Fascinated by how we can sense movement akin to how we sense touch, this workshop explores ways to transfer the tactile experience we get from the floor, touch and each other into dancing through space with memory and imagination. I will propose different tasks, prompts, metaphors and images to guide, layer and shape our experience of a dance. This is a dance class. You can expect to do some somatic exploration of movement ideas, repeated loops of short coordinations, partner-work, very short choreographed dances and an eclectic playlist of tunes. I am deeply interested in the artful play and pleasure of dancing. These classes will weave from floor to standing and I hope to leave you glazed with sweat (but not exhausted), smiling and ready for the day!

In this workshop we will dance with fascia, moving with and being made different by its generative possibilities. Fascia is often referred to as connective tissue and seen as simply wrapping muscles. But it is also an active, intelligent and communicative sensory organ enveloping, permeating and constituting the body. As the “fabric” of our form it shifts our perspective from a body made up of parts to the wholeness of the architecture holding them together. Fascia can be described as a biomatrix that surrounds everything in our bodies, connects everything, and yet paradoxically cleaves and separates everything. Fascia is not one thing. The emergent set of anatomical claims about fascia stretches between communities of biologists, massage therapists, doctors, anatomists and pathologists as well as somatic practitioners and dancers (www.fasciacongress.org). 

We will dance and be moved by metaphors, images, models, scientific research and somatic practices cultivated in relation to fascia. We will explore how what I call “scoring fascia” changes our sensorium and potentially moves us in new ways.  Situated within the Axis Syllabus, as a kind of comprehensive reference system, in this fascia workshop we will try out, experiment, and place ourselves in the midst of this new form of experimental embodiment being made.

In this workshop we will practice a wide range of rhythms, steps, gestures, movement qualities, sounds, songs and spatial formations inspired by folk dances I have learned over many years. They offer numerous ways of knowing and becoming.  In each dance our senses, sense of time and space interact, and entangle differently and together. The process of learning and practicing dances and songs from other times and places provides a multitude of new experiences and other ways of coming to know.  In learning these dances one can engage on many levels, discovering unique combinations of timing, visualizing circles and lines of movement as we engage with space in arcs, curved pathways, direct lines, circles and various formations. We will explore tuning in and out of these relations learning with these particular dance and world making practices.

These classes will be rooted in a practice of studying and sensing the architectural integrity of our bodies in dynamic movement. We will use anatomic principles and the Axis Syllabus as information resources to delve into physical propositions, ask questions, problem solve through challenges, and fall into moments of joy.

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