New Year’s Awakening WAITLIST ONLY: ReWilding Contact Improvisation Intensive w Nita & Ezra

**We are currently full. Applicants will be added to the waitlist in case a spot opens. New Year’s Awakening ReWilding Contact Improvisation Intensive with Nita Little & Ezra LeBank 24 hours of immersive training over four days Over the long New Years weekend December 30th - January 2nd Fri, Sat & Mon (Holiday) 10am - 5pm Sun (Jan 1st) 1 - 8pm-ish* Portland, Oregon at FlockPDX & SKC Dance Center *(6-8pm-ish New Year's Celebration & Conversation at cozy location) Description How do we engage our ability to be physically alive, to connect, and to commune with one another and our immediate physical environment? How do we awaken our embodiments in order to support emergent relations within and without this dance we are living? How are we prepared for soaring together in flight? We will shake off the limits of our domestication as we complete this past yearly cycle and turn toward building greater clarity in our relations within the physical dance and throughout our perceptual worlds, human and more. We can become more instinctual, more intuitive, more specific and generous in our actions, and more alive, kind, and generative in our presence with one another and our worlds. With generosity and care we will prepare for and meet the New Year with our full being, together. Dancing Contact Improvisation in its duet and ensemble modes, this workshop offers serious play: It invites individual introspection, and guides us through somatic states and into communion with one another and our environments. Our work is to explore our humanity through our somatic communication and invite greater relational abilities through gaining contact improvisation skills found only below the surface, both in duet and group form. We will find new answers to how we communicate as physical beings, as individuals, as dyads and as communities. We focus on learning to extend our embodied attention and develop states that heighten our felt sense so that even walking down a street we are alive with communication. We will come to understand the learning that is implicit in our play. We will support our somatic ReWilding with expansive solo and partnered physical training to expand, integrate, and ready our bodies in conversation with space and gravity. This will develop into cloud tectonics – work that aims to reframe our experiences of flight, loft, and drift. Detailed and buoyant exercises will guide us toward a dancing experience that feels full of abundant and radically free choice-making in vertical and spherical space for both ourselves and those we dance with. Instead of relying on each other, we imagine a dance we co-create amidst simultaneous independence and communion. Who Is This For This intensive course is designed to harness the energy of dancers/movers with previous CI experience and a desire to immerse in a highly physical and deeply relational contact improvisation practice. Come prepared for expansive flight training alongside somatic coordination and attentional detailing. And, please come prepared to play, learn, and work. Space is strictly limited to 24 students. Please submit an application here: https://forms.gle/AcDyhoTnMPxXhw4p9 Prompt applications are encouraged as the intensive is expected to fill quickly. Tuition Early (First 12 Spaces) SOLD OUT Regular $385 - $420 (last 10 spots) Venmo to @bossyflyer (last 4: 2518) Paypal to [email protected] (please select ‘to friends and family’) Scholarship support is available for those with financial barriers to participate. Please write a brief letter to [email protected] Biographies Nita Little (US) is an activist for relational intelligence through improvisational dance practices that began with the emergence and development of Contact Improvisation (CI). A dancer, teacher, choreographer, and dance theorist, her work with Steve Paxton was generative of CI in 1972. Little received her PhD in Performance Studies in 2014. She tours worldwide on a regular basis working for dance companies, at festivals, conferences and universities teaching, lecturing, and choreographing. Her writing investigates ecological actions of attention and the creative potentials present in entangled relations. She initiated the Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (the ISSC) in 2016 with dance research ensembles (which all share CI in common) participating from around the globe. www.nitalittle.com Ezra LeBank (US) is a Professor of Movement at California State University Long Beach. Meditation, Aikido, and acrobatics work their way into his curiosity of CI. His approach is inspired by many wonderful teachers including Nancy Stark Smith, Ray Chung, Ishmael Houston Jones, Martin Keogh, and Nita Little. He has been invited as a teacher at International Contact Festival Freiburg, West Coast Contact Improv Jam, Seattle Festival for Dance Improvisation, Poland Contact Festival, and this summer will teach at CI@50 in Oberlin, Ohio. His research asks the question if we can fly and fall without noticing much. www.bossyflyer.com/movementlab **We are excited to share that there will be evening jams in Portland from 7-9pm on Dec 28-31 at Lewis & Clark College hosted by Carolyn and Eric!! (They are also offering a series of all levels classes that week: https://www.facebook.com/events/881805386535797 )