Dance and Dance Related Classes

Classes marked with an * are now offered as virtual or in person classes.

Technique / Training

  • Contemporary Modern Techniques  I, II
    • Technique class creates an environment for students to deepen their somatic awareness, efficient athleticism, and creative voice through the medium of contemporary dance. Through floor work, inversions, classical modern, and improvisation, students are encouraged to a fearless exploration and understanding of their personal alignment, strength, flexibility, coordination, rhythm, dynamics and spatial awareness.
  • Partnering  (I, II)
    • Investigate the visceral information, movement vocabulary and kinesthetic understanding through physical contact and weight-sharing between two or more dancers. This class focuses on partnering skills from rolling, falling, giving and receiving weight, structural systems, training, styles of partnering and use of momentum and weight. The class will examine what information is created and transferred both dancer to dancer and dancer to audience. Special consideration will be paid to creating partnering that is part of a larger kinesthetic/emotional/ intellectual dance over creating exciting moments.
  • Improvisation Techniques

Choreography/ Creating

  • Choreography: beginning to advanced.
    • Students develop and deepen personal creative exploration of movement and choreographic research. We will be examining time-based practice, performance, and other forms that emphasize process and conceptual rigor for stage, site, and installation dance works. Strategies to develop choreographic compositional choices, movement languages, and conceptual ideas for each individual’s creative projects. Class investigates and supports students’ developing language for addressing, critiquing and comprehending compositional choices and structures through verbal and written feedback practice.
  • Composition
    • This class seeks to develop and deepen personal creative exploration of movement while cultivating a constant curiosity for delving into deepening creative processes and venturing into unknown movement and thematic areas. Partnering somatic awareness and athleticism with improvisational practices, compositional and durational skills to find connections to concepts, intellectual and subconscious links in material. During this process, we will examine the work of historic and current artists creating work that reach across genres in new ways. Students explore the integration of processes and collaboration in creative projects while continuing to engage in an objective critical process of their own work and the work of others.
  • Improvisation as performance
    • Improvisational performance is a field and skill that requires strategies, practice, and understanding to produce fearless, exciting performances. We will explore performance structures, movement vocabularies, choreographic practices, contemporary and world dance artists whose work is deeply involved in improvisation in performance and creation. Students will work with weight sharing, partnering, listening, and engaging techniques from action theater, contact improvisation, viewpoints and other forms through exploration of structured movement problems.
  • Improvisation for creation
    • Students shake up movement habits and explore alternative methods for movement creation. Improvisation acts as a catalyst for intuitive generation of movement toward a goal of creating choreographic works with unique vocabularies.
  • Dance and Place – site-specific work
    • Creating site-specific work: An exploration of space *
      • How do you explore a site through its history, community, present, and possibilities? Each space offers a unique opportunity and voice through which to create a performance. Site is both space, land, politics, history, community, and story examined through time. How you deal with those elements can help you create a piece that is a part of the space.
    • Site-Specific and Unique Spaces: Ways of viewing.*
      • Unique spaces have unique opportunities and constraints on how people view the work you are creating. Whether you are creating immersive theater or a more traditional viewing, delve into how a viewer will interact with your site-specific work. Experiment with seeing sites as performative architecture, embrace the distractions and plan a range of interactions with your space and audience as well as the possibility of letting go of control to see how an audience reacts naturally.
    • Technology, Dance, and Site: Moving the environment. *
      • Technology expands the possibilities in site work from lighting and soundscapes, to image mapping and augmented reality. We will question when and how to use technology to fully explore a site. We will further understand how technology affects the site, the viewer and your connection to the land and architecture you are working in.
    • Interdisciplinary Works *-
      • In essence, almost all dance work is interdisciplinary, however, explore processes and strategies for creating intentional and engaging interdisciplinary work as a blend of media as opposed to dance with music, etc.. Areas of exploration include virtual and digital works, collaborative processes, and the conceptual intent, contextual history and the emotion introspection which make movement human.
  • Dance for Camera * – An examination of the history of dance for the camera in relation to intellectual trends in both dance and film throughout the 20th Century and an understanding of the larger political and cultural map these forms grew in. Ideally a two semester course, this course actively engages the student in conception, filming, editing, and examination of dance for the camera.
  • Performance Art / Live Art / Action Art – Performance Art is taught as a European art form and while the roots of the form as we know it are European, live art around the world is informed by older art forms and practices. Regional variations vary by tradition, political realities, and influences of the individual artists. This course covers performance artists from all around the world, exploring how influences inform the resultant work. These explorations will inform the attending artists explorations in time based, interactive performative work.

Production

  • Dance Lighting
    • For dancers: A Practical understanding of lighting and how to work with lighting designers. Light defines and illuminates every dance you make. These classes explore theoretical, technical and creative work in lighting design as it relates to stage, installation and site-specific work. We will examine historical and contemporary practices in lighting design, writings by choreographers and designers and examine designs of current practitioners. Understanding light allows choreographers to work with it mind, and speak with their designers.
    • For lighting designers: Methods, options, and history of dance lighting through contemporary practices and concerns. A practical course where students actively work on a stage, hanging, focusing, and lighting productions. Includes installation, site specific work, projection, and alternative lighting options.
  • Producing * – We discuss the creative process of bringing your dance works from conception to the stage. Budgeting, funding, theater specs, and costs, and production basics are all covered as well as providing the dancer with an introduction to the types of performance venues available today, and their technical systems and equipment. It will also establish an awareness of how the full range and scope of technical theater design arts may be utilized by a choreographer.

* classes marked with the asterisk are available for virtual instruction as well as in person depending on need.