Compose Your Contact

NEW CI Class Series @ Finnish Hall! 6-8PM all Tuesdays in May & June 2019 in the upstairs Meeting Room A series with focus on IMPROVISATION, for folks with an existing contact practice. Flesh out your weight-sharing skills with tools for playing with: Space! Time! Shape! Ensembles! States! Focus! Interpersonal interaction! Consent and boundary negotiation! Entering & exiting dances! And moooooore! Rotating facilitation! May 7 Ilka Fanni 14 Miriam Wolodarski 21 Sabrina Baranda 28 Rajendra Serber June 4 Cathie Caraker 11 Kristen Greco 18 Krista DeNio 25 Miriam Wolodarski $80 for whole series (that's just $10/class!) $15 - $20 at the door * Paypal to [email protected] (notaflof, please get in touch) UP NEXT! June 18 Carving Contact with Krista DeNio In this class we'll establish the vocabulary of Viewpoints as our building blocks to dance with time and space. We'll begin with solo bodies creating group composition, then enter contact improvisation with this more specific attunement to the whole room and full dance. Playing with focus, and directing our attention across a spectrum of inner-outer, near-far, and small-large, will allow for a wide variety of options and fun. Krista DeNio is a choreographer, director, performer, writer and educator, committed to developing new forms of performance work. She collaborates with artists, educators and activists, across disciplines, toward a creatively engaged and socially just world. She is Artistic Director of MovingGround, and a House Artist @ CounterPulse. Krista has been a practitioner of Contact Improvisation since 1997, and approaches the form from a variety of perspectives, from it’s technical foundation and support of partnering work in choreography and performance, to the radical political potentialities that exist within the practice and participating communities. www.movingground.org *** June 11 Suspension Bridges with Kristen Greco This class will focus on suspension and momentum in the context of composing. We will play with the potent dynamic moment where kinetic energy is stored, whether as a solo dancer or as an ensemble. What happens when we suspend our habits and follow the emergence of moment by moment choice making? How does kinetic energy work as a force throughout the space? How to we navigate between receptive listening and actively directing our attention? How do we move beyond what is already known? We will explore adjusting our apertures from a broad view to the details, and play with suspending our 'ideas' about how to compose. There will be a qi gong warm up, and an ongoing invitation to mix rigor with delight. Kristen Greco is a Oakland, CA based artist. Her investigations are rooted in somatics, qi gong, improvisation, contemporary dance and physical theater. She loves teaching and dancing CI especially in outdoor settings. Kristen has directed, performed, and taught internationally in the US and internationally for the past 20 years. She was a director of The Carpetbag Brigade and has been an improvising performer in the works of Erika Tsimbrovsky/Avy K productions, Sara Shelton Mann, and Nancy Stark Smith. Kristen teaches somatics and intergenerational trauma resolution at the Luminous Institute. She has a private Somatic Experiencing practice in Oakland, CA. *** May 28 Rajendra Serber Playing with electricity! In this lab we are going to experiment with our awareness of the electricity in and around our bodies as a score to create instant composition. We will take time to warm up the current in our bodies and the space around us. Developing our attention to invisible morphing currents and static and how these are affected by the presence of other bodies. The goal is to restrain the dominance of vision and logic that usually drives us. Leaving this objective system in our brain to observe and interpret, while our nervous systems leads our body to unexpected expressions. "Electricity is everywhere, even in the human body. Our cells are specialized to conduct electrical currents. Electricity is required for the nervous system to send signals throughout the body and to the brain, making it possible for us to move, think and feel.” – Amber Plante, https://graduate.umaryland.edu/gsa/gazette/February-2016/How-the-human-body-uses-electricity/ Rajendra has had the privilege of collaborating with many wonderful artists including Sara Shelton Mann, Scott Wells, and The Residents. He was born the same year as Contact Improvisation and grew up wrestling as a playful and loving practice; Starting with his father, who was a national wrestling champion in Argentina, and continuing with his own two sons. He has studied a variety of physical and energetic forms including Contact Improvisation, Body-Mind Centering, and Release Technique. Some of his teachers have been Anna Halprin, Nita Little, Simone Forte, Daniel Lepkoff, and Cathie Caraker. Rajendra began teaching Contact Improvisation in 1999. Since 2012 he has been part of the organizing team of the West Coast Contact Improvisation JAM (wcciJAM.org). *** JUNE 4 Tuning Laboratory with Cathie Caraker We will start with fine-tuning the sense perceptions of touch, weight and vision, observing how we organize ourselves to explore the environment as human animals. Moving into scores that involve spontaneous composition, we’ll practice embodied choice-making, entering and exiting, generating and transforming images as an ensemble. Cathie Caraker is an international dance-maker and teacher who has been working in the fields of improvisation and somatic movement education for over 30 years. Her work has been strongly influenced by the study and practice of Body-Mind Centering®, Contact Improvisation, Lisa Nelson’s tuning scores and related forms. More info at www.caraker.com May 21 Sabrina Baranda Aesthetics of Choice- How does the individual aesthetic choices affect the ensemble as a whole? In this class, we will play a series of games that bring our attention to the choices we make as individuals and within Ensemble Thinking. By observing our own aesthetic tendencies, we will address how that influences our relationship to space, movement quality, objects and other moving bodies. Sabrina Danielle Baranda Sabrina is a dance maker, performer, teacher, and improviser originally from the Bay Area. She draws inspiration from somatic explorations, primal animal movements, and nature. She invests a lot of time in solo exploration and bonding with the earth as your primary dance partner- in order to deepen your understanding and connections with others, you must first start with the source. Her movement quality is heavily influenced by her background in Flying-Low and Passing Through, Gaga, Axis Syllabus, Play Fighting, Acrobatics, and a hodgepodge of other Contemporary Dance modalities. *** May 14 CONTEMPLATIVE TACTICS with Miriam Wolodarski Eye Practices. Maps of space. Time signatures. What techniques can we deploy to bridge sensation with choice-making in our dancing? Sourcing Barbara Dilley’s Contemplative Dance Practices, Six Viewpoints, and various CI exercises, we’ll work on tools for orienting/disorienting, mapping/blurring, harmonizing/juxtaposing, starting/ending, joining/escaping, always noticing-dancing-playing. Come as you are. Miriam Wolodarski is a performing artist and manager of the Berkeley Finnish Hall. She holds a MFA in Contemporary Performance from Naropa University, a BSS in Political Science from Uppsala Universitet, and a banana in her left hand. senseobject.com *** May 7 * Ilka Fanni Tentacles of Attention We will start from the middle, expand out, pull back in. Working with the awareness of our bodies, our YESes and NOs, spreading out to other bodies, the space and objects. We will expand our attention to embrace the ensemble and compose the space while in contact with each other and ourselves. Ilka Fanni In her teaching, Ilka is focusing on effortless, playful movement, body-mind consciousness, and sense opening, luscious dances. Ilka has been teaching and performing CI, choreography and Improvisation for the past two decades. She studied Somatic Movement Therapy and Authentic Movement extensively. Though she found her life’s calling to be a mother, a doula and aspiring midwife, her lifelong love of dance and bodies keep her moving and she is ever inspired to teach. ... More Class Descriptions Coming Soon!