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!

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

 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.

MEG STUART

Creative Process with Meg Stuart

MIDDAY 5-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE

MEG STUART

“[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

JUNGWOONG KIM

Stone + Wanter / Stone Moving Like Water

MIDDAY 5-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE

JUNGWOONG KIM

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

d. Sablea Grimes

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.

MALCOLM-X BETTS

Chasing the Framework

MORNING 4-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE

MALCOLM-X BETTS

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

ZOE SCOFIELD

I am proposing a choreographic / performance making lab that mirrors my own process. Currently I am working with:

  1. Objects / meaning 
  2. 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

FOX WHITNEY

MELTED RIOT: THE INTENSIVE

EVENING 3-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE

FOX WHITNEY

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.

Rachael Lincoln + Leslie Seiters

Fast Craft: Duets

EVENING 3-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE

Rachael Lincoln + Leslie Seiters

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. 

www.hannahkrafcik.com

www.emilyannejones.com

 

 

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

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FAQs

SFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+ISFD+I