I am currently teaching at Bennington College where my courses cover technique, improvisation and the process of the dancer.

Current and previous courses include…

Improvisation: Somatic Nuance

This is a class for those curious about their bodies’ potential for spontaneous, nuanced movement. We will begin with a slow warmup, emphasizing our natural desire to move. We will use varied improvisational structures or scores to create frames for attention. By gaining awareness in our bodies, we will improve our ability to move easily and articulately. We will explore dancing in small groups, alone and through partnership. We will aim for an expansive, expressive and joyful experience of moving.

Dancer as maker

Dancers working presently in the contemporary, experimental dance world do so in relation to the historical definitions of “the dancer,” all while deconstructing and recontextualizing its meaning. Dancers are makers in their own right inside choreographic structures. In this course, we will work with specific choreographic structures and scores, and use them as a frame to help understand how we participate in the process of making.  We will look at the choices we make as we help shape the choreography and performance. We will look at how we, as whole people, interact with the material. We will work with approaches to employing technical skill and elements such as movement quality and relationship to space, exploring our personal agency and presence.  As a final project we will study the efforts of a few dancers working presently in the contemporary experimental dance realm with major choreographers. We will be learning their choreographed material and also charting their perceived methods for engaging in and performing the work. We will be asking questions like: What was their training model? What influenced their work? How did they integrate themselves into the whole concept?

DANCE MAKING

This course is an introduction to the creative process of dance making. We will look at choreography as a format for arranging bodies and movement; considering time, space, and emotion in performance based work. We will explore, improvise, watch, and discuss our work and the work of others.  We will develop personal movement material from multiple sources and investigate our personal process as it relates to contemporary performance.

witching

Through moving together and individually, with proposed movement structures, writing, discussion, and watching each other, we will uncover our default habits and references in an aim to expand our options of how we generate and locate ourselves in action. Gaining skillful perception, we will observe our reference points for movement employing the use of memory, imagination, sensation, architecture, the social and political implications of our bodies, and our relationships to each other. We’ll aim to understand the previous unnameable and expand out expressive and transparent moving alchemy.