP/ $45 both days

 

Explore movement practices that open you to your deepest potential to create, unwinding unnecessary tension and obstacles within to engage with your most curious and fully aligned body-self. Move beyond practice into the development of movement art; generating connections to ideas, to others, and to the beauty of our complex existence. This workshop will involve some of the ideas and choreographic structures in (re)MOVE: (re)TURN, KSD’s upcoming April new work. Join us in this moving, intellectual, playful and lively environment! ***Please bring your phone if it has a video recording ability.

AUDITION:

KSD is looking for dancers to join upcoming paid projects for fall 2016 and 2017. Please send a resume and photo to karinstevensdance@gmail.com. Call backs are MAY 4 / 12-3PM. 

Karin Stevens Dance is a 501c3 that was formed in 2009. KSD works capture the breadth of the human moving experience and embody the complex layers of our cultural spaces, time and relationship to nature.www.karinstevensdance.com

 

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: KT NIEHOFF
REINVENT YOUR EYE
MAR 31+APR 7 / 5:30-8:30PM
APR 2+9 / 12-3PM
Velocity: V2 1525 11th Ave

This work uses improvisational scores to examine the components associated with creating non-linear, non-narrative performance art. Structures are designed to dissect elements such as personal movement vocabulary, space / architecture, theatrical elements, time / timing, identification of an idea and development, risk and wild card. Participants focus on defining each element’s parameters and universal properties, as well as individual likes / dislikes and aesthetics. Over time the elements combined in multiple configurations, allowing the work to develop in complexity and possibility. Because the class uses improvisational scores as the exploration device, the group also focuses on working effectively with an ensemble, maximizing opportunities for intelligent, in the moment decision-making, or spontaneous composition.

Each day consists of interactive scores, watching of improvised material and time for evaluation and assessing the work amongst one another. Artists in all disciplines (e.g. writing, visual art, music, film, etc.) are welcome. Discourse around how to modify, develop and share these structures across disciplines will be encouraged.

I give thanks to the visionary minds and work of Katie Duck, Nina Martin and Wendel Beavers, whom I have had the great fortune of studying with and who have deeply influenced my own working process. I also thank the multiple groups of disparate artists who have helped me develop this material in Seattle, as well as residencies at MANCC in Tallahassee, FL, Oberlin College in Ohio, Estudio 3 in Madrid, the SNDO in Amsterdam and the University of Washington.

 

 

PHOTO ARTHUR ELGORT

THE VELOCITY SESSIONS
WORKSHOP SERIES: JANE COMFORT
Community Performance
TUES APR 5 / 3-6PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$25 / $20 MVP / FREE for Jane Comfort + Co Ticket Holders

 

This workshop will focus on how to make a performance piece that deals with social issues. Warm up activities include acting and movement improvisations which are followed by discussions of structural options for performance and the social issues involved. Small groups or individuals develop short pieces which are shared with the group.

Get your tickets for Jane Comfort and Company at UW Meany Hall APR 7-9 >>
Ticket holders may take the Workshop for FREE.

The Velocity Sessions is a partnership with UW World Series.

 

PHOTO CHARLIE SCHUCK

WORKSHOP + AUDITION: KATE WALLICH’S INDUSTRIAL BALLET
FRI MAR 18 / 5-8PM
V2 1525 11th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP // Ages 16+
Dancers/Performers needed for large group durational / experiential performance throughout the show.

Learn material + process from Kate Wallich’s Industrial Ballet, and audition to be a part of the premiere performance at the Moore Theatre on March 26. Please arrive 15 minutes early to register, and wear all black + shoes you feel comfortable dancing in.

Performers need to be available for rehearsals and performance:
FRI MAR 25 // 5-9PM
SAT MAR 26 // 1-9:30PM

 

 

 

PHOTO IAN DOUGLAS

WORKSHOP SERIES: KEITH HENNESSY
STATES, TASKS, RITUALS
SAT MAR 12 / 1-5PM
University of Washington Dance Department Meany Hall
Suggested Donation, sliding scale $30-$48 / Current UW Students FREE
Four hours of dancing aka body experiments aka kinetic meditations and bodily actions aka a dance class for (angry hurt anxious sad) people. Moving and talking about contemporary dance in the (apocalyptic) era of neoliberal crisis, permanent war, fascist democracy, and the white supremacist capitalist heterocispatriarchy that motivates #blacklivesmatter.

 

 

 

 

PHOTO LAURENT PHILIPPE

THE VELOCITY SESSIONS
MASTER CLASS SERIES + CONVERSATION: TRISHA BROWN DANCE COMPANY
WED FEB 3 // MASTER CLASS 9:30-11:15AM / CONVERSATION 11:30AM-1PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP / FREE for TBDC Ticket Holders

The Master Class will begin with a warm up concentrating on clarity and freedom of movement, which is then applied to learning Brown’s movement vocabulary through phrases from TBDC repertory. Emphasis is placed on learning movement as the Company does, with attention to detail, spatial clarity, performance quality, and dancing with others.

Directly following the master class, stay for a conversation with Associate Artistic Directors of the Trisha Brown Dance Company (Carolyn Lucas and Diane Madden) and BANDALOOP Artistic Director Amelia Rudolph. The discussion will focus on the creation and performance of site-specific work, including a discussion of Trisha Brown’s pioneering leadership in this field with Early Works such as “Man Walking Down the Side of a Building” (1970) (to be performed by BANDALOOP at Meany Hall on Friday, Feb 5), and the newest iteration of the Trisha Brown Dance Company “ Trisha Brown: In Plain Site” which mines and recombines material from Brown’s vast repertory to accommodate the unique spatial demands of a particular venue (such as the Seattle Art Museum on Saturday, February 6, at 2pm).

Get your tickets for Trisha Brown Dance Company at UW Meany Hall FEB 4-6 >>
Ticket holders may take the Master Class for FREE.

The Velocity Sessions is a partnership with UW World Series.

 

PHOTO BAMBERG FINE ART

MASTER CLASS SERIES: WHIM W’HIM
JAN 9 / 12-2PM with MARK HAIM
JAN 16 / 2-4PM with DOMINIC WALSH
Velocity Founders + Kawasaki Studios 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP

Explore the new contemporary dance works premiering at Whim W’Him’s January production, IN-spired. Whim W’Him dancer Thomas Phelan will lead a fun warm up and then the choreographers take over. Mark Haim leads class on 1/9 and Dominic Walsh leads class on 1/16. Join the Facebook event >>

THOMAS PHELAN—originally from Fort Collins, CO, where he received his BA in Performing Arts from Colorado State University. He danced for Alaska Dance Theater in Anchorage and Whim W’Him since 2014. Since living in Seattle Thomas has had opportunities performing with Ballet Bellevue, Alana Rogers, The Robbie Turner Review, The House of Verlaine, Olympic Ballet Theatre, and International Ballet Theatre.

DOMINIC WALSH—Dominic Walsh is world renowned Choreographer and former Founder/Director of Dominic Walsh Dance Theater (2002-2015). As a principal dancer with Houston Ballet for over a decade, Dominic Walsh received national and international praise for his interpretations of both classical and contemporary roles. Walsh burst onto the choreographic scene when he won the prestigious Choo-San Goh Award in 1998, and he is now hailed as a leading choreographer who is pushing the boundaries of ballet into new realms of theatricality. He won a second Choo-San Goh Award in 2007 and received a Princess Grace Award in 2008.

MARK HAIM—Mark Haim has been making dances and teaching for over 30 years. Born in New York City, he attended Juilliard, began choreographing, and received his BFA and MFA. He directed Mark Haim & Dancers and the Companhia de Danca de Lisboa. He created new works for many dance companies in the US, Europe, and Asia, as well as numerous university dance departments throughout the US. Mark was a Senior Artist-in-Residence at the University of Washington (2002-2008), Visiting Associate Professor at Reed College, and was on the faculty at the American Dance Festival and NYU-Tisch School of the Arts. He has guest taught in schools around the world. He is the recipient of NYFA Choreographers Fellowship (1987), NEA Choreographers Fellowship (1988 and 1996), and the Scripps/ADF Humphrey-Weidman-Limon Fellowship for Choreography.

www.whimwhim.org

 

 

 

2015 master classes + WORKSHOPS

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: ERICA BADGELEY
EVERYTHING IS MATERIAL
DEC 23 / 6-8PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP

ERICA BADGELEY has spent the last year creating and performing work by up-and-coming choreographers in Europe, a generation birthed from companies and schools like Rosas, Sasha Waltz, Akram Kahn, P.A.R.T.S., SNDO and SEAD. Through physical tasks and exercises, Erica will share processes she experienced in Europe, along with discussion of the new ways the choreographers have evolved their history.

As Tonya Lockyer has aptly observed, we can still see the stem of most of this work originating in the 1970s Judson Dance Theater in New York. Thus the title: Everything is Material. Join this physical workshop and discussion on European Dance today, and why the cross-continental evolution of American post-modern dance may have had less traction in our own American dance evolution.

PHOTO CHOREOGRAPHY BY MATIJA FERLIN

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: PATRICK KILBANE
DEC 3 + 4 / 3-6PM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave
REGISTER $45 Full Workshop / $39 MVP / $30 drop-in

We will research and develop the tools required of today’s versatile contemporary dancer and deepen our understanding of what it means to be an artist + athlete. We will focus on impulse, sensation and technique.

We will generate and perform choreographic material. We will sweat, seek pleasure and inspire one another.

PATRICK KILBANE is from Bainbridge Island, WA. He trained at Pacific Northwest Ballet, San Francisco Ballet, School of American Ballet and others. After being exposed to contemporary dance Patrick joined NW Dance Project in Portland, OR where he danced for 6 seasons and worked with an incredible array of international dance makers. He is thrilled to be back in Seattle working as a freelance performance artist, choreographer and teacher. Patrick dances with Kate Wallich + The YC and will be joining Whim W’him as a company member this fall.

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: STEPHANIE SALAND
WEDS / 4:30-6PM
Velocity Steward Studio: SEPT 16
Velocity Kawasaki Studio: SEPT 30 / OCT 7, 14, 21, 28 / NOV 11, 25 / DEC 2

Ballet Master Class Series: Stephanie playfully offers classes that are ballet “revisited”… integrating the contemporary spirit with a historic form. The classes are a reflection of life… an ever changing and porous investigation. We create tasks and use unique images that help to understand anatomy. The lessons evolve around rich spatial and textural approaches and tools, Encouraging curiosity, and exploring risk is factored in. Sequences are patterned structurally and musically to awaken and maintain a taste for lush and precise articulation. Many of the exercises are woven with the work inventive work of Eva Nemeth, as well as other aspects from Qi Gong, Body Balancing and Gyrotonics. These influences play out quickly. Shifts and expansion are palpable. Focus and intention are honed in the room. More is more.

STEPHANIE SALAND performed as a principal dancer with the NYC Ballet for 21 years under the direction of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Based in Seattle and teaching freelance now for 21 years, she continues to explore movement in all ways and has developed a unique and multifaceted approach to dance and life at large. The myriad riches for education in New York: from teachers such as Stanley Williams, Maggie Black, and her colleague Gelsey Kirkland. She was there for the initial pangs of Gyrotonics which fed into the nuance of technique and specificity. She was and is equally inspired and informed through other non-ballet modalities and offers a class that is synthesis and creative response to the valuable aspects of these systems.

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES + SUMMER INTENSIVE AUDITION: MARK MORRIS DANCE GROUP
SAT NOV 21 / 10:30AM-NOON
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP

Mark Morris Dance Group conducts a class where dancers will explore the innovative and challenging work of choreographer Mark Morris. This class is a modern dance technique class which will conclude with learning sections of MMDG repertory. Students will also have an opportunity to audition for the 2016 Mark Morris Summer Intensives in Brooklyn, New York. To learn more please email studentprograms@stgpresnts.org.

Presented in partnership with Seattle Theatre Group.
Seattle Theare Group presents Mark Morris Dance Group at The Moore Theatre Nov 20-22. More info >>

 

 

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: ZOE SCOFIELD
NOV 13 / 12-4PM
NOV 14 / 2-4PM
Velocity Kawasaki + Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
REGISTER $65 Full Workshop / $56 MVP / $45 Friday drop-in / $25 Saturday drop-in

zoe | juniper classes utilize a somatic approach to technique. Classes are physically rigorous, deep, and kinesthetically challenging; a space where product orientated results takes rest and active experience reigns. We combine musicality, visual and physical metaphors in both improvisation and structured forms as a vehicle to surprise and further each dancers’ potential. As a teacher, it is Zoe’s desire to help students foster a body that is available, aware and in command of its’ senses, intuition and physicality.

ZOE SCOFIELD is the Co-artistic Director of zoe|juniper. She has received a Guggenhem Fellowship, Stranger’s Genius Award, National Dance Project Tour Support, The Mariam McGlone Emerging Choreographer Award from Wesleyan University, Artist Trusts GAP Grant and Artist Fellowship Award, City Arts Innovator Award, Seattle Magazine’s Spotlight Award, Alpert Award Residency and the Princess Grace Foundation Choreography and Special Project Awards. zoe|juniper’s  work has been presented/commissioned by universities, galleries, theaters and dance companies all over the country. Their newest work, BeginAgain premiered at On the Boards & is being presented at The Joyce/3 Legged Dog, PS 122 COIL Festival & Baryshnikov Arts Center, REDCAT, Danceplace and Fringe Arts, 2014-2015. www.zoejuniper.org

 

PHOTO TIM SUMMERS

WORKSHOP SERIES + AUDITION: ALICE GOSTI
OCT 23 + 24 / 2-5PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
REGISTER $45 Full Workshop / $39 MVP / $30 drop-in

Within a creative energetic workshop/audition, investigate and explore movement materials and improvisation scores around the primary themes of Alice’s new body of work, inspired by ideas of object based identity; water as a natural element, spiritual/cyclical entity, transitional space, and port; collective resistance, history and identity.  As Chuck Palahniuk says – “the things you own end up owning you.”

Alice is currently in the very beginning creation of two new immersive durational performance spectacles. Dancers will be selected to research and perform in Alice’s next project, with the possibility of multiple performances and touring. Workshop proceeds go directly into this project. Performers of all ethnic backgrounds are encouraged to audition!

ALICE GOSTI is an Italian-American architect of experiences. While her background is mostly in dance and choreography she uses all media to create a cohesive environment in which the viewer is invited to both experience and perform. She has received the Bossak/Heilbron charitable foundation – Individual Artist Award, Artist Trusts GAP Grant, Seattle Office of the Arts and Culture – Individual Artists Project Award, the Vilcek Creative Promise in Dance Award and she is a Mary Gates Venture Scholar. Alice has received the prestigious danceWEB scholarship and was selected as a director for the Intiman’s first Emerging Artist Program. Alice Gosti’s work has been presented/commissioned by universities, galleries, theaters and festivals worldwide. Her latest work How to become a partisan was presented, commissioned and produced by Velocity’s Made in Seattle new dance development program and AiR Program. www.gostia.com

 

PHOTO DAVID FLORES

WORKSHOP SERIES: SIDRA BELL
Contemporary Systems- an interior & material approach to movement by Sidra Bell
OCT 2 / 4:30-6:30PM
OCT 3 + 10 / 12-3PM
Velocity Founders Studio1621 12th Ave
$100 Full Workshop / $30 drop-in (Oct 2) + $45 drop-in (Oct 3 + 10)

In Contemporary Systems, Bell encourages provocative thought and an immersive approach to the subject matter of the body. Her work demands a high degree of physicality and input from the dancers, encouraging them to execute movement with intention, curiosity, sustainability, and empathy. “Bell’s dance-theater works are intensely physical, concentrated and mysterious- yet they reveal the inner aspects of the performers with startling clarity”– The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

SIDRA BELL DANCE NEW YORK is rapidly gaining an international profile for work that reveals aspects of the human condition through a distinctly female lens. Bell’s creations have been described as, “brainy, exuberant, and audacious.” (San Francisco Chronicle). The work demands both physical power and tender expressiveness from her crack ensemble of “fearless and technically honed dancers” (Vancouver’s Georgia Straight). The Company has performed extensively throughout the USA, Europe, Canada, and South America. It was listed as “#1 in Contemporary Dance” by the Pittsburgh Examiner (2014), as one of ArtsATL’s “Notable Dance Performances” (2012), and in the “Top 10 for Best in Dance” by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2010). Bell’s process is intuitive, collaborative, and emphasizes the integration of multiple design elements. Her work combines design, media, and fashion creating a singular vision in contemporary dance. SIDRA BELL (Artistic Director), is a Master Lecturer at the University of the Arts (Philadelphia), and was an Adjunct Professor at Ball State University (Indiana) and Barnard College (NYC). She has a degree in History from Yale University and an MFA in Choreography from Purchase College. Ms. Bell has won several awards, including a notable 1st Prize for Choreography at the International Solo-Tanz Festival in Stuttgart, Germany. Her critically acclaimed work has been seen throughout the United States and in Denmark, France, Austria, Bulgaria, Turkey, Germany, China, Canada, Aruba, Korea, Brazil, and Greece. Bell has received many commissions from institutions internationally and has produced over 100 new works. Bell was commissioned as the choreographer for the feature film “TEST” set in San Francisco during the height of the AIDS crisis. The movie was nominated for a 2015 Independent Spirit Award. “TEST” was also awarded two grand jury prizes from the Los Angeles Outfest and was a New York Times Critic’s Pick. The film has had many screenings at LGBT festivals worldwide and is enjoying an international theatrical run. She was recently named one of 50 outstanding artists living or working in Westchester County as part of ArtsWestchester’s 50th Anniversary. SBDNY has an extensive educational and mentorship program and works with institutions for dance and theater internationally with a particular emphasis on young artist development.

 

PHOTO JOHN MARC POWELL

WORKSHOP SERIES: ANNA CONNER // BABETTE DELAFAYETTE + JOHN MARC POWELL
Activated Environments
OCT 3 / 11AM-12PM + 12-2PM
Velocity at Love City Love 1919 3rd Ave
FREE

Made in Seattle artists Anna Conner and Babette DeLafayette share a glimpse into their respective creative processes. Learn more about Made in Seattle.

ANNA CONNER / 11-12PM
OSHO inspired mediation practices blindfolded
Inspired by Osho’s Dynamic Meditation, this blindfolded workshop will focus on breaking old patterns in an intense, vulnerable and fast hour in five stages.

BABETTE DELAFAYETTE + JOHN MARC POWELL / 12-2PM
Activated Environments
In this workshop series DeLafayette will work alongside individuals to build an activated environment within the body; re-creating and displacing bodily borders that make up your internal and external self. DeLafayette will guide individuals through meditative, visual, and stillness practices to build a new inner landscape from which a stronger self can be found.

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: KT NIEHOFF
Physical Practice: The Good Body
WEDS SEPT 9, 16, 23, 30 / 9:30-11:15AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP

The heart of this class is a holistic organization of the dancer as a body, human and artist. The intellectual goal is to cultivate smart, open minded, unique artists capable of engaging in artistic dialogue. The physical goal is to foster complete freedom of expression, awareness/safety and an innate understanding of one’s own body.

Passive Sequencing promotes joint range of motion, Partner Work reinforces the advantages of rebounding in relation to gravity, and concepts of directional energy relate to how tension, counter tension, momentum and torque can be used to their fullest advantage. We practice the fine balance of having an inner dialogue with the biology while simultaneously maintaining an external awareness and work to contextualize the political, personal and artistic meaning behind why we move, in order to find a deeper resonance when we move.

“When teaching on-going technique classes my goal is to create an atmosphere that allows for personal practice in a community context. It is important for professional dancers to harness our energy on a regular basis, reminding us of our collective power to go forth and make dance. Class is a simple, on-going way of cultivating this strength. I have been teaching advanced physical practice for over 20 years, and it continues to be a source of delight, inspiration and spirituality.”

KT NIEHOFF is an entrepreneurial generative artist, performer and producer working in the field of multi-disciplinary, new performance. Her creative pursuits focus on audience/artist/ proximity, resulting in the majority of her work happening in non-traditional spaces. Niehoff is a veteran teacher of contemporary technique, composition and improvisation. For over 15 years she has taught throughout the U.S. and abroad – Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Oberlin College, Cornish College of the Arts, Tisch School of the Arts, University of Washington, The Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts, The SNDO Amsterdam – to name a few. From 1996-2006 she was the Director and co-founder of Velocity Dance Center and in 2011 opened her own creative research space on Capitol Hill called 10 degrees.

Photo by Matthew Murphy

WORKSHOP SERIES: LOU HENRY HOOVER
Queer Collaborations:  A Workshop/Conversation with Lou Henry Hoover
SEPT 19 / 12-1PM
Velocity Steward Studio 1621 12th Ave
FREE

This hour long workshop is free and open to all disciplines of artists and arts enthusiasts.  We will use exercises and games out of my own collaborative processes to find performative moments that are unique to the alchemy of the workshop participants.  These pairings will be a jumping off point for a conversation about “queer art making,” community, identity, and collaboration at large. All sexual orientations and gender identities welcome!

LOU HENRY HOOVER

, purveyor of “hilarious dance magic,” has been referred to by The Seattle Stranger as “a treasure beyond measure, a genius, a jewel, a muse.” Lou is 1/2 of Kitten N’ Lou (with Kitten LaRue), 1/3 of DeLouRue Presents (with BenDeLaCreme), and recently made his television debut dancing with Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett in their PBS Great Performances Series live concert “Cheek to Cheek.” Lou has had a decade long career in both contemporary dance and cabaret performance including extensive work with Cherdonna Shinatra, and has been passionate about teaching dance for just as long.

This workshop is being presented as part of Kitten N’ Lou: OVEREXPOSED!, a project supported, in part, by an award from 4Culture.Photo by Matt Baume of collaboration between John Criscitello, BenDeLaCreme, Lou Henry Hoover, Kitten LaRue, and a community of Queers.

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: WHIM W’HIM
SAT SEPT 5 + 19 / 2-4PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP

These energetic and diverse classes explore the new contemporary dance works premiering in September 2015 at Whim W’Him’s Choreographic Shindig. Join Whim W’Him dancer Thomas Phelan for a fun warm up complete with calisthenics, yoga, ballet, and more. Then, the choreographers will take over and explore their process, base phrases, and intricate details and motivations behind their movement. Participants will learn excerpts from these new works, before they are seen on the stage. Class on 9/5 will be lead by award winning, Switzerland-based Ihsan Rustem and by Whim W’Him artistic director Olivier Wevers on 9/19. Participants in both classes receive a discount code to attend the performances.

Thomas Phelan—originally from Fort Collins, CO, where he received his BA in Performing Arts from Colorado State University. He dacned for Alaska Dance Theater in Anchorage and Whim W’Him since 2014. Since living in Seattle Thomas has had opportunities performing with Ballet Bellevue, Alana Rogers, The Robbie Turner Review, The House of Verlaine, Olympic Ballet Theatre, and International Ballet Theatre.

Ihsan Rustem – Born in London, Ihsan trained at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. He has danced with Matthew Bourne, Introdans, Berne Ballet, BallettTheater Munich, and Tanz Luzerner Theater. He created ‘State of Matter’ for the Northwest Dance Project, which won the 2012 Sadler’s Wells Global Dance Contest. He has created works all over the world but this will be his first work for Seattle and Whim W’Him.

Olivier Wevers– Dedicated to creating works of artistic innovation and collaboration, Brussels-born Olivier founded Whim W’Him in 2009. He was a principal dancer with Pacific Northwest Ballet and the Royal Winnipeg Ballet. Wevers has received numerous awards and recognition including the Princess Grace Foundation Choreography Fellowship, City of Seattle Mayor’s Arts Award, the grand prize award an unprecedented two years in a row at the annual Dance Under the Stars Choreography Festival in California, ArtistTrust/ Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship Award, participant in the National Choreographers Initiative and the prestigious New York Choreographic Institute.

www.whimwhim.org

MASTER CLASS SERIES: STEPHANIE SALAND
THURSDAYS May 21 + Jun 4, 11, 25 / 4:30-6PM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave

Ballet Master Class Series: Stephanie playfully offers classes that are ballet “revisited”… integrating the contemporary spirit with a historic form. The classes are a reflection of life… an ever changing and porous investigation. We create tasks and use unique images that help to understand anatomy. The lessons evolve around rich spatial and textural approaches and tools, Encouraging curiosity, and exploring risk is factored in. Sequences are patterned structurally and musically to awaken and maintain a taste for lush and precise articulation. Many of the exercises are woven with the work inventive work of Eva Nemeth, as well as other aspects from Qi Gong, Body Balancing and Gyrotonics. These influences play out quickly. Shifts and expansion are palpable. Focus and intention are honed. in the room. More is more.

STEPHANIE SALAND performed as a principal dancer with the NYC Ballet for 21 years under the direction of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Based in Seattle and teaching freelance now for 21 years, she continues to explore movement in all ways and has developed a unique and multifaceted approach to dance and life at large. The myriad riches for education in New York: from teachers such as Stanley Williams, Maggie Black, and her colleague Gelsey Kirkland. She was there for the initial pangs of Gyrotonics which fed into the nuance of technique and specificity. She was and is equally inspired and informed through other non-ballet modalities and offers a class that is synthesis and creative response to the valuable aspects of these systems.

MASTER CLASS SERIES: ATE9 with DANIELLE AGAMI
JUNE 18 + 20 / 12-1:15PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP

Join Danielle Agami (Artistic Director) and Ate9 company members for special Master Classes inspired by Gaga, Ohad Naharin’s movement language. Gaga is a practice of research and discovery that brings new possibilities and healing to the body through constant and mindful movement. Using imagery to guide students through improvisational tasks, Danielle encourages participants to experience a wide range of sensations from within the body. Class works to foster strength, flexibility, and sensitivity throughout the body and mind. Come get groovy, heal your body, and push your physical limits. Classes are open to dancers and all types of movers alike – new movers, voices, and faces enhance the experience in the studio and bring inspiration. Everyone is encouraged to join!

DANIELLE AGAMI: Originally born in Israel in 1984, Agami studied at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance High School and was a member of the Batsheva Dance Company from 2002-2010. Between 2007-2009, Agami served as the artistic director of Batsheva Dancers Create and functioned as the company’s rehearsal director from 2008-2010, during which she received the Yair Shapira Prize for Excellence in Dance in 2009. In 2011 Agami relocated to New York City, where she functioned as Senior Manager of Gaga U.S.A. In 2012, after relocating to Seattle, Agami founded Ate9 dANCEcOMPANY and a year later chose Los Angeles as the company’s home. During 2013 she presented TacTics forAte9, Shula in Israel, for the Batsheva Ensemble, This Time Tomorrow for NorthWest Dance Project in Portland, Oregon, Loose Gravel  for Barak Ballet in L.A, and a unique collaboration with L.A. Dance Project for Invisible Cities by The Industry Opera. Agami is a renowned Gaga teacher and for the past few years, has been traveling across the world as an ambassador of Ohad Naharin. In the past few years Agami has staged Naharin’s work with  Alvin Ailey Company, Ballet Atlanta, Ita Dansa / Barcelona, The Juilliard School, and more.

MASTER CLASS SERIES: MATT DREWS
JUNE 16 / 9:30-11:15AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP

Choreographer Matt Drews and sound artist Garek Jon Druss craft an all-levels master class to demystify the themes and structures embedded in The Weltgeist. An opportunity to access the conceptual and physical underbelly of the upcoming premiere. Live sound will be framed and utilized as a living entity; a palpable presence that will trigger and converse with a guided improvisation. The dancing body and the sound design become conduits for many textures, images, states, and rhythms. We will harness portions of choreography from the work to activate compositional perspectives between concrete physicality and abstract ideas. The choreographic and sonic trajectory of The Weltgeist will be unveiled as a structure in which set material collides with unbridled movement.

MATT DREWS is a movement artist who oscillates between the realms of dance, yoga + performance. His creative roles aqueous as choreographer, performer + teacher. He facilitates states of experience for bodies to investigate movement with a heightened lens toward healing, presence + ritual. He studied at Naropa University + holds a BFA in Dance from Cornish College of the Arts. His work has been produced at Decibel Electronic Music Festival, On the Boards + Velocity Dance Center. He has collaborated with Ate9 dANCE cOMPANY, tEEth Performance, Saint Genet, Kate Wallich + the YC, The Pendleton House + Modern Recollections. His new work, The Weltgeist was developed during Drews’ 2015 Creative Residency at Velocity Dance Center.

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: LOU HENRY HOOVER
Making Every Second Count (or, What I’ve Learned about Choreography in 5 Minute Increments)
JUNE 14 / 4:30-7PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
REGISTER $25 drop-in / $21 MVP

This workshop will explore tools for delivering our movement ideas, images, and concepts to an audience with the greatest impact in the least time possible. The goal: to create meaningful, complete pieces that can be performed in 5 minutes or less. We will discuss how this dense and action-packed style of performance-making applies to longer work. This workshop is inspired by a career made up of 60 minute and 5 minute choreographies, and what I have learned from the extreme contrast between evening-length and cabaret formats.

LOU HENRY HOOVER, purveyor of “hilarious dance magic,” has been referred to by The Seattle Stranger as “a treasure beyond measure, a genius, a jewel, a muse.” Lou is 1/2 of Kitten N’ Lou (with Kitten LaRue), 1/3 of DeLouRue Presents (with BenDeLaCreme), and recently made his television debut dancing with Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett in their PBS Great Performances Series live concert “Cheek to Cheek.” Lou has had a decade long career in both contemporary dance and cabaret performance including extensive work with Cherdonna Shinatra, and has been passionate about teaching dance for just as long.

 

WORKSHOP SERIES + AUDITION: KARIN STEVENS DANCE
The Art and Practice of Movement
MAY 29 / 12-3PM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave
REGISTER $30 drop-in / $25 MVP

Explore movement practices that open you to your deepest potential to create, unwinding unnecessary tension and creating space in the body to engage with your most aligned body/self. Move beyond practice into the art of developing movement phrases. This workshop will explore KSD movement repertory, which stems from the belief that movement connects us to our fullest self and ideas, to others, and to the beauty of our complex existence. Join us in this playful and lively environment!

KSD is looking for dancers to join them for their upcoming show in October. Must be available for rehearsals starting in June (email karinstevensdance@gmail.com for more details).

Also seeking 1­-2 women + 1-­3 men for a new evening length work taking shape in the fall that will be presented in the winter of 2016.

Karin Stevens Dance is a 501c3 that was formed in 2009. KSD works capture the breadth of the human moving experience and embody the complex layers of our cultural spaces, time and relationship to nature. www.karinstevensdance.com

 

WORKSHOP SERIES + MALE AUDITION:
BABETTE DELAFAYETTE + JOHN  MARC POWELL
MADE IN SEATTLE, FALL 2015
MAY 20 / 12-3PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
REGISTER $15 / $12 MVP

Seeking male dancers of all ages and backgrounds!

Upcoming Made In Seattle artists Babette DeLafayette and John Marc Powell are seeking a large cast of males to perform this fall in the premiere of their newest work. Diverse and large cast desired. Dancers cast should be prepared to be available June 8-25th for the first residency. Dancers cast will receive a stipend.

The three hour workshop will be catered towards building a strong sense of awareness, timing, and precision within a large group. Babette will teach repertory from the piece as well as develop new movement inside the workshop.

Choreographer/ Performance Artist BABETTE DELAFAYETTE and Visual/Music artist JOHN MARC POWELL have partnered to form a creative entity that encompasses their omni-disciplinary visions. Babette and John Marc’s work has been presented at Velocity, On The Boards, Cornish College Gallery & Playhouse, 12th Avenue Arts, LoveCityLove, Hedreen Gallery, Steel Gallery at Gage, LxWxH Gallery, Northwest Film Forum, and Benaroya Hall.

Photo by Tim Summers. Edited by John Marc Powell.

 

WORKSHOP SERIES + AUDITION: KT NIEHOFF
MAY 14 – 16 / 12-3PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

 $65 full workshop / $30 drop-in / $56 MVP

 

Join KT Niehoff for 3 days of risk taking, dancing, and fearless encounters.This Fall KT is remounting her 2010 masterpiece, A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light. In 2006, KT began investigating the relationship between audience, artist and proximity. This search led her to seek out environments that ask the performer and the witness to confront each other in more potent ways. A Glimmer of Hope or Skin or Light, in all its forms, is an outcropping of this search beginning with the premise that every interaction holds untapped potential, that can sculpt uncommon encounters, moody collisions, raucous spectacle and virtuoso dancing – asking for more resonant connection and embracing the success or failure that ensues. Niehoff is expanding her posse of vibrant performers and seeks 6-10 showgirls to perform in the remount of this work to be presented at ACT Theater.

 

KT NIEHOFF is a Seattle based artist who makes events, dances, music, films, classes, spaces and fosters creative communities. She was featured in Dance Magazine’s “International Women in Dance” (’08) and on the covers of Dance Teacher Magazine  (’12) and City Arts Seattle (’13). KT’s creative pursuits focus on audience/artist/ proximity, resulting in the majority of her work happening in non-traditional spaces. Her work has been presented throughout the U.S. and internationally in Japan, Ecuador, Germany and Canada and has received funding from The MAPFund, The NEA, The National Dance Project, The National Performance Network, and Seattle, King County and Washington State Arts Commissions. Niehoff is a veteran teacher of contemporary technique, composition and improvisation. For over 15 years she has taught throughout the U.S. and abroad – Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Oberlin College, Cornish College of the Arts, Tisch School of the Arts, University of Washington, The Hong Kong Academy of the Performing Arts, The SNDO Amsterdam – to name a few. From 1996-2006 she was the Director and co-founder of Velocity Dance Center and in 2011 opened her own creative research space on Capitol Hill called 10 degrees.

Photo by Kevin Kauer

MASTER CLASS SERIES: WHIM W’HIM DANCE CO
SATURDAY / MAY 2, 9, 16 / 2-4PM
Velocity Founders + Kawasaki Studios 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVPLearn excerpts from Whim W’Him’s upcoming production X-POSED. Join Whim W’Him dancer Thomas Phelan and the three choreographers as they lead dancers in a fun, energetic warm up complete with calisthenics, yoga, ballet, and more, which will then lead into exploring repertoire of Whim W’Him. Each class will focus on a different choreographer – Velocity regular Kate Wallich, Manuel Vignoulle from Switzerland, and Olivier Wevers, Artistic Director of Whim W’Him. We will discuss each choreographer’s process, base phrases, intricate details and motivation behind the movement. By the end of the series, students will learn excerpts from each of the new creations.THOMAS PHELAN After years of tutelage under Carol Roderick, Chung-Fu Chang, and Judy Bejarano, Thomas graduated with a BA in Performing Arts from Colorado State University. He also has training in gymnastics, cheerleading, acro and diving. Thomas worked as an apprentice and eventually company member for Alaska Dance Theatre, before joining Whim W’Him.See X-POSED at Cornish Playhouse, May 29-31.
www.whimwhim.org

This Master Class Series is presented in partnership with Whim W’Him.
WORKSHOP SERIES: MARK MITCHELL
JAN-APRIL / 11AM-4PM
Velocity Steward Studio 1621 12th Ave
NEW LOWER PRICE! $95 per one-day workshop or two classes for $150

Mark Mitchell is an artist and teacher with many years of experience teaching sewing workshops. He is best known for his work Burial, which was performed and exhibited at the Frye Art Museum in 2013. In 2014 Mark was added to The New Foundation Seattle’s Artist Program, which provides ongoing support for exhibitions and acquisitions for museums and other non-profit institutions. He was named Best Women’s Wear designer by the Seattle Weekly in 2013, and has had two Best of Seattle honors from Seattle Magazine. Mark has decades of experience in fine dressmaking and costume design, in addition to my fine-art work. You can learn more about him and his work by watching this award-winning documentary –
http://vimeo.com/61071067.

All workshops are $95 for the day, with most materials provided. Mark will serve bundt cake at lunch. In his words: “I make it myself that day, and it’s always really good.” For detailed class descriptions go to itsmarkmitchell.blogspot.com.

MASTER CLASS SERIES: THE VELOCITY SESSIONS / DELFOS DANZA CONTEMPORANEA
WEDS APR 8 / 9:30-11:15AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$15 / $12 MVP

In this class, dancers will experience some of the training research that Lavista has developed as part of her artistic and pedagogical vision. You will explore exciting body dynamics and the flow/control of energy via the use of different principles such as: accumulation and expansion, the use of different trajectories, multi-dimensional and multi-directional use of the space, the floor work as tool/collaborator, breath as impulse for movement, body language articulation, circularity, sense of community, and the use of imagination as both a neuromuscular and emotional force. The main focus will be on the development of a natural and integrated body configuration and a free-flowing style of movement. Lavista’s dance approach fosters a deeper understanding of the individual body, thereby facilitating the use of instinct, sensory perception, connection and emotions in dance.

This Master Class is for dancers of all skill abilities. Open to the public.

DELFOS DANZA CONTEMPORANEA is Mexico’s premiere contemporary dance company and ranks among the best companies in Latin America both artistically and as leaders in the field.  Delfos is a world class company based in Mazatlán, Mexico which inspires audiences, students and communities with outstanding performances and in-depth residencies. Their performances evoke emotion and introspection embodied by their physical grace, athleticism and vibrance. Celebrating twenty plus years, Delfos Danza Contemporanea tours throughout the world, creating enduring relationships wherever they go, seeking opportunities for collaboration and exchange and passionately committed to dance education.

“…An unforced tour de force.” Jennifer Dunning, The New York Times

Join us afterwards for a special Speakeasy Series with the company! Get tickets to see the company perform at UW Meany Hall, April 9-11. This Master Class and Speakeasy Series is presented through The Velocity Sessions, a partnership with UW World Series. Photo by Lois Greenfield

 

WORKSHOP SERIES + AUDITION: ILVS STRAUSS
MAR 20 / 12-3PM // Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave
$20 / $17 MVP

This workshop will streamline the two main concepts from the March IMP Series: Crude Gestures (cultivated movement birthed of thought and word impulses) and Annihilation Storytelling (radiating the core element of your story and focuses on the melding of the ideas into a performative act). Explore the dialogue between words and physical movement to create new intersections of depth and meaning. Writing and movement exercise abound. The workshop is open to all ages and all levels of experience. Please bring a journal and writing implement.

This will double as an audition for the full length of the Not Solo Anymore piece Manifesto, to be performed at Velocity Dance Center, May 22 – 24th (note: Memorial Day Weekend). Looking for: 2-10 performers. Dancers + non-dancers are encouraged to apply. Rehearsals will be in April, continuing through May. Times TBD, approximately 20 hours of rehearsal (depending on your role). Choreography will be partially group generated through a series of exploratory exercises.

Things ilvs wants you to know:
You will be paid, but it won’t cover your rent.
You will most likely wear a giant costume and crawl around on the ground.
You might be asked to perform partially nude.
You will have had either dance experience or a deep familiarity with your body and willingness to move it.

ilvs strauss is an analytical chemist turned multi-disciplinary performance artist and theater tech living and making work in Seattle. Her art ranges from haiku poetry, to anamorphic outdoor sculptures, illustrated storytelling (aka Slide Shows), to narrated dance performance. As Technical Director / Lighting Designer she has worked for Pat Graney, KT Neihoff, Salt Horse, and Cherdonna, and is currently the TD at Velocity Dance Center. These days, she is working on an evening length of her solo piece, Manifesto, which was listed in Dance Magazine’s BEST of 2014 list. More information, pertinent and otherwise, can be found at ilvsstrauss.com.

Photo by Erica Keeling

 

WORKSHOP SERIES + AUDITION: ZOE SCOFIELD of zoe|juniper
Technique Becomes Repertory / Letsgetinthestudioandtrysomestuff
MAR 6 / 12-4PM // Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave
MAR 7 / 2-6PM // Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

This workshop begins with a technique class and movement experience, then moves into creative process. Starting with a somatic approach to technique, dancers will experience a physically rigorous, deep, and kinesthetically challenging class – a space where product orientated results take rest and active experience reigns. Musicality, and visual and physical metaphors, are combined through improvisation and structured forms as a vehicle to surprise and further each dancer’s potential.

In this workshop Scofield and dancers will also work together by embodying z|j’s creative process. By analyzing the choreographic, visual and music/sound notes used by Zoe and Juniper; dancers will discover the emotional and physical experiences of their work and gain a profound level of personal ownership in the creative process.

This workshop will also serve as an audition for zoe | juniper’s next work.

zoe | juniper is a three time Princess Grace Award Recipient and a 2013 Stranger Genius Award Winner. The dance and visual art team has been described as “a crazy dream you just can’t shake” (Karen Campbell, The Boston Globe). Their newest work, BeginAgain premiered at On the Boards & is being presented at The Joyce/3 Legged Dog, PS 122 COIL Festival & Baryshnikov Arts Center, REDCAT, Danceplace and Fringe Arts, 2014-2015.

Photo by Kelly O

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: KYLE ABRAHAM / ABRAHAM.IN.MOTION
THURS MAR 5 / 2-3:30PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

KYLE ABRAHAM, 2013 MacArthur Fellow, began his dance training at the Civic Light Opera Academy and the Creative and Performing Arts High School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.  He continued his dance studies in New York, receiving a BFA from SUNY Purchase and an MFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts.

In 2012, Abraham was named the newly appointed New York Live Arts Resident Commissioned Artist for 2012–2014. Just one month later, Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater premiered Abraham’s newest work, Another Night, at New York’s City Center to rave reviews. Abraham received a prestigious Bessie Award for Outstanding Performance in Dance for his work in The Radio Show, and a Princess Grace Award for Choreography in 2010.

His choreography has been presented throughout the United States and abroad, most recently at On The Boards, South Miami-Dade Cultural Arts Center, REDCAT, Philly Live Arts, Portland’s Time Based Arts Festival, Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival, Danspace Project, Dance Theater Workshop, Bates Dance Festival, Harlem Stage, Fall for Dance Festival at New York’s City Center, Montreal, Germany, Jordan, Ecuador, Dublin’s Project Arts Center, The Okinawa Prefectural Museum & Art Museum located in Okinawa Japan, The Andy Warhol Museum and The Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in his hometown of Pittsburgh, PA.

This Master Class is presented in partnership with Seattle Theatre Group.  Photo by Carrie Schneider

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES + AUDITION: THE DANCE CARTEL
WEDS MAR 4 / 12-1:30PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

Equal parts rigor and silliness, Ani’s class is a high-energy, physically-demanding 90 minutes including an upbeat warm-up, hot conditioning, brief improvisation, and substantial choreography sequences, often from The Dance Cartel’s repertory. Designed to challenge both trained dancers and enthusiastic novices, the class fuses technical elements from jazz/contemporary with hype energy and a low center of gravity. Technical precision and energetic intent are given equal priority, encouraging students to heighten their expressivity and dynamics as well as stretch their physical ability.

The music will be loud, and will sometimes have dirty words. We will make jokes. You will probably sweat. Expect to get your heart rate up, and bring a clean shirt if you need to look cute after class. Sense of play and humor are encouraged, but only if you want to have a good time.

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: HEIDI HENDERSON
THURS JAN 8 / 9:30AM-11:30AM
FRI JAN 9 / 9:30-11:30AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

Focus on specificity–exactly what and how we are moving- while exploring increasingly complex movement phrases. Large loopy dancing – losing our centers and finding joy.

 

 

 

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: WHIM W’HIM
SAT JAN 3 / 10AM-12PM
SAT JAN 10 / 2-4PM
SAT JAN 17 / 2-4PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

A fun, energetic class to explore the company’s signature tracing, sliding, ballooning, and “sickle pickle” techniques.

 

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: MARK HAIM + JESSE ZARITT
FRI JAN 2 / 12-5PM
SAT JAN 3 / 12-5PMSUN JAN 4 / 11:30-3PM
SUN JAN 10 / 2-8PM (Showing)
Velocity Founders + Kawasaki Studios 1621 12th Ave

A full-bodied and comprehensive modern technique class for intermediate to advanced dancers. Floor, center and lengthy phrase material. Laban / Irene Dowd / Alexander / somatics incoporated into warmup material, usually through some form of improvisation. Three-dimensionality. Stretch. Volume. Strength. Multi-tasking. Imagination. Joy!

Workshop participants perform in a showcase on Jan 10 6PM in Founders Theater.

 

 2014 WoRKSHOPS + master classes

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: ZOE SCOFIELD
THURS + FRI / DEC 4 + 5 / 12-4PM
Velocity Founders + Kawasaki Studios 1621 12th Ave

This workshop begins with a technique class and movement experience, then moves into creative process. Starting with a somatic approach to technique, dancers will experience a physically rigorous, deep, and kinesthetically challenging class – a space where product orientated results take rest and active experience reins. Musicality, and visual and physical metaphors, are combined through improvisation and structured forms as a vehicle to surprise and further each dancer’s potential.

In this workshop Scofield and dancers will also work together by embodying z|j’s creative process. By analyzing the choreographic, visual and music/sound notes used by Zoe and Juniper; dancers will discover the emotional and physical experiences of their work and gain a profound level of personal ownership in the creative process.

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: David Roussève / REALITY Company
WEDNESDAY, Nov 19 / 10-11:30AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

Taught by “Stardust” cast members, the class will combine technique and repertory.  The warm up will focus on principles of modern/postmodern dance, preparing students to move with principles of the “Stardust” vocabulary: fluidity, lushness, and boldness.  The class will culminate in the teaching of phrase material that includes elements of choreographic material included in the performance.

Join Bessie Award winning choreographer David Roussève and Velocity Artistic Director Tonya Lockyer immediately after for a free special Speakeasy Series conversation.

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: TERE O’CONNOR Making Dances
SUN NOV 16 / 12-4 PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

“. . . an essential figure, adored for his exquisitely constructed works, his mentoring and his fiercely articulated beliefs about all things related to dance.”
Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times

Rejecting a “good/bad” paradigm, O’Connor’s desire in teaching choreographic method is for artists to create problem-solving systems based on the structure of their own thought process and to rigorously pursue the “science” of their poetics. Through the daily creation of little dance works, the artist focuses 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.

READWorkshop insight from Seattle Dances

 

MASTER CLASS SERIES: STEPHANIE SALAND
THURSDAYS, Sept 18, 25 Oct 2, 9, 16 Nov 13, 20 / 4:30-6PM
Velocity Kawasaki Studio 1621 12th Ave

Ballet Master Class Series: Stephanie playfully offers classes that are ballet “revisited”… integrating the contemporary spirit with a historic form. The classes are a reflection of life… an ever changing and porous investigation. We create tasks and use unique images that help to understand anatomy. The lessons evolve around rich spatial and textural approaches and tools, Encouraging curiosity, and exploring risk is factored in. Sequences are patterned structurally and musically to awaken and maintain a taste for lush and precise articulation. Many of the exercises are woven with the work inventive work of Eva Nemeth, as well as other aspects from Qi Gong, Body Balancing and Gyrotonics. These influences play out quickly. Shifts and expansion are palpable. Focus and intention are honed. in the room. More is more.

Stephanie Saland performed as a principal dancer with the NYC Ballet for 21 years under the direction of George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. Based in Seattle and teaching freelance now for 21 years, she continues to explore movement in all ways and has developed a unique and multifaceted approach to dance and life at large. The myriad riches for education in New York: from teachers such as Stanley Williams, Maggie Black, and her colleague Gelsey Kirkland. She was there for the initial pangs of Gyrotonics which fed into the nuance of technique and specificity. She was and is equally inspired and informed through other non-ballet modalities and offers a class that is synthesis and creative response to the valuable aspects of these systems.

 

MASTER CLASS: TAHNI HOLT
TUES SEPT 2 / 9:30-11:15AM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

Work on the cellular, tingly, membrane, rivers, depth, pathway, ease, vibration, charged, warmth, softening, cleansing, full, rhythm, scale, inside, buoyant, container, continuum, oscillation, distinguishable, exchange, opening, absorb, syncopation, vitality dance through a rigorous warming up to sensorial systems and to our emotional, individual and group body. Material in class is constructed and shaped by the two year rehearsal process of Duet Love. Expect to gain insight into you – through relationship to others in the room. More is more.

Photo by Eugenie Frerichs

 

WORKSHOP SERIES: MOVEMENT ALCHEMY
SARA SHELTON MANN
MAY 16 + 17 / 2-5PM
Velocity Founders Studio 1621 12th Ave

This workshop starts with Chi Cultivation — A series of movement/breath exercises that articulate the spine, work the muscles, touch all the meridians and will raise your physical energy and your consciousness building strength and vitality. Then moves into improvisational research, to partnering, integration and sharing.

The Body Process — From the ground up, bringing you deeply inside, we will explore segments of the physical structure and converse with the energetic structure. There will be a lot of breathing, hands on, time for questions and sharing.  We will also do grounding work, protection and releasing modalities.

The Energetic Body — In relationship. Playing in the field of space, time, weight and relationship.  The whole is more than the parts. Establishing personal and impersonal game plans we enter the terrain of choice, focus, ease and clarity. Owning your choices.

 

2013 WORKSHOPS + master classes

WORKSHOP + PERFORMANCE:
 Daniel Linehan’s The Karaoke Dialogues: Seattle Trial
FRI SEPT 6 – SAT SEPT 14
Workshop: SEPT 6, 8-12 / 1-6PM
Performances: SEPT 12-14 / 8PM
Velocity Founders Theater 1621 12th Avenue

Open to movers and performers of all disciplines interested in engaging in a week-long creative process with an international leader in experimental dance. Participants will explore our connection to our identity, both singular and collective and ask: What do we win, and what do we lose by participating in forms of common action? The workshop culminates in all participants performing in The Karaoke Dialogues: Seattle Trial, September 12-14 as part of Velocity’s presentation of Daniel Linehan. More info >>

MASTER CLASS:
Daniel Linehan (WA/Belgium)

SHAKY IS A GOOD THING.
MON SEPT 9 / 10AM – 12PM
UW Dance Program Studios, Meany Hall 4140 George Washington Lane NE

In this class, Daniel Linehan will lead the participants in several improvisational techniques that have been part of his ongoing dance practice, and phrase material that comes from his latest choreographies. The emphasis is on engaging in a full physicality while challenging oneself to move into zones of uncertainty and imperfection. Be ready to experiment with unfamiliar movement patterns, counter-intuitive coordinations, and ways of juggling multiple thoughts and actions at the same time. The goal is to make possible unexplored physical connections and new ways of thinking about dancing.

Preferred level of participants: Intermediate to Advanced.

This Master Class is co-presented with The University of Washington Dance Department as part of Velocity’s Daniel Linehan Residency September 5-14 with performances September 12-14 at Velocity’s Founders Theater.

 

ANDREW HARWOOD WORKSHOP (MONTREAL)
The Heart, Mind and Body of Contact Improvisation
APR 29 – MAY 3 / 12-3PM (12-4PM on May 3)
Velocity 1621 12th Ave on Capitol Hill

This workshop will encourage participants to focus on reaching a balance between the mental, physical and emotional states drawn upon to create an engaging contact duet, trio or larger ensemble dances. In this approach, the mind and body are encouraged to abandon a certain quality of willfulness in order to open to new sensations and to experience the natural flow of movement. Our warm-up and preparation will lead us to the practice of various skills such as rolling smoothly, falling safely, being upside down, supporting and giving weight effortlessly. On an emotional level, making contact with another being implies forging a nurturing connection within a safe environment, which allows us to take risks, exchange, communicate and witness. It is a fertile crossroad where skill, sensation, instinct and poetic imagination converge. Open to all levels of experience.

ANDREW HARWOOD has danced for renowned companies Marie Chouinard and Jean-Pierre Perreault, performed with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith, and Nita Little and has collaborated with Benoît Lachambre, Chris Aiken, Kirstie Simson, Ray Chung and Benno Voorham. His work has been presented in numerous international festivals and is influenced by gymnastics, the Alexander Technique, Aikido, release technique, contemporary dance and yoga.

 

KRAVAS COMPANY WORKSHOP (NYC/SEATTLE/FRANCE)
A Special Master Class Series with Heather Kravas Company Members
JAN 24 + 25 + 26

 

PROCESS with Oren Barnoy
THURS JAN 24 / 6-8PM
What makes us satisfied in dance and how do we attain it? Using this as a premise, we will begin by rigorously drawing a series of self-portraits and then dancing them. We will write descriptions of others’ portraits and then dance these narratives. We will then use our dances as frameworks for new drawings and new dances. We will ask one another, how do we become choreography? Dedicating time to move as a group, we will incorporate decision- making to construct a “performance” and inquire about what it means to offer this dance to an audience.

 

TECHNIQUE with Liz Santoro
FRI JAN 25 / 9:30-11:30AM
This class is about attention. Giving it, receiving it, taking it, having it, holding it. There will be an anatomy focused warm-up utilizing both set and improvisational exercises. Information coming from classical dance forms, Pilates, performance studies, fascial release, neurophysiology and cognitive science will provide a foundation for our investigation of attention. We will attempt not only to expand our awareness of our particular bodies in a particular time and space but we will use awareness to gain access to new movement tools.

 

MOVING TOGETHER with Cecilia Lisa Eliceche
SAT JAN 26 / 2-5PM
For our 3 hours together, we will be dancing and moving in duets, trios and groups. We will start with exercises involving massage to warm up our sense of touch. We will utilize exercises of manipulation and “read” each other’s movements. We will create tasks that involve interdependency and make us move in ways we wouldn’t be able to move on our own. Finally, we will finish with a mass unison phrase, created spontaneously.