Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Performance Improvisation Dance Class With Noelle Chun

Dance Class With Noelle ChunVelocity Dance Center
1621 12th Ave / Capital Hill
Tuesdays from 4:30-6pm
January 6 - June 30, 2015

This class offers an approach to group improvisation with the studio as a site for the collaborative exchange of physical ideas. First, we encourage the expansion of individual movement vocabularies and their conscious arrangement.

Once dancers boost their own possibilities for movement invention with specificity, clarity, and craft, we move that attitude into group explorations, which amplify attention and awareness, illuminate the perception of composition, and then look at interaction as an opportunity to exponentially increase the inventiveness of the group compositional form as something that is simultaneously perceived and generated internally.

Choreographers, performers, and those with interests in emerging art forms are welcome!

Contact: noelle.k.chun (at) gmail.com

About Noelle

Noelle Chun is a choreographer, improviser, and teacher interested in dance as forms of embodied knowledge and ethnography. Her choreographic and improvisational work has been presented at Capitol Theater and Cleveland Public Theater (Ohio), Southern Theater (Minneapolis, MN), Green Street Studios (Boston, MA), Mead Theater (Washington, DC), Epiphany Episcopal Church (Chicago, IL), and most recently at Velocity Dance Center (Seattle, WA).

Previously residing in Columbus, Ohio, she was on the faculty at The Ohio State University teaching improvisation-based repertory and other technique classes. In the community, she was resident artist at the dance/arts space called FEVERHEAD, producing dances, events, and classes. She has an MFA in Dance from the Ohio State University and a BA in Anthropology from Beloit College.

Monday, December 29, 2014

Olympia Contact Improvisation Workshop With Martin Keogh

From Martin's Seattle Workshop April 2014.
Photo by Carol Wiley
Saturday and Sunday
January 10 and 11, 2015

From 1 to 5 PM each day
Sliding scale: $95 - $185

Martin Keogh (from whom I have take multiple workshops and who I highly recommend) will teach an all-level workshop that starts with the fundamentals of Contact Improvisation: 
  • the contact point, 
  • weight sharing, 
  • pathways into the floor and into the air, and 
  • finding the root of levity. 
There will be special emphasis on releasing the neck and pelvis and surprising yourself in flight and extended follow-through.

Complete information on the Facebook page or email Rudra at ranvari0 (at) gmail.com.

For more about Martin, visit his website
 

Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation—How It Started


1994 SFADI PhotoThe first Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation (SFADI), which later became the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (SFDI), was a three-day venture in August 1994. Although, the exact origin of the idea is somewhat muddled (depending on whom you ask), it seems to have involved a suggestion from Karen Nelson, who was teaching in Vancouver, BC, with a group of other contact improvisation teachers, to Sheri Cohen and Heidi Drucker.

At the same time, Robert Harrison, who was running the Seattle contact improvisation jam, was looking for a way to stimulate the local contact improv community. Robert and Heidi talked about potentially bringing some of the teachers who were in Vancouver to Seattle. Robert then called Carol Wiley and asked if she wanted to meet about putting together a dance festival.

That first meeting in early July 1994 consisted of Robert, Carol, and Heidi. They decided to put together a three-day festival with some of the teachers from Vancouver and a few local teachers. They wanted another person to help and invited Julie Freyberg to join them.

The four organizers managed to put together a three-day festival in only six weeks, with Robert fronting money for rent, publicity, and other expenses, not knowing if he would get it back. They also asked Stephanie Skura’s non-profit dance organization, Cranky Destroyers, to provide an administrative umbrella.

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Teachers agreed to teach, not knowing how much they might be paid. And with fewer than ten people registered just days before the festival, the organizers didn’t know what to expect. But people did show up, Robert got back his money, the organizers paid the teachers and themselves a modest $74.06 each, and they even kept $210 to jump start the next year’s festival.

Were you at the first SFADI? Feel free to post any memories in the comments!

The First SFADI Schedule

 1994 Schedule Seattle Festival of Alternative Dance and Improvisation