SFD+I Research Week 2027

Mon – Wed 1 – 3 PM, Fri 1 – 5 PM, Sat 1 – 3 PM, Studio.How do we prepare for circumstances that are impossible to prepare for? How does one prepare for scenarios like death and loneliness, moments where one is at their most vulnerable? Raja Feather Kelly’s Honest Reactions to Imaginary Situations is an exercise in imagining what it looks like to dramatize these scenarios through dance and movement; making the inexplicable visible and real.There are seven major areas of focus in this exercise: Extempore, Interrogation, Debate, Agility, Nothing, Tension, and Freedom. Each of these can help artists interrogate how to find one’s most honest self.BIO
Raja Feather Kelly is a choreographer and director and the Artistic Director of the feath3r theory (TF3T), the Brooklyn-based dance-theatre-media company he founded in 2009. Over the past decade, he has created 19 evening-length works with TF3T to critical acclaim, most recently Bunny Bunny at The Invisible Dog.In 2026, TF3T will present a triptych titled A Body of Dangerous Ideas: Part 1: The (a) Point Between 2 (or more) Confessions, choreographed by Bill T. Jones and performed by Kelly; Part 2: Matter., choreographed and performed by Kelly and Spencer James Weidie; and Part 3: DOOMERS, performed by the feath3r theory.In 2025, Kelly served as Production Dramaturg for Elle Barbara’s AUTOGYNEGAMY at the National Arts Centre and as a DanceWEB Mentor at the ImPulsTanz Dance Festival. He will return in 2026 to direct Barbara’s one-man show at Théâtre Outremont and again serve as DanceWEB Mentor in Vienna.Recent projects include co-directing Michael R. Jackson’s Complications in Sue at Opera Philadelphia with Zack Winokur, starring Justin Vivian Bond; choreography for Missy Mazzoli’s Lincoln in the Bardo at the Metropolitan Opera. Kelly choreographed the Tony Award–winning Broadway musical A Strange Loop and Fairview at SoHo Rep, Berkeley Repertory Theatre, and Theatre for a New Audience—both winners of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His direction and choreography credits also include White Girl in Danger, SUFFS, Lempicka, The Listeners at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Macbeth in Stride at Brooklyn Academy of Music, and his playwriting debut The Fires, a New York Times Critics’ Pick at SoHo Rep in 2024.His honors include a 2025 Doris Duke Artist Award, a 2025 Research Fellowship from the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, a Princeton University Arts Fellowship (2023–2025), an Obie Award, Outer Critics Circle Award honor, a Creative Capital Award, three Princess Grace Foundation-USA Awards, and a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award.Born in Fort Hood, Kelly holds a B.A. from Connecticut College and completed a certificate at the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute. Kelly is currently the guest curator for the New York Live Arts Live Artery Festival.

Mon – Wed 1 – 3 PM, Fri 1 – 5 PM, Sat 1 – 3 PM, Fine Arts Studio.This workshop will explore disorientation as dancing into liberation, release, wildness and joy. Drawing from mayfield’s practice of Improvising While Black or IWB, we will practice arriving, falling, body surfing, catching spirit, riding waves, cosmic vocalizing, decomposing dance, deep belly laughter, and play. In the eye of societal storms, I will also invite participants into moments of collective movement and solidarity.BIO
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall, a Princeton Hodder Fellow alum, and most recently a Creative Time Research & Development fellow. They love living by the sea.

Mon – Wed 1 – 3 PM, Fri 1 – 5 PM, Sat 1 – 3 PM, Mainstage.This workshop will focus on re-learning the body’s mechanics in new spaces. It will engage the body and mind simultaneously as one works to strengthen the other. This movement system gives the practitioner a new way to approach space and movement to create new vocabulary with purpose.Students should bring long sleeves, loose fitting long pants or tights, knee pads, sneakers (bare feet are ok) and a hat or hoodie.BIO
Raphael Xavier is a professional breaker/dancer and artist, working in a variety of fields including music, performance, photography, and film. As a Breaking practitioner since 1983, he was inducted into the Breaking Hall of Fame class of 2025 and honored with a citation and proclamation from NYC. Xavier's work focuses on the longevity and maturity of Breaking highlighting personal topics. He continues to learn and recreate new ways to expand the vocabulary of Breaking through practice, performance, and staying present in the community. His extensive research in Hip Hop forms and culture, specifically Breaking, has led to the creation of Ground-Core, a Somatic dance technique that gives the practitioner a better understanding of the body within all dance forms. His goal is to make the form accessible to any body type and level. Ground-Core technique is featured in most of his choreography and repertory works. Xavier has been honored with a Pew Fellowship in dance (2013), a Guggenheim Fellowship in choreography (2016), and a United States Artists Fellowship in performance (2016). He is a Professor/lecturer at Princeton University teaching Breaking and comparative practice and aesthetics of Hip Hop.

Mon – Wed 1 – 3 PM, Fri 1 – 5 PM, Sat 1 – 3 PM, Erickson Theatre.In Mapping Gestures: Remembering Black M/Othering Choreographies for Intergenerational Praxis, Jasmine Hearn shares choreographies and improvisation recipes that invite participants to move, sound, sing, write, rest, remember, and imagine.Together we will warm up our bodies, voices, senses, imaginations, and memory with a guided sequence of prompts and exercises sourced from an intersection of lessons and lineages including movement traditions such as jazz, zydeco, ballet, modern, post-modern, Dunham technique, flight, care practices, BodyMindMovement, and slow cooking. A mixing and layering of these lessons and lineages, the creative container encourages participation in practices of referencing our teachers while naming individual curiosities for collective attention and movement.Bring an archival device: body, journal, pens, pencils.BIO
Jasmine Hearn (they/them), born and raised on seized and occupied lands of the Akokisa, Atapke, Deadose, and Karankawa peoples, is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, teacher, doula, dancer, performer, and organizer. They are committed to performance as an expansive practice that includes a spectrum of dance and somatic traditions, sound design, garment design, film, and the archiving of matrilineal memories. They give gratitude to Spirit, their mothers and aunties, and all the mothering Black people who have supported their moving, remembering body.Named one of Dance Magazine’s Harkness Promise awardees (2026) and Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch” (2025), Jasmine is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists Award (2023), a Cynthia Hazen Polsky and Leon Polsky Rome Prize in Design with Athena Kokoronis of DPA (2023), and also awarded two NY Dance and Performance Bessie Awards for Outstanding Performer (2021, 2017 as part of the performance cast of skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds).Jasmine directs archive and performance project, Memory Fleet, which has been awarded a Creative Capital Award (2022), a Creation Fund Award from National Performance Network (2022), and a National Dance Production Grant from New England Foundation of the Arts (2023). With its premiere in Houston, TX as part of DiverseWorks spring 2024 season, Memory Fleet continued its performance series at Kelly Strayhorn Theater in April 2026 and was co-presented by the Chocolate Factory Theater and New York Live Arts last June.Jasmine has been an artist in residence at LiveFeed Creative Residency at New York Live Arts (2023-2026) and at Summer Stages Dance at The Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston (2024). They have also been invited as a researcher in residence as a part of joint initiative supported by the Center of Engaged Research and Collaborative Learning (CERCL) at Rice University and the African American Historical Research Center – Gregory Campus (2025).Jasmine’s body of performance work has been presented at the Mattatoio presented by Spazio Griot (Rome, Italy), Ackerstadst Palast (Berlin, Germany), Ford Foundation with Vanessa German (NY, NY), Kelly Strayhorn Theater (Pittsburgh, PA), Danspace Project (NY, NY), the Hobby Center for Performing Arts (Houston, TX), and additional performance venues and site specific locations internationally.Jasmine has collaborated with Bill T. Jones, Saul Williams, Solange, Alisha B. Wormsley, okwui okpokwasili, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Tsedaye Makonnen, Holly Bass, Bebe Miller, Jonathan González, Staycee Pearl, will rawls, and with dance companies Urban Bush Women, Hélène Simoneau Danse, and David Dorfman Dance, presenting choreographic work at the Metropolitan Museum, BAM, New York Live Arts, Guggenheim Museum, Getty Center, Venice Biennale, and Carnegie Museum of Art. Jasmine teaches at Bennington College as visiting guest faculty as a part of the BFA Dance Lab.

Mon Aug 2 – Wed Aug 4 + Fri Aug 6, 10 AM – 12 PM, Fine Arts Studio.The entry point of this intensive is a deep practice in kinesthetic listening and training the reflexes to be responsive and receptive to constantly shifting conditions. Each person/body is welcome with their unique circumstances, orientations, identities, and movement sensibilities. This is an investigation of presence and each mover’s layered physical landscapes, engaging structures and improvisational frames that invite curiosity, willingness, risk, and play. How does our listening allow for myriad perspectives to co-exist and merge into nuanced communications with self, others, and the environment through touch?We will explore solo, duet, and group practices rooted in fundamental principles of Contact Improvisation: shifting points of contact, counter-balance, falling, recovering, weight sharing, touch and tone, rolling, spiraling, and momentum through spherical space. We will move and sense with our breath, listen to the sounds that shape our surroundings, see and be seen through shifting modes of perception, and attune to the subtle ecosystems within and around us.Essential to our work together is trust, consent, boundaries, agency, self-care, and collective care. Together, we will learn CI’s principles while co-creating with what is present and evolving.BIO
Hannah Rice is a dance researcher, artist and educator based out of Columbus, Ohio. Originally from Seattle, Washington, she graduated cum laude from Cornish College of the Arts in 2018 with a BFA in dance and a Pilates teaching certification. Hannah's creative work researches the body’s relationship to sound and place. She explores these motifs through writing and choreographic movement scores in response to sites. Previous work of hers has been shown at Jack Straw Cultural Center, Gallery 1412, The Shed Arts Space. Hannah has also worked extensively with Alia Swersky, creating duet and ensemble dance material. Their work has been presented at Base Experimental Arts + Space, The Good Shepherd Center, MAD Art Gallery, Cornish Playhouse, with CO– and Antipode Gallery in Seattle. She has also worked as a choreographer and dancer with film makers and musicians based out of Seattle and New York. Additionally, her work has been shown at The University of Virginia Theater Department and at Aimed Dance Festival in Texas. Hannah is currently an MFA candidate at The Ohio State University in the Department of Dance, where she teaches and studies dance making and scholarship.Alia Swersky is a movement artist, performer, and educator deeply engaged in dance improvisation, durational time-based art, site-specific performance, film, and environmental installation. She holds a BFA in Dance from Cornish College of the Arts and an MFA in Dance from the University of Washington. She is currently an Assistant Professor and Chair of Dance at Cornish College of the Arts Seattle University.Based in Seattle, Swersky has been teaching, performing, and creating work for more than two decades. Her artistic path over the last two decades has been shaped by a yearning for deep and meaningful connections with people and places. As a co-creator, ritual maker, and a “horizontal” director, she seeks to touch others through dance, somatic presence, vulnerability, and fierceness. Her work ranges from full audience participation to intimate acts of one-to-one performances, site-specific dances for film and live performance, as well as durational time-based art that includes physical acts of endurance, repetition, stillness, subtlety, singing, soft energetic grace, abstraction, caricature, and a deconstruction of clichés such as extreme high femme expressions. Her teaching and art-making seek to create practices that embrace endurance on stage and in life as acts of resistance, resilience, release, and beauty.The last five years of her artistic work has either been in solo or in collaboration with Hannah Rice, her creative collaborator. She also works consistently with Jonathan Rodriguez and Sandesh Nagaraj of Till the Teeth. Her collaborative work often bridges disciplines, incorporating sound, visual environment, and spatial relationships as integral components of performance.For some of her performance history; Swersky toured nationally and internationally as a member of the LeGendre Performance Group. She has also collaborated with numerous Seattle-based artists and companies, including The Maureen Whiting Company, Khambatta Dance Company, Jurg Koch, KT Niehoff, and Salt Horse.In addition to her university teaching, Swersky has contributed extensively to the Seattle dance community. She has taught at Velocity’s Strictly Seattle Festival and the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation (now known as SFD+I). She was a longtime co-artistic director of Dance Art Group (DAG), a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting dance improvisation and somatic education in the Seattle area, including producing the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation for 12 + years.Across her artistic and educational work, Swersky is committed to cultivating spaces that value process, attentiveness, and embodied inquiry. Her practice continues to evolve through collaboration, improvisation, and an ongoing dedication to the transformative possibilities of artistic practices.

Mon Aug 2 – Wed Aug 4 + Fri Aug 6, 10 AM – 12 PM, Mainstage.How does a city choreograph its inhabitants? What movements are encouraged, prohibited, or rendered invisible through architecture and urban planning?The Public Is a Choreography is a four-day laboratory investigating the relationships between movement, architectural theory, psychogeography, and the social production of space. Drawing from the Situationist practice of the dérive, or drift, we will approach the city as a choreographic field, examining how pathways, thresholds, boundaries, and systems of circulation organize our movements and encounters.Through walking scores, spatial mapping, collective observation, and experiments in assembly and dispersal, participants will develop choreographic propositions that engage the built environment as both material and collaborator. Our research will culminate in a proposed public performance or series of site-responsive interventions in Seattle, developed in coordination with the festival.BIO
Jonathan González is an artist, choreographer, and writer working across live performance, moving image, and text. Their practice considers the relationships between bodily sensation, landscape, architecture, and the historical conditions of place. Through durational performances, choreographic scores, and site-specific encounters, González examines how bodies inhabit, perceive, and alter their surroundings.Their work has been presented internationally, including at the 2026 Whitney Biennial and the 59th Carnegie International. They are the author of Ways to Move (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2025). González's distinctions include a Pew Fellowship, the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts, a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Fellowship, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant to Artists.González is an Assistant Professor of Dance and Director of the MFA Program in Dance at Hunter College, City University of New York.

Mon Aug 2 – Wed Aug 4, 4 – 6 PM, Mainstage.This creative lab experiments with translation as a medium and practical method for improvising across expressive forms, including movement, voice, visual art and the written word. In our creative practice, Little Brown Language has used translation to navigate the complex experience of communicating meaning across cultural borders. Activities may include meditation, vocal work, freewriting, drawing, and structured improvisation. We are enthusiastic to invite artists interested in decolonial research practice and working at the intersections of ritual and performance.BIO
Little Brown Language is a Seattle-based artist collaborative who work at the intersections of performance and ritual, imagining new forms of cultural solidarity through embodied practice. Our creative process centers translation as a medium for communicating across forms of dance, poetry, music and visual art. We are guided by a collective commitment to undoing colonial relationships with land, community, culture and lineage. We work to build worlds in which hidden histories of our communities become felt and seen. We've performed in theater, gallery, community and outdoor spaces, for On the Boards North West New Works Festival, Wing Luke Museum, Artists at the Center, Reflections Dance Festival, and Base Experimental Arts + Space. We have collaborated or partnered with various artists and institutions including A Resting Place, ARTS at King Street Station, Black Collectivity, Friends of the Waterfront Seattle, Ben Hunter, Movimiento AfroLatino Seattle, and Seattle Fandango Project.

Mon Aug 2 – Wed Aug 4, 4 – 6 PM, Erickson Theatre.A dancing body can be a playground of investigation where senses are active research tools, imagination is based in physical awareness, and composition is exposed in a moment by moment reveal, connecting all our environments, human and non-human.We begin by tuning our own instruments: the 5+ senses, consciousness of survival patterns, making choices, and resisting the dominant system’s cultural expectations by showing up for our own experiences and respecting what others are bringing to the room.In Tuning we share our opinions through actions (dancing), verbal calls (composing), silences (observing) and stillness (dancing) giving way to a culture of agency, where we contribute to, and hold, the space. This dip into Tuning intends to hone one’s awareness, felt opinions, sensations, images, and desires, and activate those into dancing.Expect a guided warm-up activating the senses. Each day a different Tuning Score will be introduced, and we will work in smaller groups and as one group, including time in “observatory mode,” where even as we observe another group working, we are active and inside the action.BIO
Karen Nelson (she/her) was Brooklyn born in the USA and is descended from Northern Europeans who immigrated to Brooklyn, NY around the 1880's. Since 1977, she has been a "mutator" of Contact Improvisation (CI), playing seriously and experimentally within the lineages of Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Simone Forti, Nancy Stark Smith, Mary Fulkerson and Marjean McKenna. Her lifelong improvisation dance practices include Tuning Scores, Contact Improvisation, Material for the Spine, Contemplative Dance Practice. As an explorer-collaborator, teacher, maker, touring performer and contributor to Dancing with Dharma and Contact Quarterly, Karen has consistently played with the boundaries of form. She co-founded the CI mixed-ability experiments Dance Ability (1988) and Diverse Dance Research Retreat (1991-99), and co-created ongoing research in Tuning Score Observatories with Image Lab (since 1991) and Tunezoom (since 2020).Her work is deeply rooted in investigating and "re-vers(ion)ing" dominant cultural narratives. This is reflected in her collaborations with mayfield brooks’ Improvising While Black (2019), her local Vashon Island community instigation Abolition Is… (a response) (2022), and the often shared lecture/demonstration/jam event Contact Improvisation Interrogates its History and Currency (2016-ongoing). She collaborates in performances that integrate a physical-sensation-based approach to dancing, treating her experience as a site of play, interrogation, and wider community connection. She lives on the colonized lands of the Coast Salish šxʷəbabs people, an island near the now-named mainland city of Seattle, WA.