Winter Festival 2010 Class Descriptions

FUNDAMENTALS CLASSES

Saturday Fundamentals Class with Jeff Bliss

Gravity Has the Taste of Honey

Open the eyes in your shoulders, fold the edge of gravity to bring more time under your bones. We will wake up our reflexes and our response to the reflexes of others. We will practice listening with the hairs on the back of our necks. This is a time to expand our range of what is possible and to invite the trust that leads us each to risk a bit more.

NOTE: Jeff's class has two sessions, a morning and an afternoon session.  We strongly recommend you take both classes. If however, you choose to take one class, please sign up for the morning session only.

Sunday Morning Fundamentals Class with Dey Summer

Turn your 'oops' around:  Finding possibilities in awkward moments

Often the desire to "do it right" can shut down our natural sense of freedom to play in the dance.  In this class we will spend some time investigating the ways it is important to communicate boundaries of safety while still remaining open to the quirkiness that can come in and surprise and delight us when we are improvising together.

MIXED LEVEL CLASSES

Saturday Morning Mixed-Level Class with Catherine Lessard

Rising Under Humans: The art of supporting, between earth and skyphoto by John Barrett

Being the channel between a floor and a partner requires a subtle mix of receptivity, extension, and anchoring. Ideally, it has nothing to do with strength. Exploring how to be this channel will be our common ground for this workshop.

A lift is nothing else than a weight transfer that is uninterrupted and brought to its full potential. As supports, we will practice how to make clear offers, how to absorb vertically into the ground, how to reach and rise up, how to solicit the resilience our joints, and how to keep moving into the endless spiral.
 
As flying partners, we will practice how to extend and expand from the shared surface of contact, how to lighten up, how to mould and melt through our partner’s vertical, and how to be ready to fall.

We’ll explore how a body structure can float with a delicate assemblage of tone and release, and recover from increased pressure without consequences.
 

Saturday Afternoon Mixed-Level Class with Dan Davis

Dancing The Endless Web:
Fascia and Contact Improvisation

Fascia: the three dimensional web of connective tissue that runs continuously from a thick layer just under your skin into the mysterious depths of your body. Fascia weaves a network of interwoven membrane around every muscle, organ, bone and cell.

Accessing this incredibly intelligent system in our dance opens a world of specificity, subtlety, and increased kinetic potential. We will traverse the range, from witnessing and following the delicate unwinding of the tissues, to finding incredible support for dynamic flight, elastic buoyancy and the creation of countless hidden shelves. Join me in researching this endlessly fascinating realm.

Sunday Morning Mixed Level Class with Olivier Besson

The Collaborative Gesture

Contact improvisation is a direction of effort, never a result. It is a compassionate dance of reciprocity. How do we surround a dance with space, allowing it to flower in our presence? Through the practice of listening to our self and one another, we join forces and evolve the dance into a simultaneous collaborative gesture. This class welcomes movers who want to expand their capacity to improvise in and around Contact.