Rev Up
In this floorwork and street style fusion workshop, teachers Allison Smith and Kayliani Sood lead athletic and playful exercises to condition a skilled, adaptable dancing body. Expect a thorough group warm up, floor work, foot work, and choreography that draw from house, breaking, and contemporary dance. This workshop is intended to create a social, sweaty, and collaborative atmosphere for experienced moving artists to enjoy.

In this workshop, we’ll explore the embodied technology of echolocation: the process of emitting sound or energy in order to receive echoes from your surroundings  that help you orient where you are. We’ll draw from different folk and vernacular dance traditions that center the reciprocity and shared agency of call and response practices. We'll work with movement vocabulary from our most recent pieces, seed & sound and Threaded, which premiered with Philadelphia Dance Projects and Philadelphia Fringe Fest respectively in 2025, as a foundation upon which participants can play and remix in order to explore what echolocation as an embodied technology can look like in their practice and consider how to activate spaces, stages,  surroundings, and audiences through these practices.

For a few years now, I've trained a focus on what it means to be "available"---in these demanding times, in this aged Black woman body, in ways that are expressed sonically, somatically, emotionally, intellectually,  spiritually,  relationally.....  I aim to bring this exploration into this 2-session workshop, with emphasis on vocal and movement improvisation as vehicles for discovering our capacities and boundaries for availability and how we might expand them, should we choose. We will use vocal improvisation strategies from Rhiannon's Vocal River and somatic strategies from Gaga and elsewhere; we will motivate ourselves with text and writing. We will engage one another's availability to tap into our own.

This improvisation jam invites us to practice deep listening and play as individuals and together. We will move through a guided somatic warm-up to tune our mind body connection, open space for weight sharing, and fall into jamming. Contact is not required for this jam, and all experience levels are welcome!

Moving the Matrix is an invitation to experience a living, adaptive network, of connection, pleasure, and rhythm. Blending Franklin Method®, dance improvisation, and somatic explorations, this class awakens your connective tissue through breath, imagery, touch, and rhythmic movement.

Beginning with a grounding breath practice and sensory awareness, we'll explore spirals, curves, and diagonal pathways that help organize the body's fascial connections. Inspired by the extra cellular matrix, a viscous non-cellular space, The practice stimulates the fascial body. Short, repetitive movement phrases gradually build, allowing the nervous system to settle while cultivating elastic support, responsive movement, and a deeper sense of connection from the inside out. The last part of class shifts towards partnered explorations of tensile structures. Communication of momentum, force transfer, and dampening get to be studied through touch and relationship. 

Too Distracted To Dance is a laboratory for artists to practice combining disciplines for performance. Artists will work in synchrony with their peers as they explore systems of improvisation and structures for composition that place our bodies into states of action and reaction. 

Participants are encouraged to use phrasework they’ve been practicing during Rigorous Play or beyond! Integrate material, riff on ideas, and cultivate your own mode of play in an open format with guided warm up, creative generation, creative composition, and watching performance.

Toward Being in Being

This workshop draws on somatic movement, movement/voice improvisation, deep listening, Contact Improvisation, and Asian martial arts to probe the depths of bodily awareness and feeling. Through self-directed gestures, natural voice exploration, and physical listening, we expand our capacity to find sensitivity, comfort, and wonder within our own body.

Description coming soon!