The labs will be co-facilitatd by several artists who have agreed to group their ideas within a collaborative frame-work and will be woven together from the following proposals:

1. Improvisation
Tara Rynders in collaboration with Nicole Dagesse, Laura Ríos.

Tara Rynders in collaboration with Nicole Dagesse
Title/theme: wading in time
Description: How do our bodies hold our memories and translate them into movement?  Can we call upon certain memories in our body to influence dance through improvisation? Through multiple exercises involving use of props and other artistic mediums such as drawing and journaling can we invoke our personal recollection of memories, time, locations, and others? With this body knowledge are we able to collectively create together as a community as well as individuals?  With this knowledge how do we allow the past to become present and influence our future?

Laura Ríos
Title/theme: The Body Ahead/transdisciplinary laboratory.
Description: It is a playful exploration space open to the emergence of formats and concepts beyond conventional forms and disciplines.
This will be a laboratory in which we return, we will reflect, explore, and play with different concepts. For starters I suggest the following: "less is more " mary o'donnell, "random" "silence" by John Cage, "taz" temporary autonomous zones by Hakim Bey, the Gilles Lipovetsky contemporary individualism, the stage area according to performance artists such as Alejandro Jodorowsky.
These concepts are a suggestion, you can subtract and add other parallels that participants propose in relation to new routes that performance art is taking with themes such as: transculture, hybrid, open forms of the collective rethinking.
Directed to: Every artist (visual, plastic, performance, writers, philosophers) that has interest in interacting with artists in other discipline.

2. Hands-Feet-Energy
Julie Rothschild, Mayra Morales.

Mayra Morales
Title/Theme: In between the fingers.
Description: I am interested in opening a practice based discussion regarding the use of the hands in relation to space or to another body. I would like to share the practice of:
a) opening the hands, making a minuscle space between the fingers.
b) remaining in a static-like position for a long enough time.
c) allowing the flow of energy/sensation to create or transform e-motion.
What interests me in working in a lab is the possibility of throwing out these ideas so they become something else in exchange with other similar or different but related ones.

Julie Rothschild
Title/Theme: Hands On.
Description: Dance teachers, yoga and pilates instructors, somatic educators, movement and body therapists, choreographers and directors – we all use our hands to learn from and communicate with our students, clients, and performers. I propose something of a "show and tell."  How do we use our hands?  I invite participants to bring their own questions, theories and techniques.

3. Dramaturgy-Narrative-Time
Cristina Goletti, Lisa Shattuck, Laura Silva Cervantes

Cristina Goletti
Title/Theme: Dance Dramaturgy and Dramaturgical Thinking
Description: The lab will examine the role dramaturgy and dramaturgical thinking play in the creative process behind the act of choreography. It will comprise of both theoretical and practical elements.  We will also investigate how dramaturgy is different from performance analysis and the many different roles a dramaturg can play within the expanded field of dance. We will watch videos, read articles, discuss our ides but we will also work in small team to shape the dramaturgy of short dance piece created by the each team.

Lisa Shattuck
Title/Theme: Sociometric Landscapes
Description: We invite laboratory participants to bring in questions they would like to explore through sociometrics (placing your body in a specific location based on your response to a presented question). Our example questions will explore perceptions of gender and ethnic stereotypes.

Laura Silva Cervantes
Title/Theme: DANCE-GATHERING
Description: Explore using texts such as poetry or stories as detonators for the creation of a short dance in which we investigate a body poetry that is both ephemeral and lasting. This way we will be recreating and filling up the space with verbal and body anecdotes, culminating in a stage show.

4. Objects and Space
Mirta Blostein, Nick Bryson

Mirta Blostein
Title/Theme: The Body, space, energy and objects.
Description: Objects distributed strategically in space. Perception of the staging space. I will be throwing questions to put the group in a situation and give them, at the same time, the role to manifest and determine ways to develop improvisation. I will propose that there are permanent observers in and out of the scene, same that might propose and give encouragement if they feel like it.  I’ll play the music in a random manner, this will become an element of encouragement as well. However, silence will also be playing an important role. When I feel the time is right I will add the presence of a general bone structure and skin with the presence of emotion. This might lead to the emergence of situations that may lead to scenes or choreographic games, as I call them.

I'll present the possibility of using objects to dress the body. I'll take the risk that, perhaps, there might not be enough for everyone, but this is a situation that the group must resolve.
What will happen is what the group will produce in their actions and I hope to have time for reflection.

Nick Bryson
Title/Theme: Is juggling more accessible than dance?
Description: The delineation between juggling movement and dance movement is that the first is functional in a physical sense and the second is not. As a long-time juggler and dancer my interest is to challenge an audience since the juggling movement is more accessible as it does not have to be “understood” immediately. There is also a 'legacy of rhythm and gravity' that juggling has to give to dance, along with its INHERENT rhythm and apparent gravity. There is a vast number of jugglers who dance but not so many dancers who juggle. Why is this?

5. Multidisciplinary
Luis Villanueva y Leilani Maciel Cabañas

Luis Villanueva
Title/Theme: To be or not to be reusable.
Description: The body, just like any other product, is currently marketed and valued according to its weight, color, shape, etc. Regardless of what this entails. Rethink what I am, what I want to be and accept what I had to be, reveals to us that we are made of many more ideas than we can sustain. Laboratory-workshop of intervention in our own body.

Leilani Maciel Cabañas
Title/Theme: atlakatl (water man).
Description: “Water, an element so valued in our present, exhaustively taken care of with awareness campaigns about its use, but seen as something external, as an element about to become a sign of wealth and power. But water is more than that, it is not something external that we must protect for the benefit of future human consumption. We are water, it is the base of what we are made of, this is why 65% of our total body weight is water and 90% of our brain is water as well. So we have its qualities in our whole being, in our mind, our soul and our physical body. We flow, we stagnate, we experience courage and endlessly change our ways and states of existing.”
Creative workshop for artistic creation (musicians, dancers, actors, plastic artists, etc.) where we will investigate, listen, create awareness, improvise and experiment regarding the human relation with this vital fluid, water.

6. Somatic Practices
Laura Rios, Brooke Gessay, Carolina Ramirez Reyes, Lance Gries

Laura Ríos
Title/theme: The Body Ahead/transdisciplinary laboratory.
Description: It is a playful exploration space open to the emergence of formats and concepts beyond conventional forms and disciplines.
This will be a laboratory in which we return, we will reflect, explore, and play with different concepts. For starters I suggest the following: "less is more " mary o'donnell, "random" "silence" by John Cage, "taz" temporary autonomous zones by Hakim Bey, the Gilles Lipovetsky contemporary individualism, the stage area according to performance artists such as Alejandro Jodorowsky.
These concepts are a suggestion, you can subtract and add other parallels that participants propose in relation to new routes that performance art is taking with themes such as: transculture, hybrid, open forms of the collective rethinking.
Directed to: Every artist (visual, plastic, performance, writers, philosophers) that has interest in interacting with artists in other discipline.

Brooke Gessay
Title/Theme: "How Can We Know the Dancer from the Dance?"
Description: The provocative question in the title of this laboratory (from the poet W.B. Yeats) points to the multi-dimensional experience of any mover in terms of willing and allowing.  In some moments it seems that we are causing movement, and communicating through it.  In others, it seems that we are being moved – movement is happening through us, but not because of us.  Sometimes the two experiences mingle and overlap; we move and are moved in a dynamic interplay between action and surrender.  How do these states occur?  Can we consciously cause them?  What are their effects on other movers or viewers?  What are their effects on us as movers? This laboratory will explore, through collaboration and various dance, somatic, and contemplative practices, the nature and value of moving versus being moved.

Carolina Ramirez Reyes
Title/Theme: Proprioception: creative element in the construction and execution of dance training.
Description: This lab will focus on the development of the sense of proprioception, considering this as the key element for the moving artist’s training.
For the development of this lab we will be using release technique as a base, however, the participants will be the ones constructing the class. The physical, sensitive and emotional needs of the participants will be taken into account during the development of the class.

Lance Gries
Title/Theme: "Our Place in the World of ...."
Description: I recently presented a "lecture" which had the following tag:
"I would like to share a discussion about how our work as researchers in the field of somatic studies, body awareness and our search for body/mind/spirit fulfillment is an ever more important step in connecting  us as dancers, performers and creators to larger discussions in the fields of Theoretical Physics, Metaphysics, Eastern Philosophies, Cognitive Studies, Neurobiology, Spirituality and Consicousness.  These disciplines are beginning to intersect and connect and a conversation is already taking place. We need to be part of this coming together of information!"
I would like to propose a laboratory where we could share how we think of our personal practices as connecting to the "larger picture" and hopefully share specific experiences, exercises, improvisations that we do or teach which are manifestations of that.

7. Politics of Being
Abigail Levine, Andréa Bergallo Snizek

Abigail Levine
Title/Theme: Border Regions
Description: In dance, performance art and visual art are in a moment of intense engagement. What is happening at the porous seams between disciplines? What are the politics and political possibilities of this engagement? How is technology intervening in this conversation? We will look at these collisions imaginatively, mining them
For their suggestions and possibilities. Particular attention to notions of duration, objecthood and body, "doing," and audience.

Andréa Bergallo Snizek
Title/Theme: Body, politics and poetics.
Description: To work as a team in the practice of sensitive memory. This work may be realized in 4 or 5 groups with five members each, four of them will be manipulating one specific member with work specific material. It will all depend on the articulations and negotiations that exist among the team members and their will to fulfill their goals. The movement and trajectory of the person being manipulated will be based on the group collaboration. This practice will encourage the chaotic structure of an action politic and the sensitive memory for the esthetic structure of movement. The ideal is that everybody gets the chance of being manipulated (one at a time) and based on it they are able to investigate, perceive and construct their ideas and speeches based on their differences and their similarities.

8. Site Specific
Zap Mcconnell, Left Feet Collective

Zap Mcconnell
Title/Theme: Site-specific Improvisation
Description: I am interested in observing a site through movement. Integrating vision, sound, touch and other senses into our movement, we will improvise to acquaint ourselves with the specific site. Depending on the group, we may begin with a directed improvisational exercise. Once we have established individual ways of moving in the space, we will begin working as a collective. Either by discussing, dancing, or both, we will define our practice by generating and honing a list of interests. Like pillars holding up a building, our list of interests will support our collective practice.

Left Feet Collective
Title/Theme: The Breathing House
Description: To build a house of human bodies that can be abstracted and dissolve.  We have broken the process into three distinct parts.
Part 1: Warm up activity - Hiving
The exercise starts by filling a large open space evenly with participants, moving through space organically while maintaining the same relative distance between each member of the group.  Gradually, this space between bodies is condensed:  several arms lengths, a single arms length, fingertips, several inches, several millimeters.   The goals of this exercise are learning to make rapid individual movement choices on a more instinctual level, becoming aware of how the distance between bodies in a space influences the structure of a dance, and remaining present in an ever-evolving hive.
Part 2: Building a House with Bodies
Create a physical structure of a home using participant’s bodies. People can choose what element they want to be in this home we are creating, but it must be integral to the overall structure and energy of the whole.  At this point, only structural elements exist: doors that are mobile, columns which take weight, archways that create portals, the gravity of a welcome mat.  These elements can be taken less literally as long as it keeps with the internal logic of the structure.
At some point the structure must “breathe”, become malleable.  As in a dream when the imagination is allowed to expand upon memory and an initial structure, corridors will emerge; new rooms will take shape tangential to the old.  Dancers may begin to abstract the concept of home.  The Breathing House is embodied.  Walls can be built or knocked down.  Interiors can be created, and the structure can vaporize and rematerialize.  The new structure will overlap with the old structure, like layers of paint collecting on an apartment wall.
Part 3: Finding threads
Individual dancers can begin exploratory routes through the home.  At this point the house is in a constant state of flux.  Physical reality meets surreality

9. Environmental
Zap Mcconnell, Nicole Dagesse, Kate Jewett

Zap Mcconnell 
Title/Theme: in the moment in ourselves in space
Description: Continuing with a much loved theme, we will explore the surrounding campus and gardens together, creating scores of investigation that utilize the mover, the immediate, the space and the musicians. This lab will be able to break apart into smaller working pods and also investigate large scale group movement. Open to all levels and for any folks on campus to witness, we will delve into site specific work and all the skills that brings. Awakening all levels of our awareness, connecting as a group, allowing each space to be a full partner, listening and communicating with the musicians, discovering how to work with all aspects of art, and finding out what that means to us as we do.

Nicole Dagesse in collaboration with Tara Rynders 
Title/Theme: Discovering the Site through Sensation
Description: As a species, humans navigate the world primarily through sight.  In this workshop we will use movement explorations that utilize all the senses to discover the movement potential present in a particular space. Beginning with blind improvisations, we will build movement phrases that unearth secrets of the site.
Limitations on Participants: All are welcome, but participants should come prepared to move, and possibly to get dirty.

Kate Jewett
Title/Theme: Natural Inspiration
Description: This laboratory would explore the way in which nature informs art, using my dance piece 'Mycelial Sketches' as a model. This work visits the underground world of the Earth’s mushroom networks, celebrating the beauty of decomposition and paying homage to their life sustaining work. My inspiration came from underground mushroom networks, mushrooms and from a book called, Mycelium Running: How Mushroom’s can help save the world, by Paul Stamets. The way in which I developed this piece of work was used as an educational tool to train 20 dancers and perform this work for an audience of over 500 people.  I would like to follow this model in a similar way but with a more concentrated group in which the students themselves learn to develop their own improvisation techniques and learn to open their eyes to the natural world. I am interested in understanding how we are all connected on this earth and how as humans we are evolving into the future and that we are emulating the systems that nature has already put in place.  For example, the Internet is very similar to how the mycelium underground networks work, passing on information through a series of networks and finding space to grow these systems.  Are we just copying what is already there in order to make us more efficient humans and if so how as artists can we focus in on these patterns in nature?

10. Sex, Sensuality, and Touch
Katie Swords, Brennan Harvey & Xander Jeanneret

Katie Swords
Title/Theme: Touch
Description: Touch is the moment a part of the body comes in contact with something or someone.  Touch can be a connection or an action.  I can touch you, you can touch me, and we can mutually touch each other.
In this laboratory I am interested in exploring physical connections among participants and what we can learn through touch about our individual body and the bodies surrounding us. Can we learn something different about our bodies when we take away our ability of sight? What is there to discover if I do not use my hands to touch my body? What would happen if my right shoulder rubbed my right cheek?  Or my elbow to my lower back? How do we connect through touch, through dance? Is the connection physical?  Invisible? Palpable? Explainable? Can you touch someone without physically connecting? These are some questions that I am interested in researching in a studio for this laboratory.

Brennan Harvey & Xander Jeanneret
Title/Theme: Sensuality Versus Sexuality
Description: All cultures associate certain parts of one's body with sex. How do we overcome this obstacle in dance because dance involves the body as a whole? Is it true that in order to dance completely, we must disassociate sexual connotations with our bodies and interpret touch with a deeper awareness of the senses; sensuality? How do we (or should we) set boundaries?

11. Ballroom Dancing Deconstruction
Lou Sturm

Lou Sturm
Title/Theme: Ballroom Dancing Fragments
Description: What elements put a simple duet in the ballroom dancing context? How can we play with sliding in and out of that context? How can we play with and go beyond the cliché? This laboratory invites participants to reaffine their perception in recognizing stereotypes and play more consciously with them.