- This event has passed.
PRO: Ballet Rituals
July 15, 2024 @ 10:00 am - 12:00 pm
BALLET RITUALS
Ballet Rituals is born out of an active interest in queering the technique and culture of ballet. Class begins on the floor with a sensory and somatic warmup that encourages softness, proprioceptive tuning, and efficiency. From there, we move into a barre practice that offers both familiar exercises and those which explicitly diverge from classical structure and are rooted in contemporary research. Class culminates with juicy and expansive center phrases, including tendu, adagio, waltz, and jumps.
Our classes are designed to help contemporary movers savor the familiarity and structure of ballet while simultaneously shedding any parts of the practice that don’t serve them. Pop-indie playlists underpin the ritual and rhythm of ballet shapes and sequences, and help to root us in togetherness and joy. We indulge in and subvert the familiarity of form through creative pathways, anatomical clarity, and collective practice. We play and laugh our way through experiencing ballet as a ritual, in community.
We treat ballet as a practice, not an ideology, and reject hierarchy, patriarchy, silence, and authoritarianism wherever possible. We use a co-teaching model, encourage singing along, and offer a tiered pricing structure whenever possible to foster an inclusive and accessible environment.
ALETHEA ALEXANDER + HANNAH SIMMONS
Alethea Alexander and Hannah Simmons began co-teaching under the name Ballet Rituals in Spring 2022. They arrive at ballet practices from different histories: Hannah from a rigid classical training and Alethea from an academic approach. They have a shared desire to queer the form and dismantle their relationships to ballet and academia’s problematic power structures. Their approach examines the tension between softness and rigor and, above all, prioritizes pleasure and joy. Alethea and Hannah’s collaborations extend into creative processes that are rooted in environment generation and responsiveness. Most recently, they participated in a research-based residency at the Henry Art Gallery (in partnership with Velocity) and a premiere at Mini Mart City Park (curated by Maia Melene Durfee).
Alethea (M.F.A., University of Washington) is a Seattle-based dance artist and educator, and co-founder of Ballet Rituals. Community, sensuality, care, effort and collaboration are central tenets of her creative and teaching work with dance partners human, object and sonic. Alethea teaches community classes with Dance Undercurrent, and is Training Manager and teacher with Dance Church. She performs her own improvised and choreographed works in collaboration with multidisciplinary artists in Seattle and nationally. Other teaching appointments include the University of Washington Department of Dance (2017-2023), Whatcom Community College (2014-2016), Velocity Dance Center’s SFD+I summer festival (2019, 2022, 2023), Cornish College of the Arts (2020-2023), as well as recurring guest teaching for ODC Dance (2013), Bellingham Repertory Dance (2013-2017) the Seattle Piano Institute (2017-2023), Sam Houston State University (2019-2021) and others.
Hannah is a multi-disciplinary performer, creator, and educator living and working in Seattle. She holds a B.A. from Bennington College in dance and mathematics. Her choreographies and installations are centered around queering forms and hybridizing reality and fiction, in service of giving viewers a dynamic and unusual perspective on their own bodies. Her recent work has been supported by Velocity Dance Center, NWFF’s Collective Power Fund, MAP Fund’s inaugural microgrant initiative, Jack Straw Cultural Center, Seattle’s Office of Arts and Culture, 4Culture, and the Freeway Park Association. She is passionate about communal care, collaboration, and building sustainable and reciprocal systems of support for artists..