SEATTLE FESTIVAL OF DANCE + IMPROVISATION
DROP-IN AND A LA CARTE
INTENSIVES + CLASSES, ONE AT A TIME
JUL 12 – AUG 7, 2027
A LA CARTE INTENSIVES:
- 5-DAY:
$525$475 - 4-DAY:
$325$275 - 3-DAY:
$225$175
Early Bird price before Mar 15, 2027
Take a 3-, 4- or 5-day intensive, or drop in to a single class, without joining a full program. Select any class below to see the details, sign up, or add it to your calendar. July classes come from the Professional and Cohort programs. August classes are part of Research Week.
5-DAY INTENSIVES
Aug 2 – 7. Mon – Wed, Fri + Sat, 1 – 3 PM (Fri 1 – 5 PM). $525 $475 Early Bird until Mar 15. Select an intensive to see the details.
RAJA FEATHER KELLY
HONEST REACTIONS TO IMAGINARY SITUATIONS
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.
MAYFIELD BROOKS
DISORIENTATION: DANCING THE JOYFUL MYSTERY
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.
RAPHAEL XAVIER
GROUND·CORE
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.
JASMINE HEARN
MAPPING GESTURES: REMEMBERING BLACK M/OTHERING CHOREOGRAPHIES
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.
4-DAY INTENSIVES
Aug 2 – 4 + 6, 10 AM – 12 PM. $325 $275 Early Bird until Mar 15. Select an intensive to see the details.
ALIA SWERSKY + HANNAH RICE
CONTACT IMPROVISATION FOUNDATIONS AND EVOLUTIONS
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.
JONATHAN GONZALEZ
THE PUBLIC IS A CHOREOGRAPHY
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.
3-DAY INTENSIVES
July: Tue – Thu, 10 AM – 12 PM. August: Mon – Wed, 4 – 6 PM. $225 $175 Early Bird until Mar 15. Select an intensive to see the details.
NATALIE GRANT
COUNTERTECHNIQUE SERIES
Tue Jul 13 – Thu Jul 15, 10 AM – 12 PM, Mainstage. Full 3-day intensive only.
The Countertechnique® class is a contemporary dance technique class. It stretches, coordinates, and strengthens the body, making the dancer sweat, build stamina, and really move. The class starts with a recurring set of exercises, allowing dancers to investigate the Countertechnique® principles in detail. The second half of the class consists of changing components, working towards luscious movement combinations. The Countertechnique class results in dancers using less energy, losing their fear of taking risks, and gaining speed in changing direction.
MAJINN
HOUSE FOUNDATION INT/ADV
Tue Jul 20 – Thu Jul 22, 10 AM – 12 PM, Mainstage.
Class will teach you various foundational steps, grooves and variations in House dance as well as culture and my personal history within House and Black social dance culture. We work on connecting the movements in your body and learning to make them your own and help speak your voice through the movement, everyone has a different body and relates to movements differently so I teach towards what works for you after working on a base. My training style focuses on drilling movements utilizing 8 direction points and layering that with levels, direction and tempo changes and more. Freestyle is big part of class and showing your authentic self and is the base of Black social dance forms, you will hear various types of music in class during freestyle sections but foundation portions of the class will be to various types of House music, class will end in a cypher (freestyle circle).
In my House dance intensive we will be spending time not only on foundational steps and variations but will be working on putting steps together into short combos I create as well as you all together, we will also be working on floorwork (ways to get in and out of the floor, floor variations of steps, and different transitional moves) and lots of time playing with freestyle prompts in and out of the cypher. A big focus of the intensive will be aimed at dancing together and moving authentically to how the music makes you want to move, there are steps (language) I will give you but it will come back to your authenticity and how you utilize the language I give you with the language you already have in your body to speak your voice through house music.
JOSEPH HERNANDEZ
Tue Jul 20 – Thu Jul 22, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio.
Class title, description and bio coming soon.
UNDERCURRENT
FLOORWORK
Tue Jul 27 – Thu Jul 29, 10 AM – 12 PM, Mainstage.
Undercurrent offers a deep dive into the vigor, mechanics, and joyride of floorwork through a seamless and immersive physical practice. In these classes, movers will be guided through a continuous stream of sequences, each utilizing the body’s architecture to make progressively challenging movement comfortable, playful, strengthening, and sustainable. Each class will begin with simple sequences that build logically and progressively towards increased complexity. Over the course of each class, and also over the arc of this three-day experience, the flow gathers momentum, and concepts grow in complexity and dynamic range. We prioritize biomechanical safety and energetic efficiency in service of full-body engagement, innovative inversions, and fluid choreographic sequencing.
UNA LUDVIKSEN
CUNNINGHAM TECHNIQUE®
Tue Jul 27 – Thu Jul 29, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio.
This workshop explores pattern, rigor, and the joy of moving in space to our fullest capacity, finding freedom in form. Cunningham is designed to prepare the brain and body for big dancing and endless possibilities. In a structure similar to ballet class, we will warm up sequentially starting with the Cunningham back exercises based on curve, arch, tilt, and twist. We will continue through short exercises that get our feet, torsos, and limbs warm separately, and then together, increasing in complexity and variation. We’ll discover new combinations of upper and lower body coordination through the Cunningham movement language. We’ll shift our weight and expand our relationship to verticality while traveling and dancing BIG. We will run, turn, hold, reach, and leap with commitment, clarity, and self-trust. Exercises range from slow, simple movements to layered combinations of limbs, torso, and rhythmic changes. Most of this work will be done from standing. Each class will build on the previous day, and we’ll have the opportunity to deep dive into the back exercises and play with group composition through chance and choice. Expect a learn-by-doing, “go for it” approach with plenty of opportunities to make the material your own. No prior Cunningham experience needed.
NAOMI MACALALAD BRAGIN + MILVIA PACHECO SALVATIERRA
TRANSLATION AS MEDIUM
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.
KAREN NELSON
TUNING SCORES: ACTIVE, PHYSICAL, MOMENT BY MOMENT
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.
DROP-IN CLASSES | JULY
Classes from the Professional and Cohort programs. Select a class to see the details.
NIA-AMINA MINOR
THE MOVE: EXPERIMENTS FROM INSIDE THE GROOVE
Mon Jul 12, Wed Jul 14, Mon Jul 19, 5:30 – 7 PM.
Dive into contemporary approaches to movement through groove + musicality, physical exploration, and choreography. Class is informed by historic and current movement practices including Black social dance and improvisation. We will be guided by music from the Jazz and Hip Hop continuum and discuss music just as much as we practice movement.
As an experiment in groove, we’ll find a chorus of movement together. Bring all of yourself, that means any foundational movement practices or dance styles/genres of movement, party dances, and social dances; bring all the ways your body moves.
MAYA SOTO
Mon Jul 12, Mon Jul 19, 5:30 – 7 PM.
This beginner modern dance class is designed specifically for adults looking to explore movement, build physical confidence, and connect with their creativity. It is also a welcoming space for returning dancers looking to safely step back into their practice, as well as anyone who simply wants to slow down and focus on foundational movement mechanics. Class starts on the floor with breath, gently awakening the core, building functional strength, and releasing daily tension. Drawing on natural flow and momentum, dancers are introduced to essential modern dance concepts such as fall and recovery, rebound, suspension, and spirals. Focus is placed on understanding and maintaining healthy alignment while moving with ease.
This class flows through accessible, structured exercises incorporating ideas from Laban/Bartenieff fundamentals as well as release and countertechnique principles. Foundational practice is paired with individual exploration, keeping the dialogue between work and play central to the experience. Increased spinal mobility, range of motion, and mindful body awareness are the ultimate goals. Class culminates with fun, low-pressure phrases that emphasize rhythmic dynamics, musicality, and artistic expression in a supportive and encouraging environment.
MARY SIGWARD
BALLET FOR THE CONTEMPORARY DANCER
Tue Jul 13, Tue Jul 20, 5:30 – 7 PM.
Studying multiple dance techniques simultaneously allows a dancer to pull ideas from different fields to influence and inform their work. Shedding the unnecessary aesthetic ideals of ballet, this class focuses on precise footwork, efficiency of movement, and anatomical placement. Class begins with barre work that emphasizes proper alignment while slowly building in speed and complexity, before transitioning into center work that combines fluidity and conciseness.
Participants can wear either ballet shoes or socks, and should wear clothing that they can move freely in.
MARK HAIM
INTERMEDIATE BALLET
Thu Jul 15, Thu Jul 22, 5:30 – 7 PM.
This intermediate level ballet technique class follows a traditional format of exercises at the barre, in the center and across the space. Rigorous and fun, graceful and sweaty, we explore joint range, rotation, dynamic alignment, muscle efficiency, strength and flexibility, spatial clarity, and musicality. We’ll be balancing, turning, extending, making lines, and jumping. You will have a deepened sense of your body’s alignment, an expanded sense of spatial and rhythmic accuracy, and increased strength and flexibility.
A ballet technique class is typically structured to prepare you to jump and leap for joy by its end. What could be better than that?
JOSEPH HERNANDEZ
Fri Jul 16, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio.
Class title, description and bio coming soon.
ORB
Fri Jul 16, Fri Jul 23, 5:30 – 7 PM.
Class title, description and bio coming soon.
KAYLA FARRISH
PUNK WORLD-BUILDING AND RAGE AS PORTALS: DANCE-THEATER, IMPROVISATION, AND VOICE
Mon Jul 19 and Mon Jul 26, 10 AM – 12 PM.
With inspiration from punk movements and maroonage, I’m working to hold a practice for our feeling, our untaming, our audacity, our aliveness, and our belief in the creation within us. This workshop time will shift through improvisation, dynamics and textures of movement, storytelling, arc/scene, and voice. How can we activate our world-building between us? How can we invite hushed emotions like rage to make portals for truth and reimagined present? Additionally, we may work with relationships and partnering with options of contact and no-contact. With open curiosity, mess-making, I encourage you to bring your voice to the questions and directives and we will discover possibilities.
KEYES WILEY
SING ALONG TO SONGS YOU DON’T KNOW
Mon Jul 19 and Mon Jul 26, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio.
Improvisation of the whole body. Tap into contact with others, with your voice and song you may or may not know.
In this class we will focus on improvisation as both an artistic practice and a performance modality. Emphasis will be placed on developing spontaneous movement vocabulary while deepening somatic awareness, listening skills, spatial attention, and choice making strategies. There will be music, contact with others and the use of voice and spontaneous song making. Each class will build upon the previous one as we work towards collaboratively generating structures and scores.
KEYES WILEY
Class + Improvisation
Wed Jul 21, Mon Jul 26, Wed Jul 28, 5:30 – 7 PM.
Improvisation of the whole body. Tap into contact with others, with your voice and song you may or may not know.
In this class we will focus on improvisation as both an artistic practice and a performance modality. Emphasis will be placed on developing spontaneous movement vocabulary while deepening somatic awareness, listening skills, spatial attention, and choice making strategies. There will be music, contact with others and the use of voice and spontaneous song making. Each class will build upon the previous one as we work towards collaboratively generating structures and scores.
BEBE MILLER
SOLO/DUO DANCING: A WORKSHOP FOR IMPROVISED CHOREOGRAPHIES
Fri Jul 23 and Fri Jul 30, 10 AM – 12 PM.
We’re always moving; we’re always in relationship; we’re always alone: I’m interested in how we frame the details of attentive imagination that inform our dancing from these perspectives. We track our interest, mining the details and contexts that emerge. Let’s consider Form: a way towards skilled awareness in our dancemaking practice. This workshop aims to further that practice by shaping our dancing in response to kinetic events, our immediate environment, as well as to the community we’re forming by our shared attention.
Improvising with a choreographic tracking at play we will craft sequences in time and space, noting emergent constructs. We’ll move with clear regard for the leap of faith that dancing asks of us. We’ll consider how we see and are seen so we can work between what we feel, what we intend and what is legible. We’ll practice our frames of reference, claim our choices and continue on.
MARK HAIM
PROFESSIONAL BALLET
Fri Jul 23 and Fri Jul 30, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio.
This professional level ballet technique class follows a traditional format of exercises at the barre, in the center and across the space. Rigorous and fun, graceful and sweaty, we explore joint range, rotation, dynamic alignment, muscle efficiency, strength and flexibility, spatial clarity, and musicality. We’ll be balancing, turning, extending, making lines, and jumping. You will have a deepened sense of your body’s alignment, an expanded sense of spatial and rhythmic accuracy, and increased strength and flexibility.
A ballet technique class is typically structured to prepare you to jump and leap for joy by its end. What could be better than that?
UNDERCURRENT
FLOORWORK
Mon Jul 26, Wed Jul 28, 5:30 – 7 PM.
Undercurrent offers a deep dive into the rigor, mechanics, and joyride of floorwork through a seamless and immersive physical practice. In these classes, movers will be guided through a continuous stream of sequences, each utilizing the body's architecture to make progressively challenging movement comfortable, playful, strengthening, and sustainable.
DROP-IN CLASSES | RESEARCH WEEK
Aug 2 – 7. Select a class to see the details.
RAPHAEL XAVIER
GROUND·CORE
Mon Aug 2, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio.
Ground-Core is the exploration of movement and its relationship between the body and its core and the ground/workspace. A derivative of Breaking, a form of hip-hop dance, Ground-Core focuses on the possibilities of pushing boundaries with the body in its entirety.
Students should bring long sleeves, loose fitting long pants or tights, knee pads, sneakers (bare feet are ok) and a hat or hoodie.
HANNAH KRAFCIK
CONTACT IMPROVISATION + PARTNERING APPLICATIONS · COLLECTIVE CRAFTING
Tue Aug 3, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio. Mon Aug 2 + Tue Aug 3, 4 – 6 PM, Studio.
MON AUG 2, 4–6 PM: CONTACT IMPROVISATION + PARTNERING APPLICATIONS
In this class we will explore rigorous, collaborative movement. Class will begin with an overview of consent-focused community guidelines, followed by a warm up that brings participants into initial contact with one another. We will lab specific weight shares at different levels, noticing the physics and biomechanics of our movement. Class will conclude with a “Round Robin,” a group dance of ever-changing duets and trios. This offering is suitable for those with prior experience in the fundamentals of contact improvisation. Class material will include dynamic, full-bodied lifts.
TUE AUG 3, MORNING: COLLECTIVE CRAFTING
Participants will be given invitations to move intuitively and imaginatively in a self-directed manner. Drawing on a format developed by Mary Starks Whitehouse, participants will be invited to take turns moving while being witnessed. Participants may choose to move with their eyes closed if they desire. We will start this practice in small groups and end with large ensembles. This class is suitable for anyone who likes to move and watch movement.
TUE AUG 3, 4–6 PM: PARTNERING APPLICATIONS + TRANSITION COMPOSITION
After an overview of consent-focused community guidelines and a warmup, we learn several lifts and partnering motifs, then break into small groups to create original compositions with them. Small groups will be invited to share their compositions with one another. Suitable for those with prior experience in the fundamentals of contact improvisation.
AMY O'NEAL
DANCING OUR INFLUENCES
Mon Aug 2, 4 – 6 PM, Fine Arts Studio.
As movement artists, the way we mix and sample our experiences is what makes us who we are. In this class, guided improvisation will shake up and ground information we hold in our bodies from our teachers, environments, and art heroes. Who and what do we want to continue to hold and who and what do we want to let go? We will work solo and in duet in order to witness and be witnessed in our process. We will discover the difference in style vs form and mine vs ours.
RAJA FEATHER KELLY
MYTH, MADNESS, MONTAGE AND MELODRAMA
Tue Aug 3, 4 – 6 PM, Fine Arts Studio.
Using his company the feath3r theory’s signature style of Honest Reactions to Imaginary Situations to explore Myth, Madness, Montage, and Melodrama and to move from wildness and chaos to order and emotional resonance.
KAREN NELSON
SENSATION + DESIGN
Wed Aug 4, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio.
This session will use Tuning Scores to expand practices of composition, and dance languages such as Contact Improvisation. Using the verbal and inner calls adapted from Tuning including “pause, reverse, replace etc,” can disrupt flow and expectation to refresh awareness and offer alternate communication choices to arise in the dancing.
Practices will include asking: what’s the difference? Moving with eyes closed (as closed as you are comfortable with) in touch and exploring space, and eyes opened, caring for space and each other. We will expand into game-like scores where relaxing into the simplicity of the structure can become “just enough” shared intention to allow invention and play to emerge and inform the pleasure of dance.
JONATHAN GONZALEZ
THE BODY IS A LISTENING PLACE
Wed Aug 4, 4 – 6 PM, Fine Arts Studio.
How do we sense architecture? What might the body know about a place before we can describe it?
The Body Is a Listening Place is a two-hour movement laboratory exploring the relationship between embodied perception, architectural space, and the sensory conditions of our surroundings. Drawing from phenomenological approaches to architecture and psychogeography, we will investigate how built environments shape our movements, orientations, and habits of attention.
Through guided movement scores, participants will explore weight, breath, touch, peripheral vision, spatial orientation, and the relationship between bodily sensation and architectural form. Open to participants of varied experiences and backgrounds.
EMMY SMITH-STEWART + JEFFREY AZEVEDO
MAPPING INTERNAL/EXTERNAL GEOGRAPHIES
Wed Aug 4, 4 – 6 PM, Studio. Mask required.
This class invites participants into a space for mapping the blurry and contradictory substance of our internal and external geographies. We'll move through processes of generating performance text and choreography through somatic writing practices and improvisational dance scores and then harvest that material towards layered composition. We will discover points of tensions (contradictions, longings, annoyances, attractions, and/or memories) and play with their generative potential.
Informed by the rich ecosystem of sick and disabled artists weaving disability justice frameworks with performance making, this class invites a lens of chronic illness and disability as sites of choreographic possibility. How can we create modes of making and moving that might reframe ideas of deficiency?
This workshop is perfect for those who would like to deepen their connection between writing/spoken text and movement. Masks are required and provided. No artificial scents. Please bring a notebook and pen, and your phone and earbuds or headphones if you have them.
JASMINE HEARN
CENTER, SATELLITE, RETURN
Fri Aug 6, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio.
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.
You will be asked to listen, respond, remember, imagine, care, and rest. Jasmine will offer sequences for warming up, recipes and scores for improvisation, time to process (writing, talking, resting), and phrase material.
JOSEPH HERNANDEZ
Sat Aug 7, 10 AM – 12 PM, Fine Arts Studio. Shape/Place Improvising.
Class title, description and bio coming soon.
NAOMI MACALALAD BRAGIN + MILVIA PACHECO SALVATIERRA
THE GROOVE MIGRATION
Sat Aug 7, 10 AM – 12 PM, Mainstage.
The Groove Migration is an open-ended dance improvisation drawing on core principles of rhythmic pattern repetition and collective sensing to generate joyful experiences of solo and group movement. We explore the groove as an Africanist aesthetic practice that shapes fluid and joyful expressions of cultural identity and belonging, centering the queer syncretic culture of house music.
LEAH CROSBY
TUNING THROUGH TOUCH
Sat Aug 7, 10 AM – 12 PM, Studio. Tuning through Touch.
In this workshop, we will work as a group and in pairs to approach care for self and for community as a movement research practice. Improvisational scores and techniques will inform curious and intuitive, fully-clothed bodywork in a container shaped by consent.
Our collective practice moves toward deep attunement with one-another, setting a container for rich movement exploration, trust, and nervous system regulation. This class opens with consent practices and explorations of touch with self and the floor, then moves into structured partnered explorations, and culminates in “phrase-work”: learning a full-body sequence that encourages deeper connectedness with the body. Participants will leave with tools for curious, sensation-based care for self and others.
MAYFIELD BROOKS
DISORIENTATION SCORES
Sat Aug 7, 4 – 6 PM, Fine Arts Studio.
This workshop will explore disorientation scores as an opportunity to dance into liberation, release, wildness and joy. Drawing from mayfield’s practice of Improvising While Black or IWB the invitation is to bring all of you to the dance. We will practice falling, body surfing, spiraling, cosmic vocalizing, and accessible, playful dancing.
ALIA SWERSKY + HANNAH RICE
CONTACT IMPROVISATION FOUNDATIONS AND EVOLUTIONS
Sat Aug 7, 4 – 6 PM, 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.
WANT TO DANCE FOR A WHOLE MONTH?
SIGN UP FOR ULTIMATE SFD+I
Combine a performance cohort with the full Research Week for a full month of dancing under $1,000. $995 Early Bird price before Mar 15, 2027.
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SFD+I SUPPORTERS
The Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation is made possible with generous support from the Seattle office of Arts and Culture, ArtsFund, and 4 Culture, as well as 4 Culture’s Public Free Access Program, in partnership with Seattle Art Museum.
