My teaching practice encompasses a wide range of approaches to movement, dance-making, improvisation, and embodiment for dancers and non-dancers alike. I have been deeply influenced by years of studying of somatic-based movement practices, fostering in me an interest in self-directed and embodied research and an interest in both western and non-western approaches to anatomy, physiology and notions of corporeality. I’ve taught extensively in New York City, as well as nationally and internationally, in both professional and University settings.
For several years, I co-created a workshop with artist Dean Moss which was structured around participants using their own work in dialogue with each other as the raw material of the class. This method of facilitating group knowledge production through risk, vulnerability and creative response, rather than the teacher offering choreographic templates from the top down had a powerful influence on my teaching philosophy.
I value autonomy, risk and dialogue. I consider class as a site of research and encourage participants to embrace “failure” as a sign that we are moving beyond the familiar and the known. I like to think of the dance studio (or wherever we are working) as a warm and vital space where ideas and practices are shared in an effort to grow and expand the incredible potential of dance, as well as its practitioners.
sample classes
*technique
Class is an opportunity to create the space to fully inhabit our bodies and integrate various approaches of embodiment into our movement and artistic practice. We usually begin slowly, with imagery and gentle preparation inspired by various somatic traditions to access our awareness of the senses, the organs, the skeleton, the cells, gravity, and other energetic forces. Class may also include technical exercises, choreographic structures (“phrases”), improvisations, and performance constructs, with a focus on precision, ownership, and play. Through class I hope to nurture, challenge and further develop our collective and individual artistic practices.
*composition / practicing courage
This workshop considers dance making not as a craft that can be taught but as a space that we can create together, sharing resources and knowledge, and engaging with the process of making as an individual and collective practice. We will continually challenge ourselves to be present in our making through a series of structured exercises and conversations that challenge ownership, aesthetic preference, preconceived concepts of form, commitment and desire. Please bring a notebook.
*FORM AND PRACTICE HISTORY AND DESCRIPTION
Art making is hard because the object created takes on a life of its own that needs to exist independently of the artist. Thus the process of making choreography is doubly difficult because the dancer and the dance are often thought of as fused in the body.
Performance Praxis, an experimental dance composition workshop, offers the makers of contemporary performance an alternative. Consisting of strategies both physical and intellectual the workshop attempts to separate the artist from the art work. In so doing, it establishes a rigorous environment of great creative challenge that illuminates the participants’ choreographic preconceptions.
Originally conceived by Dean Moss in 2002, this intensive experimental dance workshop has been developed in conjunction with Levi Gonzalez from 2005 to 2007 at The Kitchen under the workshop title “Form & Practice.” It seeks committed performance artists who are ready to surrender themselves and a small excerpt of their work to be objectified, shared, reconfigured, and destroyed. Through rapid-fire showings and discussion, the participants sharpen their ability to articulate their own aesthetic interests and preferences and mine the gap between their own discourse and how that discourse is activated into an artistic practice. The workshop makes artists responsible for their own observations and opinions of their own work and the work of others, both through language and through the act of doing. Simultaneously artists explore technical, practical and conceptual issues, including, authorship, theatrical presence, styles of performance, the use of sound and visual media, theatrical formatting, the role and usage of the dramaturge/director from a dance perspective, and the ability of the artist to shape the larger frame in which their work is seen. At every step of the process the participants will question each other and the work, and in the end, through constant showings and questioning, exercise a contemporary dialogue between practice and intention, between the art and the artist, between the work and the public, and between performance and the world-at-large.