August 4 – 10, 2024 : I will once again be teaching an intensive workshop entitled Combining Disciplines for Creative Practice – a workshop exploring improvisational and somatic approaches to dance making- at Bearnstow on Parker Pond in Maine.
This creative residency is a return to community. Community of dance and landscape, learning more together about our personal natures within the natural setting of beautiful Bearnstow. It is a renewal and a recharge.
The workshop itself brings together decades of dance and improvisation, somatic research, theater of the body and vocal practices. It will offer students the opportunity to discover the innate wisdom of the body as source and towards creative performance. Basic anatomy and physiology expand our range of choice and the quality of movement and voice and enable us to make the invisible visible. Our investigations will include the external space, time and place, using the environment of Bearnstow as the landscape of the imagination.
Through improvisation and composition we will explore musicality and phrasing, how the senses influence and motivate our movement choices, and how we craft time and space. We will explore and work in all of Bearnstow—forest, lake, paths, cabins, weather. There will be time each day for an early morning yoga class, group sessions, and individual time for exploring and developing material. And there will be time to wander in the wonder of Bearnstow for research and relaxation. Each student will keep a journal of activities, experiences, observations, and thoughts that will be a blueprint for the making of work that will be informally shared with one another at the end of the workshop.
The time at Bearnstow will be very much about the unfolding of each participant’s imagination and the shaping and crafting of it as we engage within community and all that is the nature of Bearnstow.