SEATTLE FESTIVAL OF DANCE + IMPROVISATION
RESEARCH WEEK
AUGUST 4-11, 2024
FULL RESEARCH WEEK INCLUDES:
$750
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!
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.
ANYA CLOUD + MAKISIG AKIN
A Queer High-Risk Love Practice
MIDDAY 5-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
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.
Photo of the artists by Tim Richards
JODY KUEHNER AKA CHERDONNA SHINATRA
No Noise
MIDDAY 5-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
Within our own creative process, how can we attune to our personal inspirations and impulses without all the noise? I’m finding the importance of rigorous mindfulness, relating to how our internal landscape supports our external landscape as well as our physical body. In this workshop we will be focusing on the creative process as enhanced by mindfulness, meditation, play, and present moment possibilities. We will debunk predictions, pull some tarot cards, laugh, eat a snack, talk about our obsessions and our intrigues. We’ll move somatically, improvisationally, rhythmically, and experimentally with and without noise. 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 self-compassion to enter one’s practice. If we intentionally create a state of wellbeing this week, what kind of work is possible? In this workshop there will be room for solo investigation and time to create some material to take with you.
Photo of the artist by Jenny May Peterson.
TERE O'CONNOR
MOVING MEANING
MIDDAY 5-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
The political, cultural and social temperature of the present, together with elements such as personal history, that of the performers, human behavior and everything else, converge in my dances to shape the dense choreographic constellations I create. The nature of consciousness is unruly and fragmentary yet in our daily lives we are fueled by an unrealistic organizational mania. My work harnesses both qualities and favors neither. I make dances to advocate for the interrelatedness of all things and to give vision to the specific music of their relativity. I look to dance as a location of freedom, where specifics are melted into the illusory and dogma is eroded by the unending fountain of pluralism at the center of dance. The capaciousness of dance has taught me how to learn.
In this workshop, we will consider how movement and its manipulation can bring us to meaning production. What lurks behind the sign systems of body and shape that we can use to create layered choreographic statements? We will make work daily and use the material to examine foundational questions about where information emanates from in movement-based choreographies. What are we “reading” from a dance and how can we shape this? Central to this examination will be the use of time-sculpting, using velocity as a tool for making.
How can meaning be stable when time is constantly running forward. We will apply these questions into our work.
Photo of Tere’s choreographic work by Maria Bartanova
SHANNON STEWART
not about thing
MORNING 4-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
A small protest to always having to explain/propose/know/
Photo of the artist by Jingzi Zhao
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
PE Workshops
MORNING 4-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
Each day of the Physical Education Workshop will be taught by a different member of P.E.
MON, Aug 5 | Curiosity Collection
with Allie Hankins
Allie is invested in the non-linear development of ideas when it comes to making performances. She tries to stay present with desire and dive into whatever strikes her fancy in the moment. So, let’s gather in a studio and briefly celebrate studio practices. We will likely dance/improvise, sing, write some things down, document things to revisit at some future time, and have some conversations. The workshop will continue to take shape between now and August and will be informed by Allie’s experiences dancing with ensembles, her step-aerobics expertise, her recent singing lessons, and her curiosities and where they meet yours.
TUE, Aug 6 | ~intricate tension~
with Lu Yim
In this class you can expect something slow, specific, and introverted as we explore a threshold between practice and performance. I will be guiding the class through somatic scores and pathways, based on an interest in experiencing time as a spatially dysphoric/dynamic entity.
Together, we will take on the shape of an inverted funnel, attuning to almost-imperceptible expressions. We will play in a performative range that exists half-way under water.
Most of class will be performed at ground level, with touch and non-touch options available for each score.
WED, Aug 7 | Surrender and Agency
with Takahiro Yamamoto
This workshop introduces breathing exercises and solo and group improvisational movement practice that utilizes metaphysical/spiritual trust and the commitment to surrender. At the end, group discussion will be held to explore participants’ physical experiences in relationship to their personal backgrounds. The idea of ‘post memory’ will be discussed – delving into the interconnectivity of things that we don’t know, things that we physically experience, and things that we don’t articulate.
FRI, Aug 9 | divergent strategies 🙂
with keyon gaskin
Through guided personal explorations, group movement exercises and discussion; we will play with practices that explore the usefulness of our neuro/emotional-divergences, in our lives and performance making. Attempting to develop strategies that reframe our relationship to oft negatively coded aspects or hindrances like: anxiety, embarrassment, depression… Can we play with these aspects of our being and practices to use them to propel rather than stifle us and our making? All people interested in movement / performance welcome.
Photo of the artists by Mario Gallucci
HARUKO CROW NISHIMURA
Embodiment + Presence
EVENING 3-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
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 the tools of somatic 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.
We will practice tuning into how the space, our body’s subtle energies and our physical memories can move through us, heightening our internal listening and discovering what instincts we can entrust to go deeper. We will practice both playfulness as well as pushing ourselves to our edge.We will hone our embodiment and observation, bearing witness to each other’s discoveries. In addition to dancers and performers, creative and curious people from all walks of life are welcome including those with no movement experience.
Photo of the artist by Maria Baranova
BLACK COLLECTIVITY
A Practice of Return: Choreographing Archives
EVENING 3-DAY INTENSIVE | REGISTER À LA CARTE
During this workshop, participants will be introduced to the physical and archival research from the creative work of Black Collectivity. The workshop 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. Class will be informed by Black archival practices within the performance project A Practice of Return. Participants will use movement to investigate their responses to these practices. Finally we will experiment with collaborative choreography as a tool to hold stories and memories that live within the body.
Led by Black Collectivity Artists: Nia-Amina Minor, Akoiya Harris, marco farroni
Photo of the artists by Chloe Collyer
DROP-INS
SFD+I 2024 contains eleven drop-in classes that are available for pre-registration on June 20th, or in-person walk-up (space permitting). Click on the artists’ names to learn more about them and their drop-in class and registration link.
JODY KUEHNER /
LET’S CHANGE THE SUBJECT
BLACK COLLECTIVITY /
A PRACTICE OF RETURN
PHYSICAL EDUCATION /
SHARED PRACTICE
RACHAEL LINCOLN + LESLIE SEITERS/
FICTION | FRICTION | FLOW
TERE O’CONNOR /
INTUITIONAL CERTAINTLY
SHANNON STEWART /
THE DIFFERENCE IS SPREADING
HANNAH SIMMONS /
BODY + SITE
SOLVEJ AMELIA NOA /
JOY OF DANCE EXPERIENCE (JODE)
ANYA CLOUD + MAKISIG AKIN /
A QUEER HIGH RIST LOVE PRACTICE
HARUKO CROW NISHIMURA / EMBODIMENT + PRESENCE
PEGGY PIACENZA /
INTIMATE SPACES
RESEARCH FACULTY
HARUKO CROW NISHIMURA
BLACK COLLECTIVITY
RACHAEL LINCOLN
ANYA CLOUD
SHANNON STEWART
HANNAH SIMMONS
KAREN NELSON
SOLVEJ AMELIA NOA
JODY KUEHNER AKA CHERDONNA SHINATRA
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
LESLIE SEITERS
MAKISIG AKIN
TERE O’CONNOR
PEGGY PIACENZA
MARGIT GALANTER
FOX WHITNEY
EVENTS
Morning Tuning
Mon-Wed + Fri, AUG 5–7 + 9 | 8:30 – 9:30 AM
A tuning wake up. Activate somatic intentions and attention using finely crafted scores that manifest forms, imaginings, and ensemble play. Co-facilitated by margit galanter and Karen chuki Nelson, long-time teacher-practitioners of Tuning Scores originated by Lisa Nelson.
FREE and open to all.
RE-COLLECT: DOCUMENTARY SHOWING
AUG 8 | 1-3 PM
Northwest Film Forum | 1515 12th Ave
RE–COLLECT is an experimental dance documentary that traces an embodied exchange of intergenerational dance artists. Recorded in 2022 at a research symposium calledThink Gravity Dance Tank: Celebrating & Reckoning with Contact Improvisation and Performance, RE–COLLECT honors and interrogates the revolutionary dance form Contact Improvisation. The film serves as a time capsule during a pivotal moment at the intersection of COVID-19 and racial justice uprisings in the United States. Considering the gravity of these times, RE–COLLECT questions Contact Improvisation’s historical narrative and brings unspoken histories to the forefront to invite a more inclusive future of the form. The documentary will be followed by a post screening panel discussion with artists involved in the film.
Access to the documentary showing is included in Full Research Week packages.
PE Reading Group
AUG 8 | 10 AM – 12 PM
With Physical Education
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 encourage all to come and eat, drink, listen, and participate. 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
DANCE INNOVATORS IN PERFORMANCE
Thu-Sat, AUG 8-10 | 8 PM
Dance Innovators: Research in Performance is a festival-style showcase that provides a glimpse into the current explorative work of celebrated choreographers and faculty of the 2023 Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation Research Week. Join us for an evening where national and local dance artists come together to share short, experimental performances.
Tickets to all three performances of Dance Innovators are included in full Research Week packages. Individual tickets are on sale now!
PAYMENTS + DEPOSITS + REFUNDS
PAYMENT OPTIONS
To reserve your spot you can either pay in full* or hold your place with a non-refundable $350 deposit. Full payment to confirm your registration is required by June 19.
Registration for a la carte intensives, classes, workshops, and jams will open on June 20 and spaces will be available on a first-come-first-served basis. To register a la carte you will pay in full, though let us know if you need to discuss a payment plan.
Please contact Shirley Wong, operations@velocitydancecenter.org, for any questions or clarifications about registration or payment.
*ULTIMATE SFD+I, PERFORMANCE Cohorts, and RESEARCH Week payments include a $350 non-refundable deposit.
REFUND POLICY
Velocity’s refund policies were created to offer as much flexibility to our community as possible, while still protecting SFD+I from risk and instability.
The refund schedule for the Ultimate SFD+I, Performance Cohorts, or Research Week is:
- Before June 19: All registration fees, less the $350 non-refundable deposit, are fully refundable for any reason.
- After June 19: All registration fees, less the $350 non-refundable deposit, are 50% refundable for any reason.
- After your first class begins: All registration fees are non-refundable for any reason, including illness or injury.
The refund schedule for all a la carte intensives, workshops or classes (available after June 20) is:
- After you register: All registration fees are 50% refundable for any reason.
- After your first class begins: All registration fees are non-refundable for any reason, including illness or injury.
ARE THERE ANY SCHOLARSHIP OPTIONS AVAILABLE?
WORK STUDY
Velocity’s Summer Work/Study program provides the opportunity for participants to receive discounted attendance to the Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation in exchange for festival support. The deadline for this program is February 1st. Please email operations@velocitydancecenter.org with any questions.
THE APPLICATION DEADLINE HAS PASSED.
TBIPOC TUITON WAIVER
As a part of Velocity’s Seattle Festival of Dance + Improvisation we are providing $10,000 in fee waivers to dancers who identify as Transgender, Black, Indigenous, and/or as People of Color, in an effort to shift power to Transgender and BIPOC communities. The deadline for this program is February 1st. Please email operations@velocitydancecenter.org with any questions.
THE APPLICATION DEADLINE HAS PASSED.
IS HOUSING AVAILABLE DURING THE FESTIVAL?
PARTICIPANT HOUSING
The vast majority of servers are private, invite-only spaces for groups of friends and communities to stay in touch and spend time together. There are also larger, more open communities, generally centered around specific topics such as popular games like Minecraft and Fortnite. Users have control over whom they interact with and what their experience on Discord is.
2. Click Login > Register.
3. Fill your Details > Complete Captcha.
4. Account Created.
5. Verify your Email.
ARE INTERNSHIPS AVAILABLE FOR SFD+I?
INTERNSHIPS
Velocity is honored to partner with NW Folklife to provide one Summer Programming Internship from May – October. This internship will help program two international festivals, SFD+I and Mouthwater Festival.
HOW DO I ACCESS CLASSES AS A DROP-IN PARTICIPANT?
DROP-INS
Morning technique classes and Intermediate evening technique classes are open for drop-ins. Registration for these classes will be through Jot Form, where drop-in participants can register and pay. Registration for Drop-In classes will open on June 20.
REGISTER FOR YOUR IMMERSIVE SUMMER EXPERIENCE
ULTIMATE SFD+I
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 15!.
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.