Photo: Antonia Valentina
Cover Photo: Dayna Szyndrowski
Class Description:
This class will be a re-emergence into our dancing to start off the year, mostly centred on improvisatory approaches to readiness, responsiveness and expanding our possibilities for choice.
We’ll begin by warming up our joints and limb/spine connections, moving into guided games and cues to empower our supple bodies and attention to move low, high, fast, slow, and between self and group awareness. We’ll move across the floor using images as strategies for accessing otherwise ways of approaching our movement.
Using one centre phrase as a grounding spell for getting sweaty, taking space and partnering with the floor, we’ll usher in a closing space to improvise and witness each other through drawing, writing, or simply watching.
**It’s cold + flu season! If you wish to dance without a mask, please take a covid test to assure that you are negative. If you show signs of covid or other flu/respiratory illness, please don’t attend class. If you have tested positive for COVID 19, be sure to have received a negative antigen test result before attending classes. Thank you!
I am a settler of European ancestry, a queer dancer, writer, choreographer, support worker and facilitator raised and living here on stolen Squamish, Musqueam and Tsleil-Waututh lands. My practice includes making dances, writing about dances, dancing, teaching, and community actions, often overlapping and blurring together. Dance is the practice through which I sense and engage with the world around me, build nervous-system resilience, and gather in creative resistance and joy with existing and emergent community.
My training is based in Western-European contemporary dance technique, contact improvisation and somatic movement modalities. After graduating from Modus Operandi training program, I have continued my dance training as a dedicated student of Peter Bingham (contact improvisation) Helen Walkley (improvisation), and Stephanie Skura (Open Source Forms), and am in ongoing mentorship around creative practice and facilitation with Lee Su-Feh. As a teacher, I am committed to anti-oppressive frameworks, unlearning unhealthy relationships to obedience and power, and creating spaces where agency, rigorous play, and selfhood can flourish.