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Practice: A dancing intensive in San Diego, 2014


We invite you to a second year of shared research of dance. This summer, we will meet once a week to re-claim, re-imagine, re-gurgitate, re-define and mine ways to practice, make, perform, and behold dancing. Please come and work with your present body, and all its possibilities.

When: Tuesdays, 2pm-5pm from June 3rd-August 19th.

Anyone can attend somatic practice and you can still do the dance making if you can make all but 4 of the dance making sessions. (You must be able to attend at least 9 of the 13 sessions.)

What: 1.5 hours of somatic practice followed by 1.5 hours of dance making guided and directed by Jess Humphrey, Leslie Seiters, and Eric Geiger, culminating in a performance on September 5th & 6th.

Last year, we (Anya Cloud, Eric Geiger, Jess Humphrey and Leslie Seiters) crafted the following questions to guide our research.

Magic. How do we stay out of her way?
What’s at stake and are we willing to lose? Lose something? Be a loser?
How do we allow the work to work itself out?
What if the dance is problematic, provocative and incomplete? Are we making such dances or do we just think we are? Are we willing to?
What are traditionally or historically valued qualities in dance? What happens if we honor, add to, rebel against this list of values?
Who authors the human body?
When does dancing become a dance?
What is worth making? What isn’t?
How do we dance forever?
Can dropping down, dropping in, dropping out ground us?
Can practices that bring forth the parasympathetic nervous system allow for a more rigorous study of dance? What is rigor?
What are the qualities of our attention?
What is the value of getting lost?
What if leaving it continues it?
How do we make space for gestation within/during/throughout the creative process?
Can we be magnificent without grasping (literally and figuratively) for magnificence?
Can we see while being seen? Can we be while being beheld? Can we listen?
Can we pay attention to many things all at once?