What’s possible when the boundary between performer and audience dissolves? This workshop is a lab for exploring interactive performance as a tool for choreographing dances—especially with unrehearsed participants. You’ll experiment with making invitations, following discovery, and holding space for others’ choices as movement emerges. The goal of this collaborative space is to generate something new that allows you to apply your findings to your own practice as we reconsider who dances are for and how they’re made.

In this partnering workshop, we will explore ways to identify the innate connection that exists between two people, and two bodies, and how to make it visible for an audience. Beginning from a place of curiosity in the unknown, we will observe, question, connect, judge, challenge, and learn each other through impulse, games and tasks. Based on Rhonda and Ben's research for Helpful Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People, a new platform for duet creation, the duo will lead participants through scores and exercises based on the 1901 book Illustrated Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People, as well as their own partnering practice. The workshop will progress from stationary small body geographies to the movement of bodies through space, experimenting both independently and with shared weight. We will encourage participants to share their own tips for strength and health (whatever that means to them) as the basis for devising. By the end of the workshop, participants will know each other a little better than before.

“Mud… limning fingernails, encrusting children’s knees and hair, sucking feet like a greedy newborn on the breast.”

— Hillary Jordan, Mudbound

In this 2-hour improvisation dance class, we will explore—individually and collectively—the qualities of mud and how the body embraces and responds to them.

This class is a vibrant, athletic approach to postmodern techniques. Teacher Kayliani Sood draws from principles of house and modern dance to create a unique fusion that prioritizes grounded, rhythmic, and momentum-based movement. Within an intention of generosity, we warm up to strengthen, mobilize, and revitalize the body for our practice. Guided solo improvisation and collaborative exercises attune students to their bodies, their intuitions, and each other. Technical exercises and choreographic ideas challenge students to move with efficiency through footwork, floor work, and gestures. This class is appropriate for intermediate to advanced movement practitioners.

In this workshop we’ll learn strategies of making ourselves ready again with help from the trickster, the fool, and the hero. Using a score developed in residency at The Yard in 2023 with Anise Hines and Coley Curry, students will engage in different games and prompts pulling from dance improvisation, comedy improvisation, and dance theater. This score was originally made in the context of building embodied, collective responses to trauma in an attempt to make the body-mind-spirit-people ‘ready again’.

All levels and experiences are welcome. 

This is a contemporary dance class incorporating improvisation and guided phrases. Shannon introduces internal domed spaces in the body (roof of the mouth, diaphragm, pelvic diaphragm and souls of the feet) through short Franklin Method®  studies and then expands these ideas into dance practices prioritizing these spaces as locations of support, dynamics, balance and power. Expect flashlight (zooming-in) and playtime (application of embodied understanding), guided imagery both anatomical and metaphorical, group and personal reflection (notebooks welcome), functional anatomy (images and models), and big bodied dancing!