Southern Vermont Dance Festival

A progressive approach with technology. The use of physiologic principles in the videography of dance vocabulary. The class focuses on dance educators in their safe and scientific approach to teaching technique and choreography.  It will question some age-old beliefs about the different techniques and establish good practices based on scientific research.  The class will begin with a movement and awareness of space and progress to the analysis of movment.  

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This workshop will address ways in which to explore choreography of a sociocultural/sociopolitical nature through research, movement exercises, theater games, and personal reflection. It will focus on tools related to the art of creating and crafting socially conscious choreography in an engaging and approachable fashion. The facilitator will lead participants through some best practices for engaging in this subject matter, share processes in honing tactics through trial and error, discuss specific experiences and outcomes of exploring socially conscious choreography as both choreographer and performer, as well as expand the dialogue to the participants giving them the space to brainstorm for ways in which to include sociocultural/sociopolitical topics in their practice of dance making. Participants will be encouraged to continually discuss and reflect on their experience throughout the process, and by the end of their experience they will leave with the shared tools of the facilitator, their own tools, as well as their own short collaborative work. This session will look to inspire other choreographers to discuss local, national and international issues both past and present through the medium of dance. By creating a safe space to explore our social and political beliefs we are able to make profound connections between our understanding of ourselves, our immediate surroundings and our global community. The creative process becomes both interdisciplinary and introspective. By creating a nexus with our audiences we engage an educated and socially active body politic, and elucidate the tremendous importance of utilizing dance as a conduit of change. 

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In this workshop we will use dance explorations to reflect on our individual relationships to place, history and community. Whether we look at how we were raised, or communities and practices we only briefly touch, our bodies are always situated in culture. Through investigating how culture lives in our bodies we can develop greater self awareness and increase our capacity to engage with the unfamiliar. We will begin with a guided warm-up, listening to our bodies and situating ourselves in the space. From this basis of physical self-awareness, we will generate individual material recalling and cultivating experiences of cultural identity, familiarity, and difference in our lives. We will then work with partners, witness each other’s movement, and amplify any points of connection. We will use drawing, short written reflections, and verbal sharing in combination with our movement work.

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This is about seeing dance, and understanding how it might be translated into two dimensional still images. We won’t use camera at all, and won't engage in any "tech speak". Instead, we’ll look together at several short dance pieces — deciding exactly which images might tell the story of that dance, seeing if there is one “iconic” image, etc. The workshop will be useful not just for those who want to photograph dance, but also for dancers and choreographers to better understand how their pieces might best be photographed, or for anybody seriously interested in photography. The main theme will be “Look before you photograph” and we'll focus on how to look inward and outward.

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This course is for dancers who want to dance and improvise more musically. Through the anatomy of meters, and various dance rhythms (Western and non-Western), we learn about musical concepts through moving. Topics to explore include: (1) When we suspend a movement in the air, what actually happens musically? (2) Jose Limon talks about succession. How can we approach “succession” through our understanding of the musical concept of "sequence"? (3) In some cultures, dancers count 1-2-3-4. Musicians often find it confusing as they perceive music through macro beats, meter and phrasing. Can we establish a common vocabulary? (4) Laban talks about "space," how can we make better use of space through our understanding of melodic direction? (5) Is dance and music two separate fields after all? Can we find common ground? In this course, we will choreograph a piece together using the tools of non-chord tones, sequence, phrasing, and melodic direction.

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