I offer improvisational performance workshops and facilitated dance party events. All draw on a shared vocabulary and questioning regarding what it means to be a feeling body in any given moment: animate presence, embodiment, and craft, cultivated over many years as a dance anywhere and everywhere, club rat, flesh junkie researcher. These practices have been initiated by myself and developed through iterative processes of sharing, teaching, and co-creating with colleagues, teachers, and peers. All offerings are welcome to all who want to move and make.
Action is Primary
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action is primary is an improvisational practice and mode of making in the moment that examines how attention, imagination, embodied presence, and the ghosts of our choices tumble through form (our form, the dance’s form) in a constant play of regeneration and falling inwards and spilling out. In this workshop we will train and delve deeply into physically based perceptual, emotional, and compositional tasks and approaches towards ripe decision-making. We tune our attention to each re-forming and re-organizing of the moment (including our bodies) through our own actions and examine where content and form meet in live performance. Throughout this action is primary practice, we pay particular attention to movement-based explorations of language, emotional expansion and acuity as choreography, and of ways to dislocate time and extend the embodied present.
How do we commit to the veil of what we don’t know to engage with what’s already present, bring our insides to the outside and the background to the foreground? Can we simultaneously engage in self-determined research and build something together with our fullest, perhaps contradictory, and most multiple selves (as many as we want)? We improvise, dance, and reflect through writing and sharing ideas and questions. Participants are encouraged to bring their own research questions to the workshop. The workshop involves both extended practice approaches and presented performances offered as places to try things out. The workshop can be structured as a one-off 3-hour workshop or as a deep-dive series of 4-5 3-hour sessions. 4–5 days of 2-hour gatherings is also possible, in which case the time will be more focused on the practice score itself without building further into using the practice to build performances in real time. |
Photo by Eric Ashleigh
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All the feels
The undergird (group); Photo by Kevin Monko
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This workshop expands on the action is primary practice, including the introduction of the action is primary practice itself, and extending to focus more pointedly on the intersections of spoken language and movement, particularly as it relates to our constructs and experiences of time, memory and imaginative space, and what is contained in a given movement/action. Beginning with movement-based explorations of text usage, creative writing, emotional expansion and acuity as choreography, collective body dance parties, and potential time travel, the workshop moves into group structures and emergent making where the boundaries of solo or single scores start to overlap and intersect with other participants’. Derived from the development process for my 2018 project The undergird that explored the bodily resonance of grief, the workshop centers around talking and moving practices that work to destabilize a performer’s assumptions and to enliven attention to both the immediate environment and to their interior trajectories. We work to dislocate time and extend the embodied present.
We improvise, dance, practice, talk, and reflect through writing and sharing ideas and questions. Participants are encouraged to bring their own research questions to the workshop. The workshop involves both extended practice approaches and presented performances offered as places to try things out and to allow for the materiality of performance itself. This workshop is best offered as two 5–6 hour sessions (with food and whole human breaks) days, or as 4–5 days of daily 3-hour sessions. |
beautiful crystals imply slow growth
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Counter patterns, angular unconformity, shifting divides, rootless mountains, stream capture, fatigued rock, surface of no strain. Beginning from explorations of surface contact, texture, and pressure and using these <<< geological terms as tools to find somatic relief, we will mine openings for performance-making in collaborative vibration with our environments.
In this workshop, we will explore somatic and choreographic movement practices with fiber and textile materials as body-building objects and collaborators: drag, extension, adornment AND mirror, reflex, enabler, facilitator. Enlisting Bebe Miller’s proposal to consider ourselves “animal citizens, in view,” we will use surface contact, texture, and pressure as it resonates through our bodies to ground in the material moment and pursue the implications beyond. This process is a choreographic measure to examine “what is actually happening?” Using objects available to you in your home and being in community with your space, we will move concurrently, watch each other, and talk. These practices are informed by my current research into geology and parallels between ourselves – social and physical selves – and geological phenomena, in particular aligning principles of the Earth’s movements with bodily experience, sensations, and practices. The movement practices embrace a kinship-based relationship with rocks, as our ancestors, co habitants, enablers, and who will remain when we are gone and as a way to further understand gender, queerness, and family-building. This is a 2 hr workshop and can be offered as a one off or as an accumulating series over 3-5 days. In a series, it combines with action is primary (listed above) to incorporate performance and feedback in viewing amongst participants. |
Cadence in Ice Primordial; Photo by Carmichael Jones
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Dance Church + embodiment dance party
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This dance party is inspired by my years as a queer dance party and club rat and as an experimental improviser. I began to explore flipping the traditional western (in my training background) dance technique class model, in which dancers are asked to approximate the same shape and moving form on their bodies but our interior is unaccounted for, and instead ask people’s attention to share a track and for our bodies to be divergent and/or how we need in that moment to feel good. It is a full-bodied invitation to get down and dance on your wavelength, to play and move freely, while my facilitation—and an accelerating dance mix—names body parts and areas to consider, to feel, to dance WITH. Like a shared, ebbing attention that is tracing each and all of our bodies, this dance party asks you to stay in your sensation and in your pleasure and to occasionally, lightly, enjoyably bring your attention to your body as you’re dancing… not to change it but to feel it. Or take it as a provocation to explore that aspect of your body, that sensation. A pleasure meditation perhaps? You do you while we all think about respectively the crown of our heads, or of the space between your fingers, or your perineum, or…. Together.
What you can expect:
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Header photo by: Eric Ashleigh