Ana Patricia Farfán

Dance before, during, and after speech

Starting from the premise that dance is very difficult, if not impossible, separating theory from practice, this workshop invites choreographers to reflect on their work and to go back to creating with the found elements during the course of the workshop. It invites them to reflect on the possibilities of feedback and the relationship between the practical and theory parts of art. The workshop's format will be the following: Participants will be asked to previously select (depending on the number of participants) between one and three video clips of their work that don't exceed 3 min and present them in front of a group. If you don't have videos you can also present the work live. During the first session I would introduce the tools that might help the group to find keys to understand and write about their choreographic work. These tools will be centered in the analysis of dance. We will divide into smaller groups in which they will observe and discuss the work of each participant. During the second session the choreographer will be invited to write half a page about their work, trying to track its formal elements. Finally, participants will be asked to improvise on found elements and to read their writings to others.

Andrea Chirinos Brown

Non-linear narratives

The question is how to formulate our ideas and experience in this exact moment, how to obtain presence within the form. This workshop is looking to experiment with different ways to approach our ideas by seeking non-linear narratives which takes us a step closer to the intrigues of our own existence. The class is about conceptual and experiential physics. It begins with a gaga based warm up which awakes the senses and the imagination. Then we go into improvisation exercises to create movement using images, space and non-linear narratives.

Cinthia Pérez Navarro

Discovering what transforms us

A reflection on how we appropriate the body, how to inhabit space and what happens when they become permeable textures, sensations, and even those other social constructs or abstractions that accompany us everyday in how we move, think, act, etc.. In what way these reflections can be made visible by contact or relationship with others? Drawing on the improvisational practices (essentially contact improvisation), for exploration, and finding the points with in narrative therapy practice is to create the context for inquiry, questioning, enjoyment, play and link between group members. This workshop serves as a laboratory platform where we will share from the verbal and body dialogue, listening is driven from the movement and celebrates diversity.

Daniel Jiménez García y Elba Irma Emicente Sánchez

Music: the conductor between dance and temporality

Usually we study dance and music in a very separated way, or at least this is what is happening in a lot of university programs, without realizing how many similarities there are between the two art forms. Plato said: music is the perfection of mathematic. Tinctoris and Gafuri, in their first treatises about harmony during the Renaissance, stressed how important is harmony in art. Furthermore Zarlino, in his treatise on counterpoint, traces the bases for singing with the 5 counterpoints types typical of musical theory. But it's only in the 18th century we start representing graphically dance, thanks to the first book on Ballet written by Lully. Music was always on the forefront of graphic representation, however in our connected and hybrid time, there is no reason to work strictly within the confinement of any discipline. There is a unique relationship between dance and music: you can't have dance without music and you can't have music without dance. Even when we work with silence, we are still entering a relationship with music, as famous composer John Cage and several other composers from the 21st century would say, silence is music! During this workshop we will use music as a thread between dance and temporality. As an introduction we will present some important music's terms and a short historical overview of the interactions between dance and music, until we get to our present time. We will compare the extended music's techniques with the original movemtnts of our century. For example we will look at the music intgral serialism as a way of generating movement, or the French Espectralismo as a way of generating sounds through the body. We will also play with improvisation and the interaction between the body and the media to formalize some ideas about the relationship between dance and music in our century. The goal of this workshop is to generate new compositional ideas to approach the creative process in a new and renewed way.

David Silva Carreto

Physical Theater

This workshop explores some elements of physical theatre for the dramatic creative process, using dance as a connective thread for the narrative. Other themes we will explore are: knowing each other, the relationship between the interpreter and the space-time, the relationship with music as a powerful element to drive the narrative, and metaphors as a tool to improve interpretation. The goals of this workshop are to explore physicality in relation to the stage and dynamics and to create a dramaturgy from breathing, speed and positioning in the space. The dynamic relationship between tension and release, falling and contact will help us in this journey, which will terminate in the creation of a short piece.

Erin Crawley-Woods

Inner and Outer Landscapes

Dancing is many wildflowers, offer your body as a landscape. –Eiko How does our body’s interaction with the built and natural environment around us influence our perception of space, place and our role within it? How does the choreography of bodies within a space define and re-purpose it? What do we bring to a place and what do we take away? What does it mean to inhabit a place and what does it mean to embody a place? Inspired by these questions, this workshop will be an opportunity for participants to explore inner and outer landscapes and open themselves to a creative dialogue between the two. Through guided imagery, site-specific improvisation, body-mapping and written reflection we will seek to broaden and deepen our awareness of how we perceive and engage with ourselves and the world around us. Our investigation will culminate in the creation of artifacts in the form of drawing, text, improvisational score, composed movement phrase or short video that reflect our process and discoveries.

Fósforo EscenaMóvil

Dance and Composition Workshop

This workshop utilizes the technique of the Mazatlan Dance School and Delfos Dance Company. After the technique part, there will be a creative section, where compositional strategies from different disciplines, like theatre and clowning, will be used.

Janet Schroeder

Collaborative Choreography of Corporeal Rhythms

The body offers numerous inroads for investigation. We might consider its physical components, examining bone structure, musculature, and the integrated use of both. We may link the body-mind in a somatic exploration, creating intellectual body maps to better understand movement. We might also consider the body’s memory and its connection to personal history and identity. Acknowledging the impossibility of leaving any of these body systems out, this workshop focuses particularly on body memory. We will create a piece of collaborative choreography by exploring the creative process alongside an investigation of body memory, personal rhythms, and identity. Creating this piece of choreography is one aim of the workshop; at the same time, I am also interested in fostering a community made up of individuals united through rhythm. While the impetus is to create a community of movers, this process will also rely on individualized, personal reflection, particularly in the creation of phrase work. Potential frameworks for excavating movements and rhythms include exploring our personal histories and ways of identifying in the world. What narratives inform our movement habits and what do those habits look and sound like? How is identity expressed outwardly; how does this outward expression compare to our inward perceptions of ourselves; and how might we physicalize this contrast in movement? By drawing on the experiences of the individuals in the room to create an integrated piece of group choreography, I hope to discover new ways of relating to other people as we move about in the world.

Jeff Wallace

Explorations in Embodied Movement

In current society, there seems to be an increasing tension between the need to be connected to society and the desire to be present and connected to ourselves. We can see evidence of this tension all around us, and many of us experience it within us. We attempt to integrate these two elements - we use technology to share our desire for simplicity with the world, we study technique as we seek to find our personal voice. As we become aware of this challenge, we also become aware that there are times when this integration succeeds, when the tension is released, times when we connect to ourselves and through that to others and society. As we investigate this connection between ourselves and society in our artistic and expressive lives as dancers and movers, one approach is through developing our capacity to become aware of our kinesthetic, sensory, and psychological experiences. As we become aware of these experiences, as we allow them to inspire us and support us in our movement investigations, we can be said to be moving in an embodied state, moving from the inside out rather than from the inside in. There are many different movement styles that address aspects of the state of embodied movement, although each approaches this state with different philosophies and intentions. Forms such as Authentic Movement, Butoh, Contact Improvisation, and the theatre techniques of Tadashi Suzuki each give us tools to explore and develop this state within ourselves and discover the possibilities. In this workshop, we will experience movement explorations in each of these styles, and join together to discover useful insights and approaches to applying this state to the moving, creating, and performing that we all do

Joanna Rotkin

Codifying Uproar: An Inquiry into Interdisciplinary Performance

Students will experiment with a variety of interdisciplinary modalities to create collaborative and individual compositions in response to the world around them. Codifying uproar as a personal, familial, cultural, and political gesture, we will hold information, experience it, watch it, talk about it, and rearrange it. We will unearth, question, welcome, enhance, abandon and rediscover movement patterns, focal points, qualities, personal habits, and preferences to stay alert to our individual instincts and impulses. We will initiate a playful and rigorous dialogue-in-action about the innate desire to compose one’s experience

Julie Rothschild & Zap McConnell

Exquisite Corpse: Ritual.Dance.Theater

In this workshop, Zap McConnell and Julie Rothschild will use their long history of collaboration, improvisation and performance to take a group of students through ritual, structured exploration and dance making. Creating, dismantling, extracting and rebuilding each others' work to ultimately develop a new work of dance theater. Each day, both Zap and Julie will create a ritual with half of the group. Switching groups, they will create a dance from the ritual, having only seen the product from the other's work, not the process. Feeling out the moment and tuning into the interests of the participants, many rounds of this process may happen, including students collaborating; experimenting with directing their own exquisite corpse. All will be incorporated into a final performance.

Katharine Birdsall

Dancing the Moment

This is an improvisational dance class. It is an expanded version of my Alexander Technique class.

Laura Bartczak

Stop Motion Choreography

I will work with students and teach them to create their own stop motion films. A stop motion film involves what can be hundreds of photographs of a short action with minimal movement between pictures. The pictures are threaded together to create a short (often 20-30second) film. Magical things can happen in stop motion, lighting can change in an instant, people can pull things out of their mouths that weren't there, people can appear, disappear, so can objects. Stop motion provides to a tiny choreographic moment an exquisite diversity of possibility. Stop motion also has a wonderful distance in it between the act of performing (which is amazingly slow, and can take hours) and the presentation of the work (which is often reduced to less than a minute).

Lindsey Drury

Dance Games and Systems

Over the last few years, I have been developing a series of dance games and systems that can be taught as a means to investigate improvisation. Here is an example: Glitch Game: Begins by all participants walking a pathway through space and memorizing the pathway while walking it by taking note of their body's relationship to other bodies. Then, with each additional walk through the space, all changes, accidents, mistakes, etc are memorized as well, embedding the glitches in the act of repetition into the idea of what the performed material, itself, is. With each repetition, the pathway and its interactions become more and more complex, involving voice, touch, gesture, etc- simply by addressing what goes wrong in the act of repeating. Glitch game, therefore, is a means by which one can choreograph mistakes directly into a pathway to compose the choreography of that pathway.

Samuel Hanson

Writing and Dancing

We will excavate and evaluate the difficult of act writing about dance–– as journaling, descriptively, theoretically, critically, as an ambassador for the field, or as a part of the creative process itself. We’ll start by creating a personal survey of dance experiences that have had profound impacts on us. This will function both as a powerful act of self-reflection and as a way of practicing writing that marries depiction and value judgement–– a skill necessary for a good dance critic. Once we have crafted texts we are proud of, we will form collaborative groups that will transform and figuratively translate these journals into material for dance making–– manifestos, song lyrics, improvisational scores, poems...or even set movement–– appropriating each others memories. We’ll also work to view the literal (mis)translation that will ensue as an aesthetic opportunity. Next we might talk about the value that other genres of writing–– manifestos, journals, song lyrics, improv and musical scores, books and poems–– have had in various contexts in contemporary dance and performance. Some writers I might deal with (in no particular order): Tommy DeFranz, Susan Sontag, Yvonne Rainer (not just the no manifesto), André Lepecki, Ashley Anderson, Miguel Gutierrez, Ishmael Houston-Jones, Karrine Keithley-Syers and Barbara Hammer.

Sara Domínguez-Petersen

The Body as a Dancing Identity in the Space

First part: through working with gravity, breathing, mind-body connection, dancers will explore movements in different parts of the body until awareness of the here/now is awaken. Second part: Theme guided improvisations, where dancers will use their own imaginacion and their own movement qualities to create and refine individiual movement sequences. These individual phrases will be put together in duos or trios and collaboratively dancers will create longer sequences of choreography. At the end we will give each other feedback based on what we see.

Stephanie Miracle

Creation/Re-creation

I am quite obsessed with the idea of reality being synchronized or choreographed despite the illusion of free will and choice. Like a memory that you recreate over and over again in your mind, examining it and replaying it repeatedly in order to solve it; to make it right; to fix it.; I am interested in using physical bodies and physical space/objects to manifest this image of insistence. In presenting a three-dimensional version of memory or a camcorder recording I aim to create a kinesthetic empathy between performers and audience. In this workshop we will challenge our memory by creating and recreating movement situations ranging from highly pedestrian to complex choreography. We will explore this work both inside the dance studio and outside in public spaces, researching how to use our (imperfect) short-term memories complied from our multiple senses as a way to approach the re-creation of an event within the context of an ever-changing world.

Stephanie Sherman

Constraints, Borders, Space, and Moving Bodies

Building on the questions and theories put forth in my paper, I will use the workshop participants’ differential experiences of literal and social space to create improvisational and compositional scores in which tight places, boundaries, borders, and constraints generate movement. Alternating between discussion and movement, we will create scores that limit our experience of space on many levels (bodily space, interpersonal space, the space of the workshop, the city space, etc), provoking sometimes minimal or highly limited movement and pushing that movement to its extreme. We will similarly explore the support, limits, and apertures of those spaces: our skin, the skin of others, the material surfaces that encompass us, openings such as doors, fabric, bodies, windows, etc, engaging in a contact improvisation with space and with each other that engages questions of the politics of certain bodies in space.

Sven Doehner

Voice and Movement

The voice is the flux of energy, which moves inside our body. The way we vocalize has a strong impact on how we move. We will move our body to move our emotions, so they don't get stuck or they could move in different and new ways. We will work with our feelings, movement, emotions, imagination and voice to discover how to free our energy or how can we change our reactions in challenging situations.

Women Over The Wall

Me and We: Composing Community in Improvisation

Open to all levels of experience, this movement-based workshop presents Compositional Improvisation as an egalitarian practice and a democratic process, one that allows a voice and a space for multiple aesthetics. First through individual movement research, and building into ensemble thinking, we practice together in order to reveal to each other the multiplicity of perception and choice. We learn to hone one’s awareness of the whole ensemble while taking responsibility for one’s individual choices. As the practice stretches the capacity of the individual to remain present, perceive, assess, decide, and take responsibility, it exercises and hones the capacity to sense, connect, and participate in the expanded consciousness of the greater mind. Taking the tangible, material body as the ground of the working process, we begin to question perceived divisions of body and mind, providing our own proof of the seamless nature of thought/feeling/action/memory/perception as it relates to choice. As we improve our integrated being, we create more holistic possibilities in our relationship between individual agency and the social and political fabrics of which we are a part. In this way, we understand our work as both evolutionary, and revolutionary. Individual transformations spark new ways to organize and re-make not only ourselves, by our social and political structures. These new structures, in turn, have the potential to impact individual formation. In an ongoing dialogue, a hopeful and determined sense of progress can emerge, actively participating in the upward spiral of our own growth.

Zap Mcconnell

Creating Performing Scores

After feeling out what goals the whole group desires we will create a series of scores that we all try on and perform in front of each other. We will break groups up, watch and move, create duets and solos as the time and need allow. By the end of the workshop everyone will have at least one solid score to perform and a feel of the way they wish to explore and deepen this work.