SEATTLE FESTIVAL OF DANCE + IMPROVISATION
RESEARCH WEEK
AUGUST 2-9
FULL RESEARCH WEEK INCLUDES:
- One Morning Intensive / Drop in Track
- One Mid-day Intensive
- One Afternoon Intensive / Drop in Track
- Unlimited Drop ins
- Unlimited Jams
- One Ticket to each Show
$750 | *$650
*Early Bird pricing through MAR 15
The RESEARCH Week is a full eight days of intensives, workshops, and events centering improvisational dance practice and research. This interdisciplinary and intergenerational gathering brings together both local and inter/national faculty in Seattle each year to share their practice with movers new to improvisation alongside artists who have been dancing for decades. Immerse yourself in a nurturing and rich environment where embodied research in somatics, contact and group improvisation, and creative and social practice create a week of extraordinary possibilities.
Registration for the full Research Week lets you create your own immersive schedule of intensives, classes, jams, and events. Choose between the morning 4 day intensives and morning dropins, one of three midday 5-day intensives, and one of two afternoon 3-day intensives or afternoon dropins. You’ll also get tickets to all sharings + events, and be able to participate in all the jams, morning practices and drop-ins your schedule can hold!
Drop-in classes are also available on a walk-in basis if space in the class allows.
There is no pre registration for Jams. Jams are walk-in only and are free and open to the public.
*Registration for drop-in classes launches JUN 2026!
INTENSIVES
Sign up for full research week to choose one morning, midday AND afternoon intensive/drop-in slot from the options below.
In creating improvised movement work, either in solos or groups, it’s important to allow oneself to be curious and to go places that may not be familiar. Finding ways to explore this safely is key. Mistakes are opportunities for learning. Challenging oneself while at the same time prioritizing care, (of oneself and of a group,) can lead to exciting and unexpected discoveries. We will use Improvisation Techniques into creative art making.
This class explores practices that aim to deepen embodiment in live performance. We will work with listening as a central tool to cultivate a vibrant presence and maintain our connection to our sensorial experience , birthing textural phenomena, and transmitting our energetic communication between ourselves and our audience. We will employ the subtlest movements as ways to tune into our sensorial joy, the joy of connecting with others and discover how sincere open-minded internal practices can help dances arise organically from within. As we respond to and work with our gravity, breath, ligaments and internal states, we cultivate them deeper and nurture our awareness as a performer, recognizing the many rich unfoldings that can emerge between the viewer and the dancer. This becomes an authentic outward projection reaching the viewer/witness as a powerful transmission. New and fresh presences can be revealed, becoming an ever-powerful force on the stage. We will be guided by stillness, using specific imagery, sensorial memory, raw instinct, and the inspiration of live vibrational sounds. While our subjective selves can create limitations, these tools can help us find more power than we can imagine in our beings and expressions. What are we listening to? Can we listen to our instincts versus our impulses? How do we grow and sustain the sensations we’ve cultivated with such exertion and playful tuning?
Hour Selves: Moving Into Being (An embodied workshop providing joy, rest, collaboration, and ways of self-organizing
Drawing from our improvisational practice, “Desire Lines,” we will tune our attention towards a receptive state of being. Attention to our inner landscapes and our external environment. Attention to our imagination and to our actual sensations. Resonant energies and impressions will power the engine of movement and set up a relational consciousness.
We will generate individual and group structures through a layering of memories– a way to extend the time-stamp of spontaneous self-discovery, to produce knowledge from the past, and from speculative futures. Object play, spatial games, and rhythmic prompts combine to shape a collective subject. Together, how can we unearth aspects of ourselves which exist at the margins, at places of possibility and discovery?
This workshop will explore improvisational modalities used in our ongoing practice desire lines. Drawn from our choreographic interest in transformation, we will expand our sense of attention through a focused yet playful connection to our environment.
*Photo by Lilly Echeverria
We will work with a speculative relationship to one’s own body and the bodies of others to grasp what our bodies contain. Feminisms are the groundwork as we work through a variety of dancing methodologies. Through various systems of perception-action, dancing methods will be initiated from deep inside one’s internal organs; others will be formed in relation to one another as a temporary community. We will consider the bodies within bodies within bodies within frames in order to harness the social potential of dance/choreography to envision the future and reflect on the now. A set of experiential protocols will be proposed and further proposed. Relations will not be fixed to find unexpected structures, formats, and thinking/being. Dialogues shall slide between sense and nonsense, rational and irrational and more. In order for something to be radical, we cannot know the model it will take.
Prioritizing improvisation and collaboration, we will play with the possibilities of healing, politics, and dancing together. I welcome your curiosity and concerns. What inspires you or prevents you from dancing more freely, especially with others? What activates or impedes your healing potential? How is your body responding to new wars, censorship, precarity, and embodied traumas? How can dancing be activated as anti-capitalism, as a new ethics of relationship, pleasure, and shared power?
Which ideas and movements might help us now? I will invite the prophetic ancestors Gustav Landauer and Octavia Butler into the studio to renew our dancing. Depending on interest, we will integrate performance practices throughout the week.
*Photo by Ian Douglas
This class explores disabled embodiment and creativity as fertile ground for improvisation. Accessibility is not treated as an exception or adjustment, but as a set of givens that ground the creative process. While disabled and non-disabled people are welcome in this class, we seek to upend ableism and non-disabled normativity in dance by placing disabled embodiment at the center of our explorations. We uplift the improvisational edge inherent to disability culture, forged by the primal creativity of surviving our environment on a daily basis.
We release fixed categories of artistry and practice, treating the classroom as a living ecosystem—where agenda is flexible, student wisdom drives the work, and rest, joy, and ease are celebrated alongside resilience and rigor. Every moment holds the potential for sensing, shifting, and co-creating.
We invite each dancer to move at the pace of their bodies and brilliance. “Technique” is redefined through anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and non–Western–centric values—measured not by uniformity or replication, but through presence, relationship, and responsiveness.
The seeds of this class are rooted in Kayla Hamilton’s collaboration with Elisabeth Motley in Crip Movement Lab.
MAI LÊ HÔ
LayeRhythm Playground: House Dance, Live Music Interaction, and Freestyle Practice
EVENING 3-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
Rooted in the vibrancy of street and club dance traditions, LayeRhythm Playground invites participants into a three-day journey that balances technical grounding with improvisational play. Each day will explore a distinct entry point into freestyle practice:
Rhythm Conductor with Live Musicians: Partnering with live musicians, participants will experience LayeRhythm’s signature pedagogy of rhythm games and structured improvisations that open up new ways of listening, responding, and co-creating in real time.
Freestyle Practice: Expanding beyond form, we’ll explore improvisation through multiple lenses, giving dancers tools to generate authentic movement while cultivating presence, risk-taking, and connection.
Sheri Cohen
Whole Self Integration: Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement®
EVENING 3-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
The Feldenkrais Method provides a radical technology for investigating one’s sense of self through moving, sensing, thinking and feeling. The process can be light and breezy, magically leaving you with a new sense of ease; it can also be profound in the ways it brings forward your habits and challenges your reliance on them. This intensive will center on Awareness Through Movement, guided movement sequences that we inhabit with gentleness, curiosity, and freedom of exploration. We’ll bring in other materials—writing, drawing, partner work, dance forms—as needed to support your process of self-discovery and whole self integration. Read more
DROP-IN CLASSES/ FACULTY BIOS
ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES | DOING IT!
DOING IT! (DROP-IN) AUG 4 | 4-6 PM
What is your first impulse? Can you trust it? What happens when the judge falls asleep? Can you know too much? This is a workshop on dancing and speaking, on improvisation and composition. In this workshop, we will use various improvisational strategies to open up a free, immediate, and spontaneous flow of speech, writing, and dance. We will mobilize different collaborative, score-based, release approaches, authentic movement, and automatic writing to generate material. We will use this to build impromptu group pieces but also as a means to expand self-expression in solo work.
BIO:
Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. He has received three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels which centered choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism, and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now.
As an author Houston-Jones’ essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His first book, FAT and other stories, was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press.
Houston-Jones is a 2022 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2024 he was awarded the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching award from the American Dance Festival. Ishmael teaches at universities and independent studios including NYU, Bennington (formerly University of the Arts), Movement Research, TicTac (Brussels), MA exerce (Montpellier), and The Field Center.
DEGENERATE ART ENSEMBLE | SPIRITED PRACTICE (DROP-IN)
SPIRITED PRACTICE (DROP-IN) AUG 3 | 10AM – 12PM
This one-day class explores practices that deepen embodiment in live performance through listening, presence, and sensorial awareness. Using subtle movement, we’ll connect to internal landscapes and discover how dances can emerge organically from within.
Guided by stillness, raw instinct, imagery, and live vibrational sound, we will work with gravity, breath, ligaments, and internal states to cultivate an expressive, tuned-in presence.
Participants are invited to listen deeply: to sensation, to impulse, to joy. What are we really hearing? How can presence become a transmission? Open to all movers, artists, and creatives interested in somatic, improvisational, and process-based approaches to performance.
BIO:
Haruko Crow Nishimura is an interdisciplinary dance artist. She is the artistic director and vocalist for Seattle’s Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE). The company creates experimental performances that navigate the shades of darkness of the human psyche, creating new mythologies with a punk aesthetic and transgressive spirit striving to find both new awakenings and more meaningful human experiences. Her work with the ensemble has been featured in 15 countries presenting large scale performance projects, site-specific works and ongoing public experimentation. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and along with DAE has received awards from Creative Capital and MAP Fund. DAE’s recent works Skeleton Flower and Boy mother / faceless bloom have been performed at the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City, New York Live Arts, HCA Festival in Denmark and ODC San Francisco, Plovdiv Bulgaria among others. Her most recent full scale work Anima Mundi will premiere at the Moore Theatre on valentines day 2026, presented by Seattle Theatre Group.
RESHAUN MITCHELL + SILAS RIENER | DESIRE LINES: FOR THE TIME BEING
DESIRE LINES: FOR THE TIME BEING | AUG 4 | 10AM-12PM
This drop-in class will focus on building a dancing language through attunements, instantaneous constructions, and action from a receptive state of being. We will use language and image-based prompts to excavate sensory and visual memories and generate a new movement sensibility. It will be fun, physical and sometimes kind of cerebral.
BIO:
Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener are New York-based dance artists. Their work involves the building of collaborative worlds through improvisational techniques, digital technologies, and material construction. They met as dancers in the Merce Cunningham Dance company and since 2010 they have created over 25 multidisciplinary dance works including site-responsive installations, concert dances, gallery performances and dances for film in venues such as the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Barbican Centre, REDCAT, The Walker Art Center, and MoMA/PS1. Throughout they have maintained a commitment to queer culture and aesthetics. Their partnership intentionally blurs authorship and maintains a deep commitment to collaboration with a diverse community of dancers, performers, artists and cultural institutions.
MORIAH EVANS | OUR BODIES OURSELVES
OUR BODIES OURSELVES | AUG 5 | 4-6 PM
What if we dance only in pursuit of feeling? What if we always return to sensation as the dominant logic in our perception? This class delves into a physical, perceptual and speculative practice of embodiment and a dancing dancing methodology initiated from deep inside the body’s internal organs. We will work with a system of perception-action through five distinct energetic modalities emerging from infinite internal depth. Precarious conditions of dancing manifest an immanent politics residing in a body’s capacity to transform itself, others, and change the world. The body holds a capacity for resistance and expansive powers, and dance can invent what a body can do. We aim to unleash a previously unimagined range of expressivity in dancing bodies.
BIO:
Moriah Evans is an artist working in and on the form of dance—as artifact, object and culture with its histories, protocols, default production mechanisms, modes of staging and viewing—and the capacity of the public to read dance. Her choreographies navigate utopic and dystopic potentials and tendencies within dance, approached as a fleshy and matriarchal form sliding between minimalism and excess.
Evans’s 2017 Grants to Artists Award supported Figuring (2018), which premiered at SculptureCenter in Long Island City. Evans’s notable works prior to her FCA support include Out of and Into (8/8): STUFF (2012); Another Performance (2013); Social Dance 1-8: Index (2015); Social Dance 9-12: Encounter (2015); Be my Muse (2016); and Out of and Into: Contain (2016). Her choreographic work has been commissioned and presented in New York by Danspace Project; MoMA PS1; ISSUE Project Room; Movement Research at Judson Church; and the American Realness festival; in California at CalIT2; as well as internationally at Kampnagel (Hamburg, Germany); Theatre de l’Usine (Geneva, Switzerland); Villa Empain (Brussels, Belgium); and Atelier de Paris Carolyn Carlson (Paris, France).
Evans was an Artist-in-Residence at Movement Research (2011-2013); The New Museum (2012); Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (2013, 2014); ISSUE Project Room (2014); Studio Series at New York Live Arts (2015); and MoMA/PS1 (2016). She was nominated for the New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Emerging Choreographer for her work Social Dance 1-8 Index (2015). During her residency at Movement Research, she initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography, a collective apparatus involved in research processes and practices to investigate participatory images of performance and systems of choreography.
Evans received her B.A. in Art History and English Literature from Wellesley College and her M.A. in Art History, Theory, and Criticism from the University of California, San Diego. She is Editor-in-Chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal.
KEITH HENNESSY | PERFORMING IMPROVISATION
PERFORMING IMPROVISATION | AUG 8 | 10AM – 12PM
Practices, concepts, tactics and tricks for performing improvisation. How are decisions made or not? When to prioritize the internal experience or a more structural frame? Is entertainment amazing or cheap? Channel, trance, ritual, rigor?? Authentic movement in friction with queer/drag/performance. Dancing with the subversive embodied monster we might call censorship. Performance as offering in dynamic tension with performing to be seen. We’re gonna improvise, mostly in collaboration, pausing to reflect/discuss and then dance some more with witnessing. Costumes and props welcome.
BIO:
Keith Hennessy, MFA, PhD, is a frolicker, imperfectionist, and witch working in the fields of contemporary dance, queer performance, affordable housing, sexual and political healing. Raised in Canada, he has lived in Yelamu/San Francisco since 1982. Hennessy’s work is interdisciplinary and experimental, motivated by anti-racist, queer-feminist, and anarchist movements. With a focus on the politics of relationship, Keith’s performance collaborators include Ishmael Houston-Jones, Sarah Crowell, Meg Stuart, Peaches, Snowflake Calvert, Jassem Hindi, Ida Hiršenfelder, and jose abad. Awards include Guggenheim and USArtist Fellowhips, NY Bessie, Bay Area Izzie’s, and more. Keith’s 2024-25 teaching includes Lviv CI Festival (Ukraine), Cornell Univ, La Manzana de Paxton (MX), ImPulsTanz (Vienna), Contact & Flow (MX), The Field Center, Forum Dança (Lisbon.) www.circozero.org
*Photo by Ian Douglas
KAYLA HAMILTON | IMPROVISATION AS DISABILITY CULTURE (DROP-IN)
IMPROVISATION AS DISABILITY CULTURE (DROP-IN) | AUG 5 | 4-6PM
This class description was written by Kayla Hamilton in collaboration with Alexandra Beller and Alison Kopit.
This class explores disabled embodiment and creativity as fertile ground for improvisation. Accessibility is not treated as an exception or adjustment, but as a set of givens that ground the creative process. While disabled and non-disabled people are welcome in this class, we seek to upend ableism and non-disabled normativity in dance by placing disabled embodiment at the center of our explorations. We uplift the improvisational edge inherent to disability culture, forged by the primal creativity of surviving our environment on a daily basis.
We release fixed categories of artistry and practice, treating the classroom as a living ecosystem—where agenda is flexible, student wisdom drives the work, and rest, joy, and ease are celebrated alongside resilience and rigor. Every moment holds the potential for sensing, shifting, and co-creating.
We invite each dancer to move at the pace of their bodies and brilliance. “Technique” is redefined through anti-capitalist, anti-racist, anti-patriarchal, and non–Western–centric values—measured not by uniformity or replication, but through presence, relationship, and responsiveness.
The seeds of this class are rooted in Kayla Hamilton’s collaboration with Elisabeth Motley in Crip Movement Lab.
BIOS:
Kayla Hamilton is a choreographer, educator, and cultural strategist working at the intersections of access, Blackness, and disability. Her work has been presented at The Shed, Gibney, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance, and New York Live Arts, and she has performed with Kinetic Light, Sydnie L. Mosley, Paloma McGregor, and Gesel Mason. A Disability Futures Fellow and Bessie Award recipient, Kayla leads as co-director of Angela’s Pulse Dancing While Black and as co-facilitator of How We Move, a summer intensive for disabled artists. She also directs the Access.Movement.Play Residency at Movement Research, cultivating new ways of training and creating through disabled embodiment. A former public school special education teacher, Kayla brings care and rigor into her work as a consultant with institutions including the Mellon Foundation and New York Live Arts. Her practice spans choreography, dramaturgy, and writing audio description, pushing dance to be expansive, accessible, and just.
SHERI COHEN | Whole Self Integration: Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement® (DROP-IN)
BIO: WHOLE SELF INTEGRATION: FELDENKREIS ® AWARENESS THROUGH MOVEMENT ® | AUG 8 | 10AM – 12PM
The Feldenkrais Method provides a radical technology for investigating one’s sense of self through moving, sensing, thinking and feeling. The process can be light and breezy, magically leaving you with a new sense of ease; it can also be profound in the ways it brings forward your habits and challenges your reliance on them. This intensive will center on Awareness Through Movement, guided movement sequences that we inhabit with gentleness, curiosity, and freedom of exploration. We’ll bring in other materials—writing, drawing, partner work, dance forms—as needed to support your process of self-discovery and whole self integration. Read more
BIO:
Sheri Cohen (she/her) has steeped in the movement arts for over 35 years in the fields of dance, yoga and the Feldenkrais Method®. She enjoys a lively private Feldenkrais® practice in the Seattle area, teaches classes, retreats and workshops, and trains new practitioners in Feldenkrais professional trainings. Sheri presented dance performances for over twenty years in Seattle and abroad, including deeply researched historical works and on-the-spot improvisations. Her influences include a wide variety of techniques and somatic practices (contact improvisation, tuning, Deep Listening, Skinner Releasing, Contemplative Dance Practice and more), all of which influence her creative work and teaching. Sheri’s teaching combines playfulness and rigor, creating an environment in which all individuals are dancers and learners. More info at: shericohenmovement & shericohendance
MAI LÊ HÔ | HOUSE DANCE FOUNDATIONS
HOUSE DANCE FOUNDATIONS | AUG 5 | 10AM – 12PM
We will move from house dance basics into learning how to use those elements as a springboard for freestyle exploration..
BIOS:
Mai Lê Hồ is a French-Vietnamese movement artist, curator, educator, and cultural strategist based in NYC. She is the founder and Artistic/Executive Director of LayeRhythm, a nonprofit platform rooted in street and club dance cultures that unites freestyle dancers, live musicians, emcees/vocalists and audiences through improvisational performance and community engagement. Since 2015, she has produced over 135 editions of LayeRhythm, with presentations at Lincoln Center, Jacob’s Pillow, USC Kaufman, the Guggenheim, Harris Theater, and the PHI Centre in Montreal. An adjunct professor at Hunter College, she is also a 2023 Dancing Futures resident, a 2024 Bogliasco Foundation Fellow, and a 2025 Simons Foundation & Gibney Open Interval Resident Artist.
TONYA LOCKYER | OPENING TO THE UNKNOWN
OPENING TO THE UNKNOWN | AUG 3| 4-6PM
This class focuses on attending to our pleasure in the sensations of moving and being moved. We will engage with guided movement mediations, somatic awareness and improvisation scores to find and follow new unexpected pathways and energetic states. We will practice radical curiosity as we listen to the nuances of our unfolding consciousness and deepen our understanding of movement as an energetic exchange. While building trust we will embrace the interplay between known and unknown, feeling and action, vulnerability and risk.
BIO:
Tonya Lockyer is a dance artist, creative producer and writer. Born in Newfoundland Canada, she works with artists across North America and has taught and performed on three continents. Tonya has shared her love of improvisation in radically different contexts: giving workshops and performances, gathering interviews and scores for books and articles, forming improvisation ensembles, collaborating with innovators such as Steve Paxton, Miguel Gutierrez and composer Pauline Oliveros, and producing SFDI as Artistic Executive Director of Velocity (2011-2018). Her projects—navigating between dance, theater, and socially-engaged art—include 24-hour performances, installations, site-responsive works, collective creations, artists’ platforms, and choreographic commissions. Tonya was named “a key cultural changemaker” by The Seattle Times.
*Photo by Stephen Miller
JOSE E. ABAD | WREQRELATIONAL ACTIVI(TIES) ONE + TWO
wreqrelational activi(ties) one | AUG 3 | 4-6PM
wReQrelational ACTtivi(ties) can be a great way to relax and de-stress. When choosing a wReQrelational ACTtivi(tie), it’s important to pick something you enjoy and that fits your interests and abilities. You should also be safe and responsible when participating.
What are you reckoning with? What are you wrecking? With whom? How do we shape and reshape our lived materiality of this world… together?
In this workshop, we will explore somatic practices for building connection and body-based art amidst societal decay through improvisation and play. We will investigate the ways in which collective dance practices can serve as tools for reworlding, however temporary. There will be theory, techno, tragedy, and strategy. This class is open to all interested in sharing space for communal inquiry. Studio is the container, we build an experimental social choreography together.
wreqrelational activi(ties) two | AUG 8 | 4-6PM
Same as as above
BIO:
jose e. abad is a multidisciplinary social practice artist, DJ, and curatorial arts administrator based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory. They are a Black Filipino artist exploring the complexities of intersectional identities and collective relationality through embodied practice. Utilizing dance, theater, experimental video, and sound, they unearth lost histories that reside in the body, that the mind has forgotten, and that dominant culture has erased. Their choreography is rooted in collaboration and improvisation as tools of resistance and liberation.
abad has worked with established companies and artists, including Anne Bluethenthal, Alleluia Panis, BANDALOOP, Brontez Purnell, Ishmael Houston Jones, NAKA Dance Theater, Erika Chong Shuch, Joanna Haigood, Keith Hennessy, Larry Arrington, Sara Shelton Mann, Seth Eisen, and many others.
They are the Co-Director of Community Programs and Curation at Bridge Live Arts and have held residencies and produced work with organizations including CounterPulse, the Joe Goode Annex, Fort Mason Center for the Arts, Highways Performance Space, and Hope Mohr Dance. Additionally, they have taught and performed nationally and internationally in the Philippines, Mexico, Palestine, Canada, and Europe.
*Photo by Karolina Miernik
kaitlin MCCARTHY | INTRO TO CONTACT IMPROV FOR DANCERS
INTRO TO CONTACT INMPROV FOR DANCERS | AUG 4 | 4-6PM
Designed for dancers from other forms, this two hour workshop will introduce students to the fundamentals of Contact Improv and its foundational principals. An emphasis on listening with the body supports a variety of practices including
practical and philosophical approaches to weightsharing, strategies for physical and emotional safety, and some of the more commonly used techniques associated with this open source form. Feel confident entering a Contact Improv jam or learn ways to adopt what CI has to offer into your own practice.
BIO:
Kaitlin McCarthy is a Seattle-based dance artist, journalist, and teacher. She has spent the last 15 years performing and choreographing in venues across Seattle, including On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, 12 Ave Arts, and countless other venues, festivals, and self-produced performances. She spent a decade as a regular collaborator with MALACARNE under the direction of Alice Gosti, with whom she toured nationally and internationally. She also presents work with longtime creative partner Jenny Peterson as duo “The Bonnies,” who will present a new evening-length work as part of Velocity’s 2026 season. As a journalist, Kaitlin runs and edits SeattleDances.com, as well as contributes dance writing to several arts outlets about town. As a teacher, Kaitlin has specialized in teaching beginning adult dance since 2014 with both Velocity and eXit SPACE.
*Photo by Jenny Peterson
SKYE HUGHES + NIKOLAI LESNIKOV | EMBODIED IMAGINATION: OPEN SOURCE FORMS + ACTION THEATER
EMBODIED IMAGINATION: OPEN SOURCE FORMS + ACTION THEATER | AUG 8 | 4-6PM
The class will begin with an exploration of Open Source Forms (OSF), where participants will be guided through different states of consciousness weaving together various ways to warm the body, voice, and imagination into a ready state of physicality. Founded by Stephanie Skura in 2008 as an evolution of Joan Skinner’s Skinner Releasing Technique, OSF offers many pathways to shed layers of held tension in the body and tap into the flow of spontaneity through active visualization, alignment-focused exercises, and deep-state imagery.
Building on this finely-tuned awareness, we’ll then delve into Action Theater, letting sensation and perception guide us into expressive states where images, feelings, and ideas are amplified into movement, sound, and words. Created by Ruth Zaporah during the explosion of postmodern dance in the 1970s Bay Area, Action Theater invites improvisers to follow the moment-to-moment experience to its wildest reaches, embodying the vivid landscapes of our inner worlds.
Throughout the class, participants will move between solo and collaborative explorations, discovering new territories of creativity and presence. By integrating Open Source Forms and Action Theater, this class offers a rigorous, playful, and deeply intuitive journey into the heart of improvisation—where each sensation can blossom into a new, astonishing world.
BIO:
Nikolai Lesnikov is a Seattle-based multidisciplinary artist, performer, attorney, and certified teacher of Open Source Forms. He is engaged to varying degrees with the practices of contemporary dance, aerial, photography, filmmaking, and experimental music. He has performed in many venues in and around Seattle beginning in 2008 and has appeared in works by Wade Madsen, Amy J. Lambert, Petra Zanki, and Jessica Jobaris & General Magic, among others. His short film panvaluation won Best Experimental Short at the 2023 Paris Independent Film Festival. You can find some sparse documentation of his life and creative process on Instagram @spillingvase.
Skye Hughes is a queer-gay-lesbian and multi-disciplinary artist, making body-based performance. Her artistic practice is driven by the desire to investigate identity politics, oppression, and information war — how these phenomena are inscribed upon the body, and how that inscription shapes our inner life and connection to the world and each other. At the intersection of these powerful forces, how do we recover our agency, ourselves — moment to moment?
Skye majored in dance at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan; holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance from the University of Colorado, where she studied with Michelle Ellsworth, Erika Randall, Gesel Mason, and Rennie Harris; and is an alum of Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia, PA, under the direction of David Brick. She has also worked as assistant to Ed Bowes on four feature-length films. She is an Action Theater teacher, and studied with Ruth Zaporah for over a decade. Skye uses the Action Theater method to practice improvisation through movement, voice, and text with fellow performers, students, and teachers. skyehughes.wtf
CORRIE BEFORT | APETITES: FROM DESIRE TO SCORE
Apetites: from Desire to Score | AUG 7 | 10AM – 12PM
When composing/creating/choreographing through improvisation, so much pleasure can come from “feeling around” for the scores we want; scores that will DO something – for us and to us, in time and to space, with others and for others. Scoring from our appetites. How do we shape and share what we’re looking for? Are we making a new score or re-defining the tried and true? During this class we will concoct a chain reaction together – a series of scores that inform and nest into each other, possibly begetting and blossoming new scores. You can contribute to the concocting, take the rides generated, witness from the outside – or all three.
BIO:
Corrie Befort is a dancer and intermedia artist whose work in performance, film and scenographic design have been presented, commissioned and awarded internationally since 2001. Formerly based out of Seattle and Tokyo/Yokohama, she has been in Eastern WA since 2018 where she teaches inclusive movement education and improvisation, creates experimental textiles and works with dance-artist Michael Schumacher and sound-artist Jason E Anderson/LIMITS. Her performance/textile project ‘Unnamed Shapes,’ is currently commissioned by Moscow Contemporary for multi-gallery installation through The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Her works have appeared through Dance Ga Mitai, BankART, ODC, SF MoMA, The Northwest Film Forum., P.A.R.T.S., The Henry, The Seattle Art Museum, On the Boards and Risk/Reward, designing for Deborah Hay soloists, Mark Haim, Cherdonna/Jody Kuehner and Beth Graczyk (NYC). From 2008-2015 Corrie co-directed Seattle performance company Salt Horse with Graczyk and Angelina Baldoz. and she has danced for Scott/Powell Performance., Sheri Cohen and Natsuko Tezuka among others.
SOLVEJ AMELIA NOA | WISDOM OF THE BODY; SACRED SOUND, MAGIC IN MOVEMENT AND THE BIG YES
WISDOM OF THE BODY; SACRED SOUND, MAGIC IN MOVEMENT, AND THE BIG YES | AUG 8 | 10AM – 12PM
A deep and fascinating live sound experience is coupled with a facilitated warm-up, a gently guided organic stretch/movement segment, culminating in a robust, free expression of the body’s wisdom. Join in this celebration of authentic, respectful, empowered movement, often resulting in new approaches to the individual’s craft.
BIO:
Amelia Bolyard is a life-long dancer, a seasoned dance instructor, and an impromptu improvisational performance artist and composer across art mediums (music, visual art, poetry) and movement styles. She is a self-care activist and an embodiment coach for people recovering from physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and physical trauma. She is centered in gratitude and wildly curious.
*Photo by Erin O’Reilly
EVENTS
Drop-ins
Registration for the full Research Week includes research week drop-ins. These drop-ins are available for registration starting on JUN 20, or you can just show up on the day and get into the action!
Participant Showing
The Participant showing is the perfect time to show what you have been working on to faculty and other participants. Works are kept to 5 minutes or less. More information will be launched in spring of 2026.
Shows
Registrants recieve 1 ticket to each of the following Velocity Performances during SFD+I
AUG 6: CLOSER
ISHMAEL HOUSTON JONES + KEITH HENNESSY
AUG 9: RESEARCH IN PERFORMANCE
CORRIE BEFORT, KAYLA HAMILTON, MORIAH EVANS
Jams
JAMS
A SFD+I staple, Jams are open and free to the public, and facilitated by SFD+I’s illustrious faculty of facilitators. Check back in June 2026 for a list of Jam Practitioners!
Ultimate SFD+i
RADICAL DANCE, RADICAL PRICES!
Velocity’s best summer dance experience combines your chosen PERFORMANCE Cohort and the full RESEARCH Week for a money-saving, bundled price of $1200 $995 with early bird pricing before MAR 15!
Frequently asked questions
Have further questions about our summer offerings? Click the button below!
FAQs
HARUKO CROW NISHIMURA is a dancer, vocalist and artistic director of Degenerate Art Ensemble (DAE). Her unique style of movement is informed by her somatic practices of embodiment and imagery rooted in physical theater and Butoh dance. In her work, she combines projected imagery with movement and live sound to create new mythologies, revealing other dimensions, challenging reality in a multi-dimensional storytelling experience. Her work has been featured in over 10 countries presenting large scale experimental dance and theater projects, site-transforming spectacles and ongoing public experimentation. Some highlights of her work include the development of her newest work Anima Mundi at Baryshnikov Arts Residency 2023, a commission by director Robert Wilson to interpret his work Einstein on the Beach On the Beach 2013, a site specific mutli-disciplinary project for the 50th anniversary of the Seattle Worlds Fair at Seattle Center in collaboration with Olson Kundig Architects in 2012, dancing as soloist with the Kronos Quartet in 2015 as part of the 95 rituals – legendary dancer Anna Halprin’s 95th birthday anniversary project at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in 2015. She was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012 and a Dale Chihuly/Artist Trust Arts Innovators Award 2020. In addition to her work with DAE, Nishimura is constantly collaborating with both local, national and international artists to push the boundaries of her medium such as dancing in the street, creating rituals for strangers in public spaces and hosting artist salons cultivating community spaces for artists to share their work. Another recent work Skeleton Flower tells the story of her own struggle with identity depression, childhood trauma and finding her voice. It was shown as a work in progress at the Spotlight USA Festival in Plovdiv, Bulgaria 2018, the International Festival of Contemporary Dance in Mexico City 2021, Seattle’s On The Boards and the Hans Christian Andersen Festival in Denmark in 2022 and will be shown in San Francisco at ODC Theater in 2024. Her most recent collaboration Boy/mother faceless bloom with sculptor and installation artist Senga Nengudi, musician Eddy Kwon and composer Joshua Kohl premiered at Colorado College, was shown in Cincinnati at ThisTimeTomorrow Festival and will be presented by New York Live Arts in the Fall of 2023.
Photo by Maria Baranova
Embodiment and Presence
With Haruko Crow Nishimura
This class will hone attention deep into the body’s interior and we will learn to work with the states that emerge.
We will explore what it means to be moved when we let go of our individual will to manifest outer shapes and tune into our dances using tools of sensorial awareness.
It will explore what it means to be moved through deep listening and to be guided by sound and specific imagery. We will surrender ourselves to the richness of our present moments.
My training is rooted in Butoh dance, physical theater, improvisation and music.
In addition to dancers and performers, creative and curious people from all walks of life are welcome including those with no dance experience.
Anya Cloud (she/they)
I am an experimental contemporary dance artist originally from Alaska and currently based between Colorado and Berlin. As a queer, female, white person I orient my work to cultivate radical aliveness as an artist-activist practice; collaboration is central. I have taught/facilitated contact improvisation, improvisation, contemporary dance, and somatics nationally and internationally at festivals and institutions including at Guatemala Contact Improvisation Festival, Tanzfabrik Schule, ImPuls Tanz, Freiburg Contact Festival, Israeli Contact Improvisation Festival, wcciJAM, Ukraine Contact Improvisation Festival, Italy Contact Festival, The Field Center, and Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation among other. Important collaborators include Makisig Akin, Sara Shelton Mann, Karen Schaffman, Eric Geiger, Ishmael Houston-Jones, and Nhu Nguyen among others. Makisig Akin and I co-direct the project-based dance company The Love Makers. I currently teach at the University of Colorado Boulder and am trained in the Feldenkrais® Method. www.anyacloud.com
Photo by Tim Richards
Makisig Akin (they/them)
I am a queer, transgender Filipino born choreographer, dance artist, facilitator, and activist. I was raised in the Philippines and am currently based in Berlin, Germany. My work focuses on the recognition of intersectional identities, reconnecting with my ancestry, and decentralizing Western ideologies in dance making. I co-founded The Love Makers, a project-based dance company, with Anya Cloud. I have been practicing Contact Improvisation for 13 years and have taught in many different communities including HZT, UCLA, Tanzfabrik Schule, Being Touch Festival and The Field Center among others. My orientation to CI is deeply interconnected with my training in Filipino Traditional Dance, Kung Fu, Jiu Jitsu, Improvisation, walking meditation, Authentic Movement, Bouldering/Climbing, and Contemporary Dance. I examine how survival strategies can be translated into a communal physical practice, which I then use as a catalyst to a creative healing process. www.makisigakin.com
Photo by Tim Richards.
A Queer High-Risk Love Practice
With Anya Cloud + Makisig Akin
The core of this contact improvisation workshop is a queer love centered survival practice of time travel/communion/habitat/performance/ritual where everything deserves to breathe. Drawing from our individual and collective identities, CI research, and choreographic research we dive into the possibilities of what rigorous and playful contact improvisation can be. We will work with different qualities/types of touch, intention and impact, technical skill building, falling and falling together, bonding/grappling/napping/fainting, soul shaking practices, professing love, failure, and hot sweaty dancing. We will work in different constellations including solo, duet, trio, small group, and whole group. We will take on contact improvisation as a generous and high-risk practice. We will build skills for navigating around that which has potential to be fatal. We will work with a kind of bonding that is only possible through bathing in one another’s sweat. We will keep re-inventing ways to be wet and pleased. The central questions of our research are: What can we do together that we cannot do alone? How many ways can we move – move with – be moved by – each other? What is possible when love is stronger than fear?
We will practice taking care as we traverse the complex realities of being racialized and gendered bodies in relationship with one another. This will be a queer, trans, and BIPoC centered space.
Born in the South and raised in the mountains and DIY music scenes of the Pacific Northwest, shannon stewart | screaming traps explores the intersection of dance with embodied identities and social choreographies. Shannon’s creative practice is body centered–working with sensation, perception, and orientation to time and space, understanding that these things are shaped by context and social constructions, including the context of “the field of contemporary dance.” Her/Their work traverses through disciplines often crossing into essay, poetry, and film, and relies on comedy, pop culture, drag, and self-reflection to create intimate and honest works described as “mesmerizing” and “brutally poetic.”
A 2023 USA Artist Fellowship nominee, Shannon’s choreography has been presented by DOCK 11 (Berlin, Germany), CONARTE (Monterrey, Mexico), Improspekcije (Zagreb, Croatia) Movement Research at the Judson Church, Future Oceans Festival (NYC), Velocity Dance Center, On the Boards (Seattle), RISK/REWARD, Performance Works Northwest (Portland), Philadelphia Dance Projects, the Hinterlands/Playhouse, Wasserman Project (Detroit), Definitive Figures Festival, Marigny Opera House, Tulane University (New Orleans), Bryant Lake Bowl, Cowles Center (MPLS), the Work Room (ATL), Pivot Arts Incubator (Chicago), Good Children Gallery, the Front Gallery, invited to the V&A Late in London, and John F. Kennedy Center (Washington, D.C.). Her collaborative dance films have screened at festivals around the world. The development of Shannon’s work has been supported by the National Dance Project, National Performance Network, Foundation for Contemporary Art, UCROSS Foundation, Art Omi, and the Maggie Allesee National Center for Choreography, among others. Planet Detroit published their first submitted poem in July 2023.
As a performer and collaborator, Shannon has worked with Cherdonna Shinatra, Matty Davis Williams, Aurora Nealand, Deborah Hay, Christopher Matthews, tEEth performance/Angelle Hebert, zoe | juniper, Dayna Hanson, Pat Graney and has also performed the work of visual artists Tino Sehgal and Joan Jonas. She has co-founded two youth arts nonprofits on the west coast focused on underground culture and released a book distributed by AK Press documenting these efforts nationwide.
Shannon has a Masters of Fine Arts from Tulane University in Interdisciplinary Dance Performance and a BA in Urban Design from the University of Washington. She has been a core mentor for ROAR Berlin and a member of the Front Gallery in New Orleans. She is an Assistant Professor of Contemporary Dance at the University of Kansas and lives part- time in Detroit, Michigan (Waawiyatanong) with her partner and dog.
Photo by Jingzi Zhao
The Difference is Spreading
Saturday Morning “Technique” – The difference is spreading I read this quote about Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and thought this is how I feel sometimes about “technique” and “improvisation.” “She takes ordinary language—the “language of information”— and makes it strange, forcing us to be acutely aware of the way words work.” What if we take what is ordinary about dance class, dance vocabulary, and our embedded knowledge about dancing and make it strange, becoming acutely aware of the way “technique” works on, with and through us? We will move continuously, allowing patterns to emerge, saturate, transform, and spread. All techniques, anti-techniques, and fake techniques warmly invited.
Jody Kuehner aka Cherdonna Shinatra uses dance, drag, theater, camp, feminist traditions, absurdity and subversive commentary to make art. Eighteen years ago, she landed in Seattle and fell in love with its rowdy, postmodern dance culture. She fell in love with my own queerness. In doing so, Jody created Cherdonna Shinatra as a persona and character to question herself and explore the world from a uniquely queer perspective. Over the last 10 years Jody has created and performed a wide array of evening-length works and performance installations described as “uncategorizable spectacles” (The Stranger) for theaters, museums, clubs, parking lots, and abandoned buildings. She is a 2020 NEFA’s National Dance Project finalist, 2017 Artist Trust Fellowship recipient, 2016 NEFA’s National Dance Project awardee, and 2015 Stranger Genius Award winner. She has been presented locally at On the Boards, Washington Ensemble Theatre, Seattle Theatre Group, and the Henry Art Gallery. She has been presented nationally at the USF in Tampa FL, Go Drag! Festival, Berlin, Germany; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI; Centro de las Artes, Monterrey, Mexico; The Yard at Martha’s Vineyard; American Dance Festival, Durham, NC; and FringeArts in Philadelphia, PA. Her exhibition DITCH was presented at the Frye Art Museum, Seattle, WA; The Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK; Sarasota Art Museum, FL; and Akron Art Museum, OH. DITCH was featured in ARTnews, i-D Magazine and NBC’s 12 must-see LGBTQ art shows around the world.
Photo Credit Dylan Ward
Let’s Change the Subject
Jody Kuehner aka Cherdonna
This class is born from the question, how can I have rigorous compassion in my practice? In this workshop, we will explore this question together through mindfulness, meditation, and movement. We will begin by taking care of ourselves through breathing exercises and somatic meditation practices to tune into the present moment and let go of the noise surrounding us. Once we have laid this foundation, we will discuss recent developments in neuroscience that help us to understand how the brain processes pain and anxiety through the body. This scientific knowledge helps reinforce the power of mindfulness practices and lays the groundwork for rigorous compassion to enter one’s artistic practice. Then to change the subject, we’ll dance together in an open, improvisational manner for the sake of pleasure and care for the body, encouraging us to move intuitively and freely, without judgement or expectation.
Physical Education (PE) is keyon gaskin, Allie Hankins, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Co-created in 2013, PE organizes and hosts performances, reading groups, workshops, artist talks, and dance parties. Originally started in 2013 as a private reading group and discussion date over dinner and drinks, PE has curated and facilitated public programming since 2014. PE’s vision is to offer contemporary artists and audiences, as well as curious individuals, immersive modes through which to engage with artworks that center around performance and performativity. PE acknowledges and scrutinizes the perceived illegibility and messiness of the performing body, and seeks to collaboratively confront and embrace questions about it with a community.
Lu Yim is an artist who works in experimental performance and dance. They have received support through Pageant (NY), Center for Performance Research (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and recently through Queer | Art’s mentorship program with Julie Tolentino.
Takahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer. His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He co-directs the performance company madhause with Ben Evans, and is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.
keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize with their credentials
Allie Hankins is a dancer, performer, and choreographer. She is a resident artist and steward of FLOCK Dance Center, a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists founded in 2014 by Tahni Holt. In 2013 Allie co-initiated Physical Education, a critical and casual queer cooperative/support group comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently she has performed with Linda Austin (PDX), Milka Djordjevich (LA), and Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis). When she’s not working on performances, she is doing step aerobics and learning American Sign Language. Her website is alliehankins.com.
Photo by Mario Gallucci
Shared Practice
With Physical Education
keyon gaskin, Allie Hankins, Takahiro Yamamoto, and Lu Yim will hold space for talking through, thinking through, moving through, and questioning through collaboration.
PE Reading Group
PE started as a small hang-out reading group among friends, and we maintain the social yet critical nature of its origins. By providing libations, refreshments, and a comfortable atmosphere, we create an environment that is playful and relaxed, immersive, investigatory, and critical of content. We will make our reading selections available online through the SFD+I website, our email list, and social media. People will have time to review the materials as much or as little as they like before the reading group. We encourage all to come and eat, drink, listen, and participate whether they have studied the materials or not. We assert that all levels of engagement contribute to the conversation. Materials range from articles, essays, videos, and podcasts. Past examples of readings include “Delusions of Whiteness in the Avant-Garde,” by Cathy Park Hong, “Delusions of Progress,” by Daniel Borzutzky, “Looking for My Penis” by Richard Fung, “A Dialogue on Racial Melancholia” by David L. Eng & Shinhee Han, “The Company That Never Comes” by Renee Gladman & Lucy Ives, Excerpts from Rammellzee’s ICONIC TREATISE GOTHIC FUTURISM, VIDEO: The Otolith Group in Conversation
Tere O’Connor is the Artistic Director of Tere O’Connor Dance in NYC. and a Center for Advanced Studies Professor in Dance at the University of Illinois. He has been making dances since 1983 and has created over 50 works for his company. He lived and worked between New York and Rome for the first nine years of his career. His company has performed throughout the US, and in Europe, South America, and Canada. O’Connor has created numerous commissioned works for dance companies around the world, among these have been works for the Lyon Opera Ballet, White Oak Dance Project, Rotterdamse Dansgroep and many more. In addition to his 1996 work “Greta in a Ditch” for the White Oak Dance Project, he created a solo work for Mikhail Baryshnikov entitled “Indoor Man” and one for Riverdance alum Jean Butler, entitled “Day” produced by the Abbey theater in Dublin.
Tere O’Connor is a 2009 United States Artist Rockefeller Fellow. He is a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Performance Art Award, Arts International’s DNA Project Award, and a Creative Capital Award. He has received three New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards – One for “Heaven Up North” in 1988, another in 1999 for Sustained Achievement, and most recently for his work “Frozen Mommy” (2005). O’Connor is a 1993 Guggenheim Fellow. He is also a recipient of repeated grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, NEFA/National Dance Project, NYC Department of Cultural Affairs, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The MAP Fund, Jerome Foundation, Altria Group, Inc., The Harkness Foundation for Dance, and Mid Atlantic US Artists International.
A much sought after teacher, O’Connor has taught at the Bates Dance Festival,
American Dance Festival, Colorado Dance Festival, Ohio State University, University
of Minnesota, Arizona State University, at the School for New Dance Development
(The Netherlands), and ImpulseTanz (Austria), among many others. He is currently a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he resides for the spring semester, spending the rest of his time in NY or on tour.
Photo property of Tere O’Connor Dance
Intuitional Certainty
With Tere O’Connor
“She takes ordinary language—the “language of information”— and makes it strange, forcing us to be acutely aware of the way words work.”
Lu Yim is an artist who works in experimental performance and dance. They have received support through Pageant (NY), Center for Performance Research (NY), Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, and recently through Queer | Art’s mentorship program with Julie Tolentino.
Photo by Christa Holka
keyon gaskin prefers not to contextualize with their credentials
Photo by mario gallucci
Takahiro Yamamoto is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer. His current conceptual investigations revolve around the phenomenological effects of time, embodied approach to the presence of nothingness, and the social/emotional implications of visibility. He co-directs the performance company madhause with Ben Evans, and is part of the Portland-based support group Physical Education with Allie Hankins, keyon gaskin, and Lu Yim.
Photo by DJ Schaller
Allie Hankins is a dancer, performer, and choreographer. She is a resident artist and steward of FLOCK Dance Center, a creative home to Portland’s experimental dance artists founded in 2014 by Tahni Holt. In 2013 Allie co-initiated Physical Education, a critical and casual queer cooperative/support group comprised of herself, keyon gaskin, Taka Yamamoto, and Lu Yim. Physical Education hosts open reading groups and lectures, curates performances, and teaches workshops nationally. Most recently she has performed with Linda Austin (PDX), Milka Djordjevich (LA), and Morgan Thorson (Minneapolis). When she’s not working on performances, she is doing step aerobics and learning American Sign Language. Her website is alliehankins.com.
Photo courtesy of the Lumber Room
Black Collectivity (BC) is a way of being, a mode of survival, and a dream space. Since 2021, Black Collectivity organizes with the intention of bringing together diasporic people involved in creating and supporting movement based experiences. Under the guiding notion ‘we build collectivity out of necessity,’ BC finds its roots in the collective movement and contribution of Black communities in the PNW and beyond. Together the Black Collectivity team aims to make and support work that explores and celebrates memory and culture through embodied responses.
Black Collectivity Artists: Nia-Amina Minor, Akoiya Harris, marco farroni, David Rue
Photo by Chloe Collyer
A Practice of Return
With Black Collectivity
Participants will be introduced to the physical research and choreography from the creative work of Black Collectivity. The class will begin with exercises to activate the senses and warm the body, including movement meditations, task based and improvisational exercises, as well as rhythm centered explorations. We will then dive into creative process and learn phrase material.
Led by Black Collectivity Artists Akoiya Harris and marco farroni
Hannah Simmons 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. As a performer, she has oscillated between highly experimental contemporary works, performance art, classical ballet, opera, and burlesque, most recently dancing in Seattle Opera’s La Traviata and back-up dancing for electro-pop diva YellaCatt.
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.
Recent projects include: Ballet Rituals, an ongoing class series built alongside Alethea Alexander and Maya Tacon; Field Guides, place-based audio pieces that help you to think differently about body and environment, in collaboration with Leah Crosby; and Futurememory, a collection of zines that ask if something can live indefinitely in the realm of possibility, in collaboration with Maria Manness.
She is passionate about communal care, collaboration, and building sustainable and reciprocal systems of support for artists.
Photo by AJ Ragasa
Body + Site
With Hannah Simmons
A site-specific workshop built around the history and architecture of Freeway Park. We will explore the body in relationship to the site and look at the way landscapes, including our own bodies, change over time.
Peggy Piacenza is a Seattle choreographer, video artist, and performer who has toured both nationally and internationally. She is the co-founder of Base, a non-profit organization dedicated to elevating risk and invention in dance, performance, and multidisciplinary art. Peggy’s work draws from her explorations in improvisation/performance techniques, religion and gender studies, and inter-disciplinary collaborations. In recent years her stage-based work has expanded to include installation and video. Her choreography has been commissioned and presented by Bonfire Gallery, Bratislava Movement Festival in Slovakia, Dance Theater Workshop in NYC, and in Seattle as part of Velocity Dance Center’s Guest Artist Series, On the Boards, Composer/Choreographer, D-9 Dance Collective, Northwest Film Forum, and 4Culture. In 1992, she co-founded Seattle’s repertory dance company, The D-9 Dance Collective.
Piacenza’s contemporary dance career began in Seattle in 1991 when she first performed with Seattle-based choreographer Pat Graney, touring signature works throughout the US, Europe and South America. From 1996–2004 she worked in collaboration with co-directors Dayna Hanson and Gaelen Hanson of the Seattle-based dance-theater company 33 Fainting Spells. Since then, she has performed in the work of many choreographers, such as Bebe Miller, Stephanie Skura, Deborah Hay, Lionel Popkin, Beth Graczyk, and others. She also performed in two evening-length works conceived by Dayna Hanson, Gloria’s Cause (2010) and The Clay Duke (2014). She can also be seen acting in Hanson’s feature-length film Improvement Club (2013). She is currently performing with NYC/Toronto-based performance collective, Same As Sister (S.A.S.).
Piacenza is a 2010 graduate of Smith College’s Ada Comstock Scholars Program where she majored in Religion and Gender Studies. In Spring 2011 she became the inaugural recipient of the Helen Gurley Brown Magic Grant, underwriting her creative project to bring Cambodian and American artists together in Cambodia for a month of cross-cultural dialogue and dancing associated with classical and contemporary dance forms. In December 2012, a documentary film based on her time in Cambodia was completed, and subsequently hosted by Velocity Dance Center’s Speakeasy Series.
Photo by Doug Arney
Intimate Spaces
This class will focus on the intimate spaces that we dance from and the art of honing our perceptions as movement lovers and art makers. We start with the body. Instilling a sense of stillness and quiet as we listen and begin to move from the intimate spaces that connect us to ourselves and each other. We will aim to interrupt habitual habits, engage our movement desires, and move towards creating a way of knowing through our bodies. We will Move. We will Write. We will Share. We will ask Questions. Why make Art? What about DOUBT? What about TRUST? What are the ways of being that prevent us from Embodying the full expression of the dance that we want to dance?
Leslie Seiters is a teacher, performer and dancemaker. She studied visual art at Kenyon College, received an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, and is a certified Feldenkrais practitioner. Since 2002 she has directed Leslie Seiters/little known dance theater, has co-directed and performed with long-time collaborator Rachael Lincoln and she dances weekly with LIVEpractice, a group she co-founded in 2007. Leslie has primarily lived/worked on the west coast and has performed with Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband, Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions, Bebe Miller, Scott Wells, Knee Jerk Project, Body Cartographers, and Deborah Hay. She has been faculty at San Diego State University since 2005. Leslie seeks and participates in projects that provide regular opportunities to rethink, reconsider, and reinvent what she is doing as a dance artist and moves toward what dance does, rather than what it means.
Photo by Crystal Birns
Leslie Seiters is a teacher, performer and dancemaker. She studied visual art at Kenyon College, received an MFA in Dance from The Ohio State University, and is a certified Feldenkrais practitioner. Since 2002 she has directed Leslie Seiters/little known dance theater, has co-directed and performed with long-time collaborator Rachael Lincoln and she dances weekly with LIVEpractice, a group she co-founded in 2007. Leslie has primarily lived/worked on the west coast and has performed with Sara Shelton Mann/Contraband, Jo Kreiter/Flyaway Productions, Bebe Miller, Scott Wells, Knee Jerk Project, Body Cartographers, and Deborah Hay. She has been faculty at San Diego State University since 2005. Leslie seeks and participates in projects that provide regular opportunities to rethink, reconsider, and reinvent what she is doing as a dance artist and moves toward what dance does, rather than what it means.
Fiction/Friction/Flow
With Rachael Lincoln + Leslie Seiters
In this workshop, we will play with practical and poetic uses of objects, space, and selves, skirting the line between functional and fantastic. We will slow down to sense more, and speed up to access our before-thinking impulses. Can we get better at making coincidences happen? Can mistakes, awkwardness, and disruptions be our guides? Can we fully feel brief glimpses of unexpected beauty? Ideas will be layered and we will tune our presence towards togetherness.
Karen chuki Nelson (she/her/crone) tunes in community and performance where she lives on unceded Coast Salish land known as Vashon Island near Seattle, and world-wide on-screen in tunezooming, and face to face through international touring. Early on she helped develop Tuning Scores originated by Lisa Nelson in collaboration with Lisa, Scott Smith, and K.J. Holmes in their 1990’s performance group Image Lab and since then with many others. Tuning is a foundation to all chuki’s dancemaking, and crone has joined with margit galanter on many Tuning projects since they began collaborating in the late 90’s. This SFD+I inspired tuning creation project includes a scheduled early morning class, an all day research sideshow, and pop up site tunings with local and visiting guests. www.explomov.weebly.com
Photo by Margit Galanter
margit galanter (ze/zir, they/them) is a dance poet and cultural instigator living on Huichin, unceded Ohlone land. Their syncretic approach is based on decades of practice in movement/art lineages and is shared through long-term projects and writings. margit’s work is offered through the vivid grove — a live art school for moving, learning, creative evolution, and collective liberatory practices. In the end of the last decade, they instigated Tuning Culture/Tuning4Armageddon, a collaborative inquiry that utilizes Tuning practices to decolonize dance, and Cave Forms, an exploration in performance, nourishment, fecundity and the environment. margit’s practice in tuning started in Seattle with Karen as zir teacher in 1996, and through the years, many collaborative adventures. www.vividgrove.org
Solvej Amelia Noa is an impromptu, improvisational, multi-genre performance artist, as well as an educator, Embodiment Coach and non-denominational minister, based in Seattle WA. Amelia’s dance background and formal training are primarily in ballet, modern, jazz, musical theater, hip hop and afro-brazilian dance styles. She danced for numerous Seattle based contemporary dance companies from 1995-2002. At the end of that time, Amelia had incurred multiple dance related injuries, and related complications, and it was then she began what would become a dedicated rehabilitation and rejuvenation practice. This was the seed planted that lead to Amelia creating the Joy of Dance Experience (J.O.D.E.) in 2018: a sustainable, holistic self care sequence, structured to identify and tend the needs of the body, prioritizing safety, joy and freedom. Amelia credits JODE with restoring her to mobility, agility, resilience and vast quantities of JOY. With an essential upgrade in attitude, approach and awareness, Amelia returned to performing contemporary and improvised dance in 2016. She currently collaborates with choreographers from various locations across the country.
Amelia’s improvisational movement work erupted around 2003, when she joined the freestyle cyphers (circles) in local Seattle dance clubs, and began dancing to house music. With break dancers, waackers, voguers, pop-lockers and more as her sources for inspiration, her movement repertoire burst far beyond what had been her previously perceived bounds. She quickly developed an interested in supporting others in the same exhilarating, fulfilling discovery of their own bountiful resources for fresh movements and ideas. This resulted in her teaching house dance in various studios around Seattle, with the most recent location being Cornish College of the Arts, in the college dance department.
About a decade later, around 2013, Amelia discovered a treasure of a music venue in Seattle called the Spite House. This beautiful underground living room music venue revealed Amelia to the impromptu, improvised music aspect of her artistry, and she became a regular contributor, and ultimately, a curator at the Spite House. It was in that space that her freestyle movement vocabulary began to be translated and expressed as improvised and intuited sounds and poetry, with the use of a loop pedal, in concert with organic movement. This laid the groundwork for Amelia’s ministry, Our Love of Life Opera (OLOLO). Through OLOLO, she explores, cultivates and disseminates the potent medicine availed of the arts, which she considers the primary mediums through which inspiration is expressed and healing is experienced.
Amelia is also the founder of M.A.N.G.O. Family Wellness; a trauma-informed source for Embodiment Coaching for children and adults, as well as parent and family coaching for families in mild to extraordinary distress. Through MANGO, Amelia also provides trauma-informed anti-bias training, as well as infant mental health workshops for educators and care-givers. Amelia identifies as FREE and dedicates her life to a Higher Power.
Photo by Michelle Smith-Lewis
Fox Whitney is a performance maker, choreographer, dancer, musician, filmmaker, actor and writer. He started the psychedelic transfuturist band Light Aloud in 2023 and founded the interdisciplinary performance project Gender Tender in 2012. Both Light Aloud and GT engage a team of artists trained in Fox’s unique methods modeled on visual art practices,
cults, riots and QT history and the surreal nature of transformation. Fox’s ongoing project, MELTED RIOT is the current focus of his interdisciplinary art making. MELTED RIOT uses tactics rooted in text, sound, dance, durational performance, and visual art to investigate the effects peaceful and violent forms of support and sabotage have on the bodies, minds, and spirits of the transgender and queer community. MELTED RIOT is a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer. www.foxwhitney.weebly.com
IG: @fox_whitney_ @lightaloud
Fox Whitney is a performance maker, choreographer, dancer, musician, filmmaker, actor and writer. He started the psychedelic transfuturist band Light Aloud in 2023 and founded the interdisciplinary performance project Gender Tender in 2012. Both Light Aloud and GT engage a team of artists trained in Fox’s unique methods modeled on visual art practices,
cults, riots and QT history and the surreal nature of transformation. Fox’s ongoing project, MELTED RIOT is the current focus of his interdisciplinary art making. MELTED RIOT uses tactics rooted in text, sound, dance, durational performance, and visual art to investigate the effects peaceful and violent forms of support and sabotage have on the bodies, minds, and spirits of the transgender and queer community. MELTED RIOT is a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer. www.foxwhitney.weebly.com
IG: @fox_whitney_ @lightaloud
Joy of Dance Experience (JODE): The Workshop
The Joy of Dance Experience (JODE) utilizes an organic movement sequence, beginning with a thorough, relaxing warming of the body, and culminating in a powerful expression of inspiration. The facilitator takes artists, dancers, and curious adventures on a free-flow, creative journey, prioritizing their holistic well being, creative resilience and personal expansion. This self-care centered practice reveals participants to the “space of yes”, wIth an “all respect, no neglect” approach. The participant is supported by the facilitator, to create an experience of optimal safety, as they tune with the language and wisdom of their bodies and access both new, and revived energies and movements, ultimately experienced as JOY. JODE is an expression of both individualism and togetherness. The workshop includes meditation, and is rooted in freedom, so there are no “musts” in JODE. It’s a judgment free zone, with an emphasis on staying with the self, and arriving in unexpected, often outstanding, movements and moments. The facilitator, Solvej Amelia Noa, is a joyful, energized, light hearted human, with a deep commitment to art as a primary healing modality, for the full range of life experiences.
with Alia Swersky
Mainstage Theater
The Opening Jam will be just that…An Opening / A Opportunity to Begin Again and Again…Alia will guide participants in an opening score to meet & mingle which will then lead us into Open Dancing. This is not specifically a Contact Jam, but all styles and desires are welcome with awareness of consent always in practice. Come as you are. Meet yourself & meet one another. We will see what collaboratively emerges.
MAINSTAGE
Enter Anytime Jam with Karen Nelson
Enter Anytime Jam will start with group scores of 1 minute solos and evolve duet and ensemble interactions that based on individual dancers’ appetites and consent may or may not include touch or weight — powered as well by live vibes from wonderous musicians cellist Lori Goldston and mgdangam player Doug Mackenzie.
STUDIO
Open Jam
This Open Jam is a non facilitated space with no music for Participants to jam. This space is not centered on Contact Improvisation but contact is welcome.
MAINSTAGE
Poetry Jam with Ryuta Iwashita
Poetry Jam : a playful, poetic arena where texts become the landscape as they travel in and out of our bodies as our partner. There will be no music, but there will be a microphone, a stand and a sound system.
STUDIO
That’s A Handful! Research Jelly Jam with Alyza Delpan-Monley
Alongside the Mainstage Jams, CAiR artist alyza will be facilitating an explorative space as part of their research for their upcoming show That’s a HANDFUL!
MAINSTAGE
Seattle Jam with Helena Zhao
This will be a contact improvisation open jam, with a facilitated warm-up focused on tonality, listening, and support. Physical touch within duets, trios, and ensemble work is possible. It is also possible to engage in this jam with no physical touch. There may occasionally be music if the moment calls for it, and sounding by dancers is welcome and encouraged.
STUDIO
Open Jam
This Open Jam is a non facilitated space with no music for Participants to jam. This space is not centered on Contact Improvisation but contact is welcome.
aka THE DREAMACHINEHAPPENING
with Light Aloud
Mainstage Theater
A dance + sound + light show Happening inspired by the performance art of the 1950s-1960s (Alan Kaprow coined the term) and an object called the dreamachine-a stroboscopic flicker device viewed with closed eyes that produces visual stimuli and hypnagogic states (aka relaxation) created by Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs’s. This Happening will feature music from synth punk psychedelic band Light Aloud and special guests. Come to dance (scores for improvisation offered by Fox or do your own thing); come to watch (visuals galore); come to meditate (close your eyes for the dreamachine to take effect); come to connect and chill (a/c in august yes).
Open Jam
Mainstage Theater
This Closing Open Jam is a non facilitated space for Participants to jam on the final day of the festival. This space is not centered on Contact Improvisation but contact is welcome.