Photos by Amelia Golden

CHOREOGRAPHIC IDIOM

For the past 10 years I’ve been developing a class where you can work on dancing, performing and choreographic process all within the same framework.  I fiercely believe that the main things that have deepened my work over the last 20 years have been conversation, watching other people's work and learning how to be in the rehearsal room with my collaborators. That last part is essential and feels connected to listening, improvisation and a radical approach to how rehearsal is structured. In class we upend these structural strongholds by moving away from a mode of doing and processing.  Can we do an improvisation or a series of exercises that are not about development or the "culminating idea"? Exercises, dancing/performing and conversation are permitted to co-exist without having to constantly make sense of each other.  Can this shift away from the notion of "culminating ideas" lead us deeper into radicalizing our choreographic and performative habits? This is an opportunity to come work on your work in a supportive and experimental setting. This is essentially an open score improvisation class.

JOIN THE CLASS

- Classes run Mondays 10-12pm at Brooklyn Arts Exchange (421 5th ave, Brooklyn, NY)
- $15-20 sliding scale drop-in
- Slots open for each class on a week by week basis. Fill out the form to be added to the list.

HOW I THINK ABOUT TEACHING DANCE MAKING

I teach composition not as a way to rally around the object of the work itself but to deeply critique and think about what happens in the rehearsal room with myself, my group and how to move forward into "go" or the equal and opposite skill of deletion.  The history of  Western dance making, mainly in academic settings, focuses on the object itself. We learn to take it apart, obsess about what it's doing, what it's not doing and we get lost in a sea of fighting for or against FORM. I've hit my head against the wall trying to make sense of this binary but it's a useless pursuit that really does nothing for my work. Centering improvisation and the unconscious helps me get out of old formal patterns and tune into weirder more impossible states of existence.