Image: André Andreev
Contact Improvisation
In contact improvisation, we explore principles such as falling, rolling, dancing off-center, tracking gravitational pull, sharing weight, dancing in spherical space, and creating multi-limbed, unpredictable bodies to dance with. We work on dancing with our specific bodies and noticing how they are changing in each moment. We foreground negotiations of consent and practice giving and seeking consent in verbal and physical languages.
Ballet: ANIMATING Bodily Geometries
We approach ballet as (one of many) techniques for moving fully, safely, and with confidence through space. Learning will be practice-based and will focus on key principles of ballet technique such as dynamic alignment, working in turnout (outward rotation of the hips and legs), moving with precision and mindfulness, and using the ground and gravity to sustain upward and airborne movement. We will supplement our ballet practice with conditioning sessions and discussions about the social, political, and historical contexts that shaped ballet as an expressive form.
Image: Andrew Mandinach
Perception, Attention, and Action in Postmodern Dance Improvisation
How do our perceptual abilities and habits affect the way(s) we move? How do our specific ways of moving determine what we can perceive? Can improvised dancing provide a platform for researching connections between perception and action? In this GE seminar, we will engage these questions through a hybrid approach that combines (a) discussion of key theories of perception from cultural studies, critical theory, philosophy, and cognitive science, and (b) participation in selected postmodern dance practices that purposefully modify how the dancer utilizes their perceptual abilities as a means of determining how they move.
Image: Zena Bibler
Heres: Improvisation as method for researching “place”
HereS is a communal research methodology that asks participants to examine overlaps, frictions, gaps, and interdependencies between public and private space choreographies. Drawing from contemplative, choreographic, anthropological, and somatic approaches, Permeable Practices/HereS investigates specific spaces from a variety of frames, and invites participants to “think physically” about how we are shaped by and shaping the spaces we inhabit. Permeable Practices unfolds in four phases: tuning, noticing, moving, and reflecting—each of which instigates participants to focus their awareness on the ways we are called to engage with bodies of architecture, urban design, fellow inhabitants, social constructs, and the law.
Permeable Practices/HereS was originally conceived of during a residency with CLASSCLASSCLASS and has been shaped by the participation of artists, architects, students, scholars, activists, and many others in New York, Virginia, Ohio, Montréal, Lublin, and Cairo. Its founding artists are Zena Bibler, Kathryn Baer Schetlick, and Brandin Steffensen.