SEATTLE FESTIVAL OF DANCE + IMPROVISATION
RESEARCH WEEK
AUGUST 3-10
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
EARLY BIRD PRICING UNTIL FEB 28
$750 $650
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!
Registration for Drop-in classes starts JUN 20 <3
INTENSIVES
Sign up for full research week to choose one morning, midday AND afternoon intensive/drop-in slot from the options below. Registration for individual intensives opens June 20th.
“[I am interested in teaching] all aspects from technique to theory to production. I think I am particularly good and interested in teaching improvisation, creating score tasks and situations for the dancer to discover their own movement language, interests, capabilities and choices. Improvisation is used as a strategy to explore body memory and physical and emotional states. There are workshops, for instance, that concentrate on how images unconsciously affect the way we move. The images used come from existing sources mixed with images we create for ourselves and images we have for our own body. Integrating these images in the work, the dancer can explore how they expand his or her imagination and physical range. With these entrances for improvisation, strategies could be discussed for their development into choreographic ideas.”
-Meg Stuart on improvisation
Friday’s class will be led by Velocity’s Curating Artist in Residence, Amy O’Neal and will be a continuation of Meg Stuart’s pedagogy.
*Photo by Oddbjørn Erland Aarstad
In this intensive we will work with ideas about stone and water to deepen our ability to listen and to allow ourselves to be changed in relation to direct experience, while centering our own ever evolving nature. This class is for people who care about embodied insight as a foundation for making. We build on the belief that movement and observation practices are a form of thinking that we can apply to any aspect of our lives: to dancing, to making, to being in the world.
Water, without abandoning its own powerful nature, takes on the qualities of everything it touches. It absorbs, reflects, and conforms to what is there.
Stone, with its limitations of shape, can be a touchstone for precision and nuance as it requires care to fit harmoniously with other stones.
Working with these metaphors we ask:
How do we support each other?
How do we know what we need to be supported?
What power and possibility is unearthed when we are able to both give and receive support?
Drawing on Korean shamanistic and martial art practices, awareness and mindfulness forms, contact improvisation, and on theater and game practices, we will observe, play, make and dance.
We will learn and practice activities like “Becoming Stone Practice” as daily rituals to work on both individually and in groups, and we will reflect in a variety of ways on what we are experiencing. Insights from reflection will be applied to new iterations of rituals, activities and play.
d. Sablea Grimes
Flowstates: MediKinetics of Groove and Becoming
MIDDAY 5-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
Flowstates invites you into a GROOVE-centered exploration rooted in Black movement expressions and Hip Hop dance practices. Together, we’ll immerse in the vocabulary, cultural accents, movement principles, and body alignments these rich traditions offer.
Our primary intention in this gatheRING? Activate JOY through kinetic meditations on BEcoming. We’ll explore and reinterpret existing dances, moves, and movement ideas—playing with how they can be remixed and reimagined to fit various styles, tempos, music feels, and our distinct bodies. Through this playful experimentation, we’ll rethink their purpose and find new ways to sequence these movements together.
Through the Funkamental MediKinetics movement system, we will engage in a practice of embodying change, aligning with the rhythms of transformation, and redefining presence in each beat, gesture, and pause.
So, let’s turn-up, quiet down, cut loose, kiki freely, and raise our spirits while dropping it like it’s hot.
CHASING THE FRAMWORK is an open framework centering improvisational performance to excavate thematic structures within the body. Rooted in Blackness, abstraction, and relentless exploration, it seeks to unearth possibilities beyond the confines of our current reality. Through this practice we dismantle oppressive systems like white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and sexism. We start by conceptualizing repetition and exploring themes of cyclical patterns in behavior, thoughts, and ideas; using somatic practices from childhood to unlock an otherwise impossible to imagine space outside of everything imaginable.
ZOE SCOFIELD
Make what you want… bring it all in the room! A choreographic / performance making lab
Morning 4-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
I am proposing a choreographic / performance making lab that mirrors my own process. Currently I am working with:
- Objects / meaning
- Collaborating with skilled artistic peers: movement generation, how movement interacts with objects, space, light, music, content, context, set, video, costumes and language.
This intensive will invite participants to work on their own through individual time, sharing, improvisation, creation, group discussion and reflection. During the process, I will invite other artists into the room via Zoom to further deepen the explorations of the participants in the room. Guest artists to be announced closer to the date.
My goal for you is the facilitation of expanding your process. Which includes expanding your tool kit, your relationship to how you work and who you work with as well as exploring mediums.
There will be an informal showing on the last day. Participants are also invited to try out mid process ideas at the SFD+I Participant Showing on Wednesday evening, facilitated by Velocity.
Participants should have either a new or existing process / project in mind that they want to work on. Bring your own props (I’ll bring some as well)…suggestions to get you started / by no means exhaustive: make-up, paint (please clean up after yourself), cardboard, fabric, found items, masks, cassette tapes, costumes, puppets, paper, etc., literally anything thats legal ;). Please have a container to store your objects at the studio.
*Photo by Anton Karraa
MELTED RIOT: the intensive will investigate the way image + sound + movement intersect with dance, performance, QT history and trans futurism. We will engage in improvisations informed by rebellious actions towards liberation like the Stonewall Riots, Levitate the Pentagon, and the Happenings of the 1960s. We will dance, we will strength train, we will talk queer history and trans futurism, we will obsess over our joint spaces, we will take care of each other, we will trance out a little, we will lift each other up (literally and emotionally), we will close our eyes, we will engage in contact (eyes and touch/others and self), we will sometimes feel alone together and sometimes feel like we’re at a rave. We will do some restorative yoga and meditate on breath, color and other queer mysteries. All with your consent. If you don’t consent you are welcome to sit out the things that you don’t need and rest. Live musical accompaniment from Fox’s psychedelic trans-futurist band Light Aloud will be a part of the process. The name of the band comes from the title of one of Fox’s scores performed in his ongoing project MELTED RIOT; Light Aloud is an improvisation that starts with meditating on a black and white image of police officers pushing a protester to the ground that was taken during the Stonewall Riots in 1969.
Fox’s ongoing project MELTED RIOT uses tactics rooted in 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 softens the word riot (a violent disturbance of the peace by a crowd) replacing the word VIOLENT with: somatic, satirical, surreal, psychedelic. Inspired by the Stonewall Riots, this performance research project will use an isolated crowd of socially distant voices, bodies, and sculptural interventions to investigate radical extremes. MELTED RIOT is a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer.
This workshop will focus on disorderly techniques and speed-duet-making. We will lean into an expansive definition of duet as a malleable form which could include two people or our solo selves in practical and poetic relationships with time, objects, or space. We will generate quickly and with imposed limitations in attempts to act on impulse and to quiet the critical voices that can get in our way. We will override our need to formulate the “about” part of meaning-making, and listen closely to what is alive for each of us (which may be meaningful.) Can we trust the chemistry of two unknowable histories colliding in the present moment to guide our making? Can we practice live and reflective editing as an extension of trusted impulse? Can mistakes, awkwardness, and disruptions be our guides? Together we will scramble tuning and making, good and bad ideas, “set” and “improvised” dancing, and our sense of lightness and gravity. We will make quickly as a practice of focus and immediacy, allowing for unfinished, messy, unsure, and unknown.
DROP-IN CLASSES/ FACULTY BIOS
JUNGWOONG KIM / Internal Discoveries / External Connections
STONE MOVING LIKE WATER (DROP-IN)
This drop-in class is a continuation of the principles that will be researched in Jungwoong’s intensive.
“Drawing on Korean shamanistic and martial art practices, awareness and mindfulness forms, contact improvisation, and on theater and game practices, we will observe, play, make and dance.”
BIO:
Jungwoong Kim, born and raised in South Korea, has been a dance/performing artist, actor and arts educator for 25 years. He is trained in Korean martial arts and traditional dance/ritual of Korean shamanism, which strongly inform his aesthetic and artistic vision. Kim describes his practice as “a dynamic dialogue between my training and background in South Korean traditional dance and music and my embrace of western improvisation, especially Contact Improvisation, as a performance medium.” His performance practice includes improvisational solos, durational ensemble work with long-time collaborators, site-specific engagements with visual and media art, and movement characterizations for mainstage theater productions. He teaches workshops nationally and internationally that focus on movement and observation practices as a form of thinking that we can apply to any aspect of life, be it dancing, making, or being in the world. During the past couple of years his work has focused on how movement and voice are pathways to finding a sense of “home” and belonging at a time of increasing migration, displacement, hostility toward immigrants, and human isolation. Recent engagements include the role of the water seller in Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater production of Bertolt Brecht’s Good Person of Szechuan and leading improvisation workshops in Colombia, Argentina, Germany and South Korea.
d. Sablea Grimes /8-Piece Combo: Grounding in Community, Codes, and Conversational Modes
8-Piece Combo: Grounding in Community, Codes, and Conversational Modes:
This immersive movement experience invites participants to explore community, rhythm, and connection through the “mirror principle,” where we embrace each person as a divine reflection of ourselves. In the spirit of Black dance as a dialogical practice, we ground ourselves in the seamless flow of soul line dances and shared movement, creating a space for collective expression and spiritual companionship. Through groove-based techniques, kinetic rootwork, and interactive exchanges, each step becomes an offering of gratitude to the earth, a celebration of grounding, unity, and respect for our shared existence.
BIO:
d. Sabela grimes, a trans-media storyteller, sonic ARKivist, movement composer. Improvisational systems and collaboration are at the heart of his creative practice, inhaling through socio-historical observation, self-examination and speculative meanderings, exhaling through layers of interconnected sonic, visual and kinesthetic arrangements. Sabela be investing in the poetics of assemblage, the magic of mutability, mastering misuse. Past projects include Philly XP, World War WhatEver, 40 Acres & A Microchip and ELECTROGYNOUS. Sabela’s current collaborative endeavor with Meena Murugesan, Parable of Portals, dreams Butler’s professional and personal writings into live performances, audio-visual installations, site-specific short films, and interactive community activations. Each experience realizes quantum Blackness as a means to play within the nowness of recurring futures. On faculty at USC’s Glorya Kaufman School of Dance, he continues to cultivate, Funkamental MediKinetics, a movement system that draws on the layered dance training, community building, and spiritual practices evident in Black vernacular and Hip Hop/Street dance forms. He is a 2023 USC Associates Award for Artistic Expression recipient, 2021 Bessie Award winner for Outstanding Performer, 2017 County of Los Angeles Performing Arts Fellow, and 2014 United States Artists Rockefeller Fellow.
*Photo by Cheryl Mann
Meg Stuart / Drop-in Class with Meg Stuart
Drop-in Class with meg Stuart
Join Meg Stuart in exploring her Creative Process during this drop in class.
“[I am interested in teaching] all aspects from technique to theory to production. I think I am particularly good and interested in teaching improvisation, creating score tasks and situations for the dancer to discover their own movement language, interests, capabilities and choices. Improvisation is used as a strategy to explore body memory and physical and emotional states. There are workshops, for instance, that concentrate on how images unconsciously affect the way we move. The images used come from existing sources mixed with images we create for ourselves and images we have for our own body. Integrating these images in the work, the dancer can explore how they expand his or her imagination and physical range. With these entrances for improvisation, strategies could be discussed for their development into choreographic ideas.” -Meg Stuart on improvisation.
BIO:
Meg Stuart (US/BE/DE) is a choreographer, director and dancer who lives and works in Berlin and Brussels. With her company, Damaged Goods, founded in 1994, she has created over thirty productions, ranging from solos and duets such as BLESSED (2007) and Hunter (2014) to large-scale choreographies such as VIOLET (2011) and CASCADE (2021), video works, site-specific creations like Projecting [Space[ (2017-2019), and improvisation projects such as City Lights (2016). Stuart’s work moves freely between the genres of dance, theater and visual arts, driven by an ongoing dialogue with artists from different disciplines. Through fictions and shifting narrative layers, she explores dance as a source of healing and a way to transform the social fabric. Improvisation is an important part of Stuart’s practice, as a strategy to move from physical and emotional states or the memory of them. She passes down her knowledge through regular workshops and master classes in- and outside of the studio. Meg Stuart received several awards in recognition of her oeuvre, among which the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Biennale di Venezia in 2018. www.damagedgoods.be
ZOE SCOFIELD / TECHNIQUE AS A VEHICLE FOR TRANSFORMATION
TECHNIQUE AS A VEHICLE FOR TRANSFORMATION
A Contemporary approach to modern technique, This class is physically rigorous, deep, and kinaesthetically challenging. It is a space where product-orientated results are replaced by active experiences. We combine musicality, visual and physical metaphors in both improvisation and structured forms as a vehicle to surprise and further each dancer’s potential. It is my desire to help participants foster a body that is available, aware and in command of its senses, intuition and physicality.
BIO:
Zoe Scofield (she/her), is a 2015 Guggenheim Fellow, and a dance and visual artist based in LA. Zoe is the co-artistic director and founder of zoe | juniper, a dance and visual art company since 2005. Her work has been commissioned and presented by Jacob’s Pillow, New York Live Arts, On the Boards, RedCat, MASS MoCA, The Frye Art Museum, The Joyce Theater, PS 122, Carolina Performing Arts, and The Met Museum among others. Zoe works in performance, video installation, photography, opera and film. She has received funding from the Mellon Foundation, Princess Grace Foundation, NEA, NEFA, NPN and more. Her recent project, The Other Shore, is an art object, online performance, video installation presented by Jacob’s Pillow, On the Boards, Carolina Performing Arts and RedCat. Currently she is working on a new project with the band Xiu Xiu to premiere at The Moore Theater with Seattle Theater Group in May 2025.
Zoe earned an MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts as part of their inaugural class.
www.zoejuniper.org
*Photo by Stefano Altamura
Malcolm-x Betts / Drop-in Class
DROP-IN CLASS with MALCOLM-X
This drop-in class with Malcolm-X Betts explores complex social structures in an open improvisational setting.
BIO:
Malcolm-x Betts is a native New York City visual and dance artist who believes that art is a transformative vehicle that brings people and communities together. His artistic work is rooted in investigating embodiment for liberation, Black imagination, and directly engaging with challenges placed on the physical body. He has a community engagement practice allowing artistic freedom and making art accessible to everyone.
Rachael lincoln + Leslie Seiters / Time Sensitive
Time Sensitive
In this class, we will play with our sense of time as an extension of the classic five senses. We will slow down to sense more, and speed up to access our before-thinking impulses. We will take on stillness as pause, rest, response, rhythmic choice, and as a varied and alive part of our dancing. With time forward, we will tune to the presence and orchestration of pulse, rhythm, cadence and response as time-full practices. Our collectively evolving ideas about time will be layered into our durational movement practice and we will tune our presence towards togetherness.
BIOS:
Rachael Lincoln (she/her) is a director, dancer, and facilitator with a strong affinity for collaboration. Her duet work with Leslie Seiters has spanned two decades and toured extensively, and she is in her tenth year practicing and performing with the Seattle-based improvisation collective, AVID. Rachael has been a performer and an associate director with BANDALOOP since 1998, dancing site-specifically on vertical surfaces and in traditional theaters around the world and has also had the pleasure of working with celebrated dance-makers including Joe Goode, Jo Kreiter, Bebe Miller, Sara Shelton Mann, and Nancy Stark Smith. Rachael holds an MFA from UCLA’s department of World Arts and Cultures and is an Associate Professor in the Department of Dance at the University of Washington.
Leslie Seiters (she/her) 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 Tim Richards
FOX WHITNEY / PUNK PRAYERS
PUNK PRAYERS
Queer guided meditations, yoga for all levels, dance exercises to shake off the haters. Fox will guide you through visualizations and sequences intended to build strength and flexibility in the body and ease in the mind using an alignment and liberation centered approach. Warm up your punk a$$ while practicing pranayama (breathing techniques), asana (poses), guided meditations, and structured dance exercises you can break out at the show later. There’s no way to do this wrong. Come as you are. PUNK PRAYERS welcomes whispers and screams, the sacred and profane, the soft hearted and the hardcore. Live musical accompaniment from psych trans-futurist band Light Aloud.
BIO:
Fox Whitney [he/him] is a multi-disciplinary artist working at the intersection of dance, music, film+video, theater, writing and visual art. Fox is obsessed with the surreal nature of transformation, how we identify ourselves and others and how personal and collective identity is an ever shifting and evolving landscape. His projects center his queer and transgender point of view. He founded the QT interdisciplinary performance project Gender tender in 2012. He also fronts the trans-futurist psych band Light Aloud that grew from his ongoing series of performances and workshops called MELTED RIOT. MELTED RIOT is a surreal protest song, a queer meditation, a psychedelic research project, a punk prayer.
Hannah Krafcik + Emily Jones / Dealing with Desires
DEALING WITH DESIRES
What wants to happen?
Contact improvisation for people who feel ambivalent about contact improvisation
In this class, we will consider how contact improvisation can support our self-knowing— awareness of our desires, capacity, and sensory fantasies—and how it can illuminate what we don’t know we know about how to exist in right relationship with others. We will practice with a queered lens, keeping in mind that our unspoken assumptions can foreclose on curiosity about one another’s experiences and limit possibilities in our dancing. We will stay accountable to our individual behavior as well as community safety by keeping active channels of communication and consent open. We will also explore various ways of identifying and asking one another for what we want. This class will include soloing, movement in partnership and group composition. We will play with some mechanically specific material, while emphasizing its adaptability. Please know this is an aspirational class description, a seed planted in good faith, grown out of the Queer Contact Improvisation community’s research in Portland, OR. Nothing is compulsory.
BIOS:
Hannah Krafcik & Emily Jones make performances and transdisciplinary art and co-teach dance together. Their artistic offerings explore the tensions between social power dynamics and unnamed personal needs. Throughout their making, they maintain that sensory autonomy—the ability to honor and explore one’s own sensory needs and desires—is an essential step in naming, refusing, and subverting coercive power dynamics that touch every aspect of life. Emily and Hannah are based on unceded lands of Cowlitz, Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, Clackamas and many other tribes, also known as Portland, Oregon, where they organize as part of a larger Queer Contact Improvisation cohort. As Queer CI cohort members, they help facilitate space for wider community practice and are collaborating on a group performance to premiere at Movement Research at the Judson Church (NYC) in 2025.
ERIC GEIGER / WHAT IF HOW WE'RE MOVIGN IS WHAT WE'RE MAKING?
WHAT IF HOW WE’RE MOVING IS WHAT WE’RE MAKING?
Can we organize, reorganize, and disorganize ourselves in order to arrive in our dancing? We’ll wildly move through space, mess with time, destabilize our habitual patterns and make room for risk taking and aliveness. We’ll shake ourselves up while shaking it up. Let’s make something and give it away simultaneously. Let’s experiment, like children playing scientist, who mix ingredients together just to see what will happen or like alchemists, making something common into something magnificent. Queerness will guide us as we practice generosity, together. I’ve been a SFDI participant for over 13 years and will be in the intensives and jams throughout the week. Inevitably, the dancing and research of the week will be with us.
BIO:
I dance and make dances in an attempt to make sense of the world around me. I recently left my faculty position of 14 years at UCSD, where I guided practices that question what dance is and can be. Early on, I received a full merit scholarship to the Alvin Ailey American Dance Center. I was a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company where I also taught and served as choreographic assistant to Bill. As a member of The Lyon Opera Ballet, I performed in works by William Forsythe, Stephen Petronio, Susan Marshall, Maguy Marin, Angelin Preljocaj, among others. In San Diego, I performed with McCaleb Dance, (directed by Nancy McCaleb) and eventually became Associate Artistic Director and began directing and making dances. Thursday mornings from 2008-2021 I practiced performing spontaneous dancemaking with a group called LIVE. My desire to dance forever led me to seek ways of moving with greater efficiency and sustainability. Contact Improvisation, Trisha Brown-like qualities, Deborah Hay’s questions and direction and somatic approaches to dancing have transformed and expanded my movement capacities. As a Feldenkrais Method® practitioner, I practice dancing using only as much effort as needed, moment to moment. As a dancemaker, I am a collaborator. I’ve made dances with Anya Cloud, Karen Schaffman, Liam Clancy, Leslie Seiters, and Jess Humphrey.
KAREN NELSON / TUNING SCORES SAMPLER
TUNING SCORES SAMPLER
Moving from a Tuning Scores warm-up of sensing in action, we will work with using verbal calls and movement compositions to communicate our choreographic desires in solo, duet and ensemble moments. Classic Tuning Scores (originated by Lisa Nelson) introduce the potential to play intelligently in a physically disciplined, anarchic-in-spirit and consensus derived communication (using actions and calls) towards mutual understanding or at the least, a curious and inventive way to dance and improvise together.
BIO:
Karen (Chuki) Nelson (she/her), born in Brooklyn, NY, USA to 1st and 2nd generation immigrant parents from Norway and Ireland respectively, plays restfully within dance improvisation and buddhist study and practice. As explorer-collaborator, teacher, maker, touring performer, author/contributor to Dancing with Dharma and Contact Quarterly, she has been a mutator of the form Contact Improvisation since 1977. She co-founded mixed-ability experiments Dance Ability and Diverse Dance Research Retreat and integrates Material for the Spine (Steve Paxton) and Tuning Scores (Lisa Nelson/ performance group Image Lab) into her physical-sensation based approach to dancing, along with investigating dominant cultural narratives and re-vers(ion)ing these fictions within her own embodiment and wider world community. Her lecture-dem participatory event “Unimaginable” invites dialogue into Contact Improvisation’s roots and ongoing development via the people who do it. Juicy Standing Series, CI Restart Series, and Tuning Creation are current projects in addition to Faking and SMALLER. explomov.weebly.com.
Biography (short) Karen Nelson (she/her), explorer-collaborator, teacher, maker, touring performer, she has been a mutator of the form Contact Improvisation since 1977. She co-founded mixed-ability experiments Dance Ability and Diverse Dance Research Retreat and integrates Material for the Spine (Steve Paxton) and Tuning Scores (Lisa Nelson/ performance group Image Lab) into her physical-sensation based approach to dancing, along with investigating dominant cultural narratives and re-vers(ion)ing these fictions within her own embodiment and wider world community.
KEYES WILEY / SURVING USEFULNESS
SURVIVING USEFULNESS
Taking inspiration from Jenny Odell’s book “How to Do Nothing” Surviving Usefulness is a process based practice on returning to the essence of how/why we use our bodies as gifts of creation. Equal parts movement meditations, improvisation, contemplation and procrastination we will attempt to do less in order to discover how to say more in a world that is constantly asking us to be productive. In Surviving Usefulness we will learn just how hard it is to do Nothing.
BIO:
Multi-hyphenate art maker Keyes Wiley (they/them) is a designer of all things surrounding performance. Their next series of works will be in collaboration with Velocity Dance Center under the name NoGoodDoers. They will also be working with Dani Tirrell and crew on Dani’s next project LOL. Wiley has been an arts educator in Seattle since 2009 teaching various styles and genres all over the west coast. You can catch them in action as dj dark_wiley monthly at TUSH at the Clock-Out Lounge. Keyes has performed, collaborated or created work with Kitten N Lou (Jingle all the Gay, Atomic Bombshells) , Dani Tirrell (Black Bois, LOL), Keith Hennessy (Turbulence), On the Boards (Its Not Too Late), the CD Forum, Velocity Dance Center, Gibney Dance (NYC), Cal State San Luis Obispo and more.
Etienne Cakpo / Improvisation in African Dance
Improvisation in African Dance
Etienne will teach a series of movements originating from West African dance, then have participants work in small groups to break down the choreography and transform it by re-organizing, adding in improvised elements and personal touches. He will also speak to the ways that improvisation is typically used in African dance in its context of origin.
BIO:
Etienne Cakpo is an award-winning dancer, choreographer and musician from Benin, West Africa. Specialized in instruction and performance of traditional African dance from Benin as well as contemporary African dance styles, Etienne has been building his repertoire for nearly thirty years. He is director of Gansango Music & Dance, a dance company registered in Washington State since 2000. Gansango works with libraries, schools and independent arts agencies to make African dance and music performances available to a wide range of audiences, including young children. As Artistic Director of Gansango, Etienne has been the innovative mind and lead choreographic talent behind numerous public dance performances, representing a remarkable diversity of styles, and embodying collaborations with a broad range of collaborators from Uzbekistan to Burkina Faso, from Japan to Zimbabwe. For Etienne, the act of creating dance is innovation by definition, with his culture and cross-cultural collaborations serving as key inspirational forces.
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
This is your opportunity to show some of your work!
In this no tech open mic showing, participants are invited to attend and show their work with their faculty and peers. No need to sign up, just show up on the day of. Pieces are to be kept under seven minutes.
Shows
Registrants recieve 1 ticket to each of the following Velocity Performances during SFD+I
AUG 7: SPLIT BILL
JUNGWOONG KIM,
BEBE MILLER + AMELIA RUDOLPH IN COLLABORATION WITH PERFORMERS RACHAEL LINCOLN + LESLIE SEITERS
AUG: 8 ALL THE WAY AROUND
MEG STUART + DOUG WEISS
AUG 9: PARABLE OF KINOPTICS
D. SABELA GRIMES WITH AN OPENER BY FOX WHITNEY.
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 2025 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 Feb 28!
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.