Registration Open for 18th Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation

Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation
18th annual SFDI! July 31-August 7, 2011

CLASSES . PERFORMANCES . JAMS . DISCUSSIONS

Intensives with Barbara Dilley (CO), DD Dorvillier (NY),
Benno Voorham (Sweden)
Somatic Intensive with Susan Bauer (CA)

Classes with Corrie Befort/Beth Graczyk (WA), Sheri Brown (WA), Scott Davis (WA), Vanessa DeWolf (WA), John Dixon (NC), Cyrus Khambatta (WA),
Jody Kuehner/Ricki Mason (WA), Tonya Lockyer (WA), Amy O'Neal (WA),
Lionel Popkin (CA), Stephanie Skura (WA), Eric Spivack (WA), Carolyn Stuart (OR), Tamin Totzke (MN), Nala Walla (WA) & Andrew Wass (CA/Berlin).

Get all the details and register at Dance Art Group

Karen Nelson Seattle Workshop Dec 10-12

DAG Winter Workshop:
Karen Nelson
SENSATION & DESIGN: DANCE MAKING FOR PERFORMANCE

December 10-12, 2010
Friday 3-6pm / Saturday & Sunday 11am-4pm
Century Ballroom's East Hall, 915 E Pine St, 2nd Floor, Seattle
Sliding scale $160–180 if paid in full by 11/15/10. After 11/15/10, $185–205 if space is available.

Info/registration at Dance Art Group

Using tools from Tuning Scores and improvisation to investigate "performance," we will create a check list of concerns and desires for experimentation. Tuning Scores, as introduced by Lisa Nelson, illuminate our individual perceptual experience, and use actions and verbal calls to communicate to others and the environment during the improvisation. Sessions will begin with training in sensational awareness and build towards compositional ensemble work. The final session will culminate with an "in-progress" public showing, including a follow-up feedback process for audience and performers.

Karen Nelson's 33-year dance and performance practice has been directly influenced by Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson and their respective work in Contact Improvisation, Material for the Spine and Tuning Scores, and through collaboration with many others in venues around the world. She co-founded Joint Forces Dance Co, Breitenbush Jam, Dance Ability, Diverse Dance Research Retreat, and the performance group Image Lab among other projects. Image Lab, including Scott Smith, K.J. Holmes, Lisa Nelson and Karen, intensively developed Tuning Scores for nearly a decade in the 1990s. They performed "observatories" in the US, Europe and Asia, spawning other Tuning projects that continue to this day.

Contact Improvisation & Meditation Workshop

with Alicia Grayson & Greg Burdulis

October 2 & 3, 2010, Seattle, WA

This workshop offers new ways to enhance and vitalize our dancing and
meditation practices. With meditation we strengthen our ability to care for
ourselves, open to greater levels of subtlety, and refine how we use our
mental and physical energy. Cultivating the classic mediation skills of
mindfulness, concentration, right effort and metta we create an optimal
environment for creativity and connection to self and others.

With mindfulness as our foundation we explore the principles of
CI by entering into states of deep listening that give rise to safe,
spherical, fluid and delightful movement. We also cover important CI skills,
such as following the point of contact, giving and receiving weight with
ease and using momentum.

We invite you to discover how these two mutually supportive
practices generate clarity, creativity and courage on the cushion, on the
dance floor and in your life.

All levels of experience with contact improvisation and meditation are
welcome.

Workshop Schedule:

Saturday Oct 2, 11:00 AM - 6:00 PM
Sunday, Oct 3, 10:00 AM - 4:00 PM

Fees for Workshop:

Register before Sep 16: $130 - $250
Register after Sep 16: $170 - $340
Registration: Checks Payable to Phffft

Contact: Cyrus Khambatta
Email: Cyrus (at) Phffft.org

Location:
Grassroots Studio 5609 34th Ave SW, Seattle, WA 98126
(please park on 35th Ave not 34th)

Alicia Grayson has had a love affair with CI for 22 years and has been
teaching for 16. Her long time practices of meditation, authentic movement,
yoga and Pilates significantly influence her dancing and teaching.
Meditation and movement practices are vital aspects of her daily life. She
teaches CI, yoga and Pilates in Boulder, CO and CI throughout the US and
Europe. She is a member of Tumblebones Contact Improvisation Collective.
www.tumblebones.com.

Greg Burdulis has taught Vipassana Meditation in Burma, Thailand and the US.
After seven years as an ordained monk in Burma he returned to lay life to
share his insights. He practices CI because of its emphasis on listening,
spontaneity, and light effort. He considers it his liveliest form of
meditation. Greg holds an MA in spirituality and has experience as a
chaplain, mountaineering instructor, storyteller and performer and
mindfulness facilitator in corporations. www.gregthemonk.net.

Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation

Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation
17th annual SFDI! August 1-8, 2010

CLASSES . PERFORMANCES . JAMS . DISCUSSIONS

Intensives with Martha Eddy, Miguel Gutierrez, K.J. Holmes, Susan Rethorst

Classes with Cathie Caraker, Karl Frost, Louis Gervais, Aiko Kinoshita, Vitali Kononov, Michal Lahav, Rachael Lincoln, Nina Martin, Bebe Miller, KT Niehoff, Haruko Nishimura, Aaron Swartzman, Christian Swenson and Alia Swersky.


Early registration discount deadline: July 1, 2010

Information and Registration: Dance Art Group

Dance Art Group Spring Workshops

Workshops with local teachers and a super-size jam to benefit DAG!

With Nate Dryden | Lila Hurwitz | Cyrus Khambatta | Stephanie Skura

Velocity Dance Center | 1621 12th Avenue | Seattle

Only $100!: All Workshops & Jam
$30: One Workshop; $5 off each additional workshop
$5-15: Jam

Info/Registration: info (at ) danceartgroup.org; 206.686.7323; Dance Art Group

:: :: ::

FRIDAY, MAY 7 | 6-9pm
Upside Down & Backwards: Partnering With All Sides | Cyrus Khambatta

Created with Contact Improvisation practitioners in mind, this workshop will be about exploring upside down and backwards in confidence. A malleable 360 degree use of the spine enables increased ease of pathways through the back/side/frontspace while partnering. This "molding" use of the spine helps navigate options in dealing with gravity in relationship to friction and creates a better intuitive understanding of how to use a partners' architecture as an extension of one's own. By slowing down the process of falling it provides more time to respond and react and more physical confidence in partnering.

Cyrus Khambatta is the Artistic Director of Khambatta Dance Company (formerly Phffft! Co.), fusing contemporary dance and Contact Improvisation. His work has been presented in 12 US states, throughout Europe, in Russia and Latin America. In 2003 he received California's Daman New Choreography Award, and will be teaching this summer at the Freiburg Festival in Germany, in Latvia, Lithuania and France.

SATURDAY, MAY 8 | 10am-1pm
Breath, Suspension & Dynamic Movement with Skinner Releasing Technique™

Through the practice of Skinner Releasing Technique, dancers will explore awareness of suspension and breath in ways that catalyze greater freedom of movement and shifting dynamics, while supporting and sustaining the physical self. Improvisational movement studies with guided imagery engage the participant's creative process and technical skill learning abilities.

Nathan Dryden is an independent choreographer, performer, director, aerialist and teacher from Seattle whose work crosses through dance, improvisation, aerial dance, Contact Improvisation and movement theatre. In 2001 Nathan became a certified instructor of the Skinner Releasing Technique, serving as faculty at the annual Skinner Releasing Institute's summer program in Seattle and teaching in festivals and universities across the USA, Mexico, Ecuador, Turkey, New Zealand, Australia and the UK.

SATURDAY, MAY 8 | 2-5pm
The Athletic Voice | Stephanie Skura

Tools to find courage, freedom and specificity. To open the voice -- literally AND figuratively. To trust our inner world as a resource. To find physical manifestations of our ideas in body and voice. Bring paper, pen and drawing materials.

A radical and perpetual innovator, Stephanie Skura received one of the inaugural New York "Bessie" Awards for Choreographic Achievement. She creates with an abiding interest in interdisciplinary process, individual creative empowerment, and a current focus on imagistic language and the athletic voice. She has taught and performed throughout the USA and Europe. She directs a teacher training program called Open Source Forms.

SUNDAY, MAY 9 | 10am-1pm
Feldenkrais® & Friends | Lila Hurwitz

The Feldenkrais Method is a subtle and powerful system of neuromuscular re-education that evokes changes in muscular tone, flexibility, coordination, attention, and the comfort and efficiency of movement. We'll explore using Feldenkrais as a warm-up into an array of fabulous improvisational and perceptual practices including Authentic Movement, Contemplative Dance Practice, and the Tuning Score.

Lila Hurwitz is a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner who has been teaching since 1987, including one of Seattle's longest-running weekly Feldenkrais classes since 1995. She likes to think she introduced Portland, OR, to Authentic Movement; learned from and has performed the Tuning Score with Karen Nelson and originator Lisa Nelson; and learned Contemplative Dance Practice from creator Barbara Dilley in 1987. She's performed with Ann Carlson, Nina Martin, Bebe Miller, Lucia Neare, Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson, Mary Oslund, Stephanie Skura, Crispin Spaeth and many others.

SUNDAY, MAY 9 | 2-5pm
Super-size jam to benefit DAG!

Contact Improvisation Workshop

with Karl Frost/Body Research

Saturday May 1, 12-6 and Sunday May 2, 11-2
$120-$250 sliding scale
for more information, contact Cyrus at info (at) phffft.org

Human Contact

…reframing of the art of contact improvisation through diving into subtle level awareness of the physics and neurology of two bodies in contact combined with an open sense of the poetics of human beings encountering each other.

A Release Approach to Contact Improvisation

We increase moment-to-moment functional awareness through tuning into proprioception - our physical experience of the body - allowing for greater ease, speed, and power. Through more sophisticated movement intelligence (as opposed to "muscling through") we find a more dynamic perception in time, informed by our accumulated skills but less hindered by attachment to physical habit. Through releasing patterns of hyper-control, we find dense, rich awareness of and participation in human interaction.

Physical Poetics

We look at our sense of meaning in movement… a sense of the poetics of interaction, whether in kinesthetics and physics or in the poetry of sensation, emotion, and experienced image. We play with holding onto themes and frames of reference in the dance in a sense of collaborative art-making that moves us literally and metaphorically. The art that emerges might be experienced visually in the space, but is rooted in the proprioceptive experience of Human Contact.

About Karl
Karl Frost has been practicing contact improvisation, directing experimental theater, and choreographing contemporary dance works since the 1980s. He is an internationally recognized teacher of contact improvisation and innovator in the field of interactive performance work and has performed and taught in over 25 countries. He is currently pursuing an MFA in Choreography and an MS in Ecology at UC Davis.

17th annual SFDI! August 1-8, 2010

Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation
17th annual SFDI! August 1-8, 2010

CLASSES . PERFORMANCES . JAMS . DISCUSSIONS

Intensives with Martha Eddy, Miguel Gutierrez, K.J. Holmes, Susan Rethorst

Classes with Cathie Caraker, Karl Frost, Louis Gervais, Aiko Kinoshita, Vitali Kononov, Michal Lahav, Rachael Lincoln, Nina Martin, Bebe Miller, KT Niehoff, Haruko Nishimura, Aaron Swartzman, Christian Swenson and Alia Swersky.

Information coming soon at Dance Art Group.

Seattle Dance Workshop with Bebe Miller

December 7-11, 2009
Workshop with "Bessie" Awardee and Guggenheim Fellow Bebe Miller

FINDING PHYSICALITY: TECHNIQUE & CREATIVE PRACTICE
For advanced dance makers.

Monday-Friday :: 10am-1pm

Information: Dance Art Group