Mondays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays

Class Slot #1: 8 am – 10 am
Class Slot #2: 10:15 am – 12:15 pm
Class Slot #3: 1:30 pm – 3:30 pm
Class Slot #4: 3:45 pm – 5:45 pm (Footprints rehearsals will continue until 7 pm)

All full time Six Week School students will choose 3 of the 4 class slots for their 6WS Schedule. Registration for these classes will be Tuesday, June 19.

6WS classes are supplemented by the WFSS classes (Wednesdays, Friday evenings, Saturdays, Sundays)

6WS CLASS DESCRIPTIONS

as of February 3, 2012
**Keep Checking Back For Updates * Classes and Faculty Subject to Change!**

Contemporary Technique

Rodger Belman
Drawing from an eclectic mix of modern techniques and somatic principles, this class focuses on alignment and efficient, effective and dynamic movement through space. Starting with floor work and moving into standing, center and across the floor sequences, we will explore movement initiation, sequencing, weight and moving into and out of the floor with ease and confidence. We will investigate the tiniest, almost imperceptible shift in the body to the biggest full-bodied, space-eating movement. Together we will fly, fall, float, suspend, roll, invert, take risks, and sometimes play.

Elisa Clark
Elisa Clark's modern technique class begins with a structured warm-up that focuses on alignment, placement, weight-shifting  and musicality, and culminates with dynamic dance phrases that encourage students to move through space using different qualitative approaches.  In this class, dancers will have the opportunity to touch upon a variety of material that is inspired by Robert Battle, Lar Lubovitch and Mark Morris, the choreographers with whom Clark has worked most intimately with.

Shani Collins
In class we view dance as a tool for presence, confrontation, and physical expression by emphasizing placement, ease of movement, rhythmic presence, and personal investigation. We will emphasize and develop key movement elements drawing from post/modern and contemporary West African Dance. We will approach studio time as a way to establish a discipline in the body and work to identify the system of skeletal and muscular support in our individual bodies. Special attention is given to the arms/ hands and to coordination as we explore multi-lingual forms of movement. 

Mark Dendy
Class will consist of holistic floor work focusing on bones and joints, movement initiation, breath and stretch. Quadrapedal motion will be explored. There will be a short standing series of movement sequences that will incorporate some western "legacy" techniques and then phrasework in Dendy's kinetic no-holes-barred go-for-it style.

Michelle Gibson
Technique class will focus on movement in connection to aesthetics of the African Diaspora. A combination of traditional and cultural vocabulary fused with contemporary modern dance forms. Drop and recover, undulations, articulation of feet and arms, weight placement, percussive movement in relation to rhythm and pelvic isolations will be addressed. Modern technique focusing on balance, alignment, space / time, and body awareness. Basic Pilate's warm up to support and strengthen the center core will be included daily. Daily instruction will also involve of a series of warm up and breathing exercises, center floor stretches, traveling progressions, and choreographed phrases. In addition to technique, musicality in support of movement will also be explored.

Mark Haim
This class generally starts on the floor and rises up to standing and then spreads out into space. The ways in which we do that progression change and mutate; however, some basic principles appear again and again throughout the mutations: spatial clarity, muscle efficiency, power of expression, timing, and drawing out the imagination.

Gerri Houlihan
The class is based on many of the principles from Limon technique. The center warm-up incorporates plies, tendus, rond de jambes, etc. from traditional techniques, with an emphasis on awareness of proper alignment, breath, weight and rhythm. Across the floor phrases explore these same concerns as they relate to musicality, organic movement connections, and a full and dynamic use of space.

Paul Matteson
An ensemble-oriented investigation of expansively off-balanced yet precise multi-focused movement. Class begins with sensation-based improvisations and global awareness practices to help encourage limitless mind/body response when tackling set movement material. After opening up, an evolving series of buoyant sequential patterns challenge and cultivate a "released" or non-habitual dancing body free to move in parts or as a full unit with energy, rhythmic sharpness, and fluid range. The patterns build towards a precarious traveling phrase with ever re-directing spiraling pathways. Movement vocabulary is taught by breaking down in detail body-part initiations paying particular attention to safety while dancing fearlessly in the present moment.

Pamela Pietro
Pamela Pietro's teaching exists to widen the physical range and mental awareness of dancers' technical capabilities. Pamela's thorough knowledge and principles of strengthening and alignment lead to full physical charge and response, incorporating floor and upper body that leads to the expansive movement phrases explored across the floor. The class is pure physicality while motivating the body with clear detail, focus and intent.

Trebien Pollard
The class is a contemporary look at traditional ideals, emphasizing proper alignment through spinal isolations, joint mobilization, core strengthening and breathing patterns. The movement material is designed to increase the awareness of the pelvic floor and to deepen the understanding of the overall connectivity of the core to the limbs, while helping to promote the safe usage of the body in motion.

Stuart Singer
Class Description Coming Soon!

Abby Yager
My class is designed to cultivate awareness. It trains the eye to see and analyze as well as the body to express movement. It draws on various somatic practices including The Alexander Technique, Yoga, Qi Gong and Klein Technique to look at movement from the inside out placing emphasis on anatomic efficiency, freedom in the joints, use of weight, swing, and breath. Special attention is paid to mechanical specificity, spatial and directional clarity, points of initiation, and cause and effect.

Ming Yang
This class looks at movement from the inside out. It places emphasis on anatomic efficiency, finding freedom in the joints, use of weight, swing, and breath, generally explores the following principles: moving from a grounded base of support, mobilizing weight three-dimensionally through space, exploring movement in and out vertical alignment/in and out of the floor, differentiating between whole body and sequential actions, and defining rhythmic accuracy both metered and non-metered. Special attention is paid to mechanical specificity, points of initiation, and spatial/directional clarity.

Gwen Welliver
This movement class will develop from simple skeletal mobility sequences to full-out movement forms. Emphasis will be places on the joints, examining how their range of motion relates to alignment, support and weight in the course of movement. The lines inherent in human anatomy can generate virtually every aspect of choreography, from qualitative execution to dramatic substance. This class will culminate in learning, observing and discussing longer movement phrases.

Jesse Zaritt
Each class begins with practices that activate a sense of availability. We find ways to let go of tension, fixed habits and perceptual/intellectual rigidity. Improvisational and choreographed exercises help us to find openness, clarity, and length in our bodies.
Pleasure is linked to effort, power and strength as the class progresses and as the choreographed exercises become more complex. Phrase work allows us to research how to utilize physical states and forces such as continuous motion, spiral/rotation, sequential articulation and momentum. Throughout the class, we will encourage each other to embrace and extend our physical capacities as empowered, confident movers. Technique class will also be a place of critical thinking. The material we study exists to nourish our creative bodies/minds, challenging us to re-articulate/re-imagine our relationships to codified movement systems.

 

Ballet

Jeffery Bullock
Traditional ballet forms are recognized and extended to include new dance ideas and practices for the contemporary dancing artist/dancing body. Through barre, centre work and locomotion across the floor, ballet forms are danced out. Special attention is given to developing the skills necessary to become an expressive performer. The class will focus on detailing small positions/actions and then extending/ connecting them to large full-body dancing. Attention to proper alignment and placement facilitating efficient and safe dancing is constant. There will be select days for learning ballet repertory.

Elizabeth Corbett
This ballet class begins with a pre-barre warm-up and ends with grande allegro combinations and some phrase work drawn from the Forsythe project. We'll take our time at the barre to work on grounding and connections and go on from there with breath and release to explore a broad range of balletic language. Directions in the body and in space, differentiation in movement qualities and rhythm will be areas of focus.

 

Composition

Rodger Belman
Through improvisational and compositional exercises, students will generate material to create solo, duet, and group studies in a safe and supportive environment. Students will be encouraged to take risks as they explore and investigate movement ideas and acknowledge and honor their intuitive creative tendencies and choices. Through guidance, classmate support and feedback, and self-reflection, students will tap into their self-knowledge and learn to communicate what they know, thus finding their own unique choreographic voice.

Mark Haim & Ming-Lung Yang
Theoretical and practical choreographic applications for developing either solo or group dance taught by Mark Haim and Ming-Lung Yang. This class is designed for students to explore meanings of space, time and energy in depth through a variety of view points, to extract the essences of movements, ideas, and imagery, and transform them into both composed and improvised movement, to discover their unique choreographic voice, and to practice articulating their observations and feedback. The first three weeks with Yang consist of short assignments and studies. The second three weeks with Haim consist of working on a single, larger work to be presented to the ADF community the last days of the festival. 

Amanda Miller
In the composition class for this summer we will be working on dissecting movement and ideas, ingrained habits and patterns of thinking and moving. We will create space for our new compositions, thoughts, choreographies and imagination; working with tools of improvisation including the Rudolf Laban 9 pointe system. At the end of the process we will have a demonstration of our work, reflecting the new individual forms and ideas in our movement.

Jillian Peña
In this class, we'll use a variety of methods to tear apart what we think it means to "choreograph" something. Using technology, philosophy, visual arts, and anything else we can think of, we'll redefine the world for ourselves and the world. We will make a lot of work that will go: in the garbage, on the internet, in our fond memories, straight to Broadway.

Gwen Welliver | Dance Making/Visual Prompts
This workshop focuses on translating images from one form or medium into another. Working with a wide variety of prompts, we will explore both figurative and nonfigurative forms. The goal is to investigate increasingly complex artifacts and consider each a source for developing movement. Class will be conducted as a studio seminar; we will use analytical exercises and impulsive improvisations to complete a movement-based project each week.

Ming-Lung Yang
Class Description Coming Soon!

Jesse Zaritt | Composition/Performance: Activism, Improvisation and the Practice of Performance
The first three weeks of this course will investigate relationships between activism and choreography, addressing the following questions: How can art making be a form of activism? In what ways can dance artists bring concerns for justice and social change to their choreographic projects? How can the effectiveness of these projects be discussed? Neil Harris and Jesse Zaritt will co-teach the first three weeks of this class. Our studio work will draw on established models that bring together performance and social change such as Augusto Boal's Theater of the Oppressed. The focus, however, will be on developing new ways to connect choreography, performance and activism. Jesse Zaritt will teach the second part of this course, which will continue an investigation of the relationship between art and activism, but through the lens of performance practice rather than choreography. During this portion of the class, we will work with improvised performance scores. We will use these scores to challenge and re-imagine the conventions of dance performance. In order to construct these scores, we will research the work of visual/performing artists as well as draw from our experiences merging activist and dance practices. We will facilitate an open space for discovery and change. The course will culminate in a performance for the ADF community.

Repertory/Performance

Mark Dendy
Mark will be developing material for a new work using plastic water bottles, text, strenuous movement and body noises. The piece will explore themes of climate change. The students will construct a monster made of water bottles that will move as a puppet. Mark will explore his daring physicality and wit with the dancers. The dancers will collaborate improvisationally and compositionally with Dendy as well.

Mark Haim
In this class, we will either re-stage an already existing dance or create a new dance and share it with the ADF community sometime during the festival. Classes are in the form of a company rehearsal, and thus consistent attendance and professional behavior are required.

Paul Matteson
Partnering Possibilities
A feast of possibilities for imaginative, articulate partnering.   Task-based guided improvisations exploring weight sharing, body-part manipulations, and ways of harnessing forces of momentum help develop the trust and the responsibility that is essential when moving in close proximity and in contact with other bodies. In duets-trios-groups, collaborative dances are created quickly so at to block out debilitating editing tendencies. Progressions of reconstruction steps work to organically and inorganically push the evolving compositions into new worlds of detail and timing.  There is always a showing in the last part of class, with time to reconfigure and experiment based on outside eye observations.

Ursula Payne
Ursula Payne will reconstruct from Labanotation Score "Primate" choreographed by Robert Battle in 2006 to music by Philip Hamilton. Mr. Battle describes the work as "a very stylized one-act ritual". The students will experience the art of dance reconstruction within a contemporary performance process.

Pamela Pietro | Repertory for 16 – 18 year olds
A highly collaborative and creative process involving young artists with inquisitive minds. We will be building a dance based on community. This class will not be learning a piece of past repertory but building a piece involving all participants in the class. Material will be generated through improvisation and compositional practices, partnering skills, daily journal writing and feedback about our process.

Trebien Pollard
This class will be devoted to the improvisational elements of non-gender specific, partnering techniques. Selected excerpts of Pilobolus repertory will be taught to emphasize weight-sharing and trust building skills through a collaborative effort.

Stuart Singer
What does it mean to learn repertory?  What’s essential—the movement or the structure by which it was created?  We’ll actively explore these and other questions, using Bill T. Jones' Chapel/Chapter as a resource.  Assume you’ll learn phrase material and excerpts from the work; make and manipulate phrase material; and reexamine the definitions of dancer, choreographer, and performer, and perhaps end up erasing those distinctions.  We will create a final product of sorts, based on the material we learn and create together.

Andrea Weber
The Cunningham Repertory class will explore the diversity and complexity of Merce's work over the more than 50 years he was creating pieces. We will do a decade a week starting with the 1960s and finishing with the 2000s. In the six week period we will learn excerpts of choreography that will delve into space and time, rhythmic footwork, clarity of line, and stillness. We will find that the difficulty in the technique was always present in Merce's work, yet as the decades progressed and Merce's chance procedures evolved the work gained a denser integration. At the end of the Intensive we will have a showing of an "Event", the excerpts put together in a new order just for this occasion. "Events are Cunningham's signature, site-specific choreographic collages that incorporate excerpts from past and current repertory works, and are often created for unconventional performance spaces such as museums and galleries."

Ming-Lung Yang
Based on the ideas from an evening length work entitled "2020", a collaboration with visual artist Peter Warren and composer Chris Peck which premiered in 2004, we will work together to recreate the final section of the piece. What we choose to see in a moving picture and how we steer focus will be the prime elements in the composition.

Elisa Clark
Mark Morris Repertory
Students will learn excerpts from two Morris works, Grand Duo and Bedtime, exploring very different movement qualities. Grand Duo is a favorite Morris group work choreographed to the music of Lou Harrison, while Bedtime, set to music by Schubert, is much more lyrical.

Footprints
6WS students will have the opportunity to audition for ADF's Footprints program. Students chosen to perform in a Footprints piece will have the chance to study intensively with an emerging choreographer to create a new work for the full 6 weeks. Footprints gives students a chance to experience working within a professional dance company environment. They will also have the rare opportunity to perform on ADF's main stage (Reynolds Industries Theater) as a fully produced part of the ADF performance series during the last week of the festival. The 2012 Footprints artists will be announced in the spring.

Improvisation

Ishmael Houston-Jones, Curt Haworth and Felice Wolfzahn | Improvisation Strategies
This class is rooted in many different forms of improvisation and will offer students a foundation in diverse techniques of instinctive, intuitive, non-set dances. The class builds upon the principles of Contact and Releasing to give students a strong, personal movement foundation. It teaches students to use senses other than sight when improvising and asks that they allow their dances be guided by touch and sound as well as by narrative and emotion. Another component of the class is the use of both spoken and written text and the use of personal material. Students are asked to use language in an automatic and improvisational way. Then they are instructed to use the resultant text as a prompt to movement. This may lead to short solo or group pieces. As part of Improvisation Strategies Ishmael Houston-Jones will be teaching for the entire 6 weeks of the Festival while Curt Haworth will be teaching Contact Improvisation in weeks 1 - 3 and Yvonne Meier will be teaching Releasing and Authentic Movement in weeks 4 - 6.

Curt Haworth | Contact Improvisation: Weeks 1 - 3 … part of Improvisation Strategies
This is a class that focuses on perception and dancing in contact with another person or the environment using shared weight, momentum and gravity…. partnering, dancing closely, touching, supporting, lifting. We will explore such skills as rolling, falling, and sharing weight through easy compression and counter balance. In this class we will break down and explore the techniques of sloughing and rolling points and explore basic forms such as body surfing and tabletops. Expect to use the whole body as a surface for encounters with the floor, another human, and the world around you The Class will dedicate ample time to open movement improvisations and explorations. Contact is ever evolving and we may delve into performance aspects of the form such as Lisa Nelson's Tuning Score.

Felice Wolfzahn: Weeks 4-6… part of Improvisation Strategies
Authentic Movement
Authentic movement is a simple form where dancers move with eyes closed in the presence of a witness. The depth emerges from this simplicity in that the witness holds the dancer in a supportive space where there is no judgment about moving in a right or wrong way. Dancers allow movement to emerge freely from any source, conscious or unconscious, including sensations, imagery, gesture, playfulness, movement integrations, or memories. Through this experience, the dancers have an opportunity to find their own path toward connecting deeper to their authentic selves and their own way of moving.

Released based movement
This class will combine exercises and structures drawing form the Alexander Technique, Contact Improvisation, and Release technique. We’ll work on finding ways to deepen in our physical and intellectual understanding of the body to find more efficient ways of moving. We’ll work with imagery, breath, partnering, and hands-on exercises that will guide us towards deeper access to moving with less tension and fuller expression.

 

African Technique Workshop

Sherone Price
This class will introduce students to a non-western dance form that has a long, varied history and plays a central role in the socio/spiritual life of the African people. The class will learn the dance vocabulary, perform and view a variety of styles and become familiar with rhythms and music of various African techniques.

Hip Hop

Teena Marie Custer
This beginning/intermediate level class will introduce students to the foundational vocabulary of street dances that originated in the 70's during the birth of the hip hop culture, and remain under the umbrella of hip hop dance today. Each class will be an introduction to the technique behind styles such as locking, popping, b-boying/b-girling, house, and various social dances. Students will also be exposed to how these techniques are used in commercial and theatrical hip hop choreography, as well as freestyling.

LaShawn Jones
This class teaches a combination of fast-paced, smooth & groovy and hard-hitting choreography. There is an emphasis on putting intention behind all movements and telling a story and/or accentuating the beats with your body. Come prepared to sweat and have a fun and exciting time.

Voice and Gesture

Ellen Hemphill & Rafael Lopez-Barrantes | Voice/Gesture Exploration for Performance Art
This performance art oriented class is based on the voice work of the Roy Hart Theatre of France. The voice of each individual as well as the group "voice" will be explored in such a way as to contact sources of energy hidden deep within the body. The class begins with the voice as it is in each unique individual. Therefore, it is not necessary to have had previous voice training to discover what possible expression there is in each voice. The movement/gesture work in the class comes from the world of dance-theatre and will be explored in connection to the voice expression. We will use text and song and work towards informal showings of class excerpts. All the work is intended to combine exercises, voice, text and movement that can be used as building blocks towards performance.