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AN ARCHITECTURAL BODY

“Architecture must be made to fit the body as a second, third, fourth, and, when necessary, ninth (and counting) skin.” - Madeline Gins and Arakawa

 The Architectural Body, developed by artists Madeline Gins and Arakawa, offers both concept and practice in considering the profound ways that buildings and bodies mirror, mingle, and orient, ensemble. How do bodies create architectures? How do buildings act like bodies? This class imagines choreography as a well of possibility that springs from this in-between space. We will engage objects, clothing, furniture, and language, creating new relationships and events for moving with/in space.

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AT HOME IN THE HOUSE

What are the relationships between a home and a house? In this course we will animate re-frame art and performance making through the lens of affective, domestic labor, animating our studio by transposing the domestic space and the theater house. Part physical practice, part installation, part personal research, part choreographic experimentation, the rhythms of daily life will provide the fodder for this performance studio, engaging the domestic as a site of artistic production, expression, and politics. Shaping ones psyche, identity, memory, habits, and physicality, we will mine both concrete and iconic images of the domestic space to reshape its contexts, manipulate its rhythms, and, through performance, explore its affective potential. A site of nurturing, discipline, the unconscious, deviation, the familial, we will play in the theatricality of this formative, reproductive space. 

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DANCING TEXTURE

Felt, styrofoam, astroTurf, gauze, polished steel, sandstone, drift wood, jello, salad, wicker, grass, grapefruit, wool, cotton, powder, asphalt, rubber, satin, skin, blood, coral, plastic, honey comb, coca cola, lip gloss… We make our way through infinite textural qualities, densities and tones every day. They make their way through us. In this workshop we will invite our bodies to the limits textural imaginings. How does the body absorb the textured environment, objects, sounds, images? What are the textures of movement? Is texture relational, (im)material… or transitional? We will explore how textures affect and inform qualitative choices in movement and performance.  Using bodily sensations, words, and objects found in or brought to the studio we will attempt to carve out textural arches that generate unexpected states for generating movement and can be layered upon improvised or composed dance phrases and vocabularies. 

I haven’t perceived a texture until I’ve instantaneously hypothesized whether the object I’m perceiving was sedimented, extruded, laminated, granulated, polished, distressed, felted, or fluffed up. ~ Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

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CONTEMPORARY ENERGY

This is a contemporary technique class about the physicality of ENERGY. Dancing the ebbs and flows of ENERGY, we will cover ground: on and across the floor of the studio and through the landscape of own bodies – our musculatures, vibrations, densities, desires, and relationships to gravity. We will play in cycles of ENERGY, as it picks us up and drops us down. We will harness ENERGY through sequential articulation. We will dance to music and find ENERGY within it. We will get warm and sweaty. We will move. The class culminates in a long phrase that we could easily transition from studio to stage and incorporates Bell’s background in Cunningham, Klein, and Trisha Brown techniques, release technique, yoga, improvisation, contemporary ballet, and performance.

PC: Taylor Craft

PC: Taylor Craft

CONTEMPORARY TECHNIQUE: WHAT FLOWS?

This class is an exploration of flows – over flows, disjointed flows, energetic flows. Part choreographic container, part laboratory, this class will examine how flow operates within the context of contemporary, technical dancing: through both an attentive, immersive engagement within individual bodies as well as between and amongst the population in the room. Investigating flow, we will use it as a guide for creativity and belonging. The class will be structured so we can find flow in the least expected places, proposing flow as a means by which to move efficiently and sensitively through the world.

INNER SURF OUTER TURF

From the pier to the sand to the sea, this playful, physically experimental class will transform in the movement across surfaces, textures, bodies, and beach zones. Opening up the body, celebrating the day, having fun with each other, this class will groove with moments of solo exploration, group experience, sonic vibrations, and sensorial play. We’ll warm our bodies and commune on the pier, launch off and get lost in the sand, cool down and flow with the waves. Come, let’s move together… get sweaty, sandy and salty!

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MOVING FROM OUTSIDE

Where is the space for making dance? Is it composed with a floor and empty space for movement? Does it necessarily have a center and periphery? Is it a question of unobstructed pathways? This workshop will ask us to consider the where of our dancing, seeking to align with new potential configurations of space, physically and conceptually mobilizing the space wherein creative processes unfold. This workshop will consider sensory delineations of space and seek to expand, alter and articulate these frequencies. How are spaces always already thick with meaning, memory and materiality? Through active listening, modes of seeing, shifting perspective and investigating the tactile possibilities of surfaces, we’ll respond to our environment, propose movement that is always already transforming space, and make dances that bloom out from the outside.

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DANCING BODY/SITE 

dancing Body/Site is a class that works to generate movement experience, vocabulary and choreography from information found within and through interactions with space, architecture and décor. Architectural site is considered in relation to memory, function, scale, surface and perception. We will trace various paths of logic housed in found structures (as site, body, pathway), consider moments wherein respective rationales deviate or shift in the event of the dance, and experience dance that takes on new possibilities as a conversation with the site. dancing Body/Site is a class that investigates the (in)compatibilities between body and structure, movement and spatial construct. We will begin by looking at theoretical discourses assessing interactions between body and site, drafting lines of influence and mutual relation, and then move into the frame of dance-making, improvisation and performance. Expanding upon the role of venue to become one of site, spatial specificity/sensitivity and the particular architecture of place, we will consider social, historical, political dimensions of the body and self in a marked space, locating subsequent and present intersections.

READING GROUPS

Swallowed up in Mise en Scène

A series of questions set our MELT reading group into whirring motion: Where does theatrical space begin and end? What kind of stage does a choreography construct and what kind of performer or spectator is it hoping to produce? Walk into the black box, where do we go? How is this space best considered—an environment, a cave, a body, an apparatus for capture? A space for ghosts, the gaze, capitalism, immersion, hypervisibility, suspension of disbelief, spectacle, desire, mediation, excess, how does the theater (be)hold bodies in place? Does every performance construct its own theater? Let’s talk about this. Readings include excerpts from texts by Luce Irigaray and Jacques Derrida, and Boris Charmatz, interviews with luciana achugar, and a conversation between William Forsythe and Jennifer Tipton.

To live is to leave traces

Let’s discuss affect and domesticity against (dance’s) modernism and its house of objects. This reading group triangulates three poetic though potentially unrelated texts. First, a manifesto of the tropical museum that intervenes against a history of South American colonialism in thought, aesthetics, embodied practice, and arts real estate. Second, a narrative account of affective communities outside, offsides, against and withheld from the conventions of capitalist economies. Lastly, and looping back to the first, we encounter a sexy architectural analysis that configures Adolf Loos against Le Corbusier with an eye at and through interiority, framing the view, the battlefield of domestic fashion, and theatrical (notably of Josephine Baker’s) modernist, exuberant dwellings. 

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