Ishmael Houston-Jones | Embracing the Awkward

5-Day Intensive | AUG 3 – 8 | SIGN UP

In creating improvised movement work, either in solos or groups, it’s important to allow oneself to be curious and to go places that may not be familiar. Finding ways to explore this safely is key. Mistakes are opportunities for learning. Challenging oneself while at the same time prioritizing care, (of oneself and of a group,) can lead to exciting and unexpected discoveries. We will use Improvisation Techniques into creative art making.

Bio:

Ishmael Houston-Jones is a choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed world-wide. He has received three New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Awards for collaborations with writer Dennis Cooper, choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and Fred Holland and composers Chris Cochrane and Nick Hallett. Houston-Jones curated Platform 2012: Parallels which centered choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism, and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now.

As an author Houston-Jones’ essays, fiction, interviews, and performance texts have been published in several anthologies. His first book, FAT and other stories, was published in June 2018 by Yonkers International Press. 

Houston-Jones is a 2022 recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship. In 2024 he was awarded the Balasaraswati/Joy Ann Dewey Beinecke Endowed Chair for Distinguished Teaching award from the American Dance Festival. Ishmael teaches at universities and independent studios including NYU, Bennington (formerly University of the Arts), Movement Research, TicTac (Brussels), MA exerce (Montpellier), and The Field Center.

Degenerate Art Ensemble | Spirited Practice

5-Day Intensive | AUG 3 – 8 | SIGN UP

This class explores practices that deepen embodiment in live performance. Listening will be our central tool to cultivate vibrant presence and stay connected to our sensorial experience, birthing textural phenomena and transmitting energetic communication between ourselves and the audience. Through subtle movement, we’ll tune into the joy of sensation and connection, discovering how sincere, open-minded practices allow dances to arise organically from within. As we work with gravity, breath, ligaments, and internal states, we nurture deeper awareness as performers and recognize the rich unfoldings between dancer and witness. Stillness, sensorial memory, instinct, and live vibrational sound will guide us. While the subjective self can limit us, these tools can unlock more power than we imagine.

Reshaun Mitchell + Silas Riener | DESIRE LINES, Hour Selves: Moving Into Being (An embodied workshop providing joy, rest, collaboration, and ways of self-organizing

5-Day Intensive | AUG 3 – 8 | SIGN UP

Drawing from our improvisational practice, “Desire Lines,” we will tune our attention towards a receptive state of being. Attention to our inner landscapes and our external environment. Attention to our imagination and to our actual sensations. Resonant energies and impressions will power the engine of movement and set up a relational consciousness. 

We will generate individual and group structures through a layering of memories– a way to extend the time-stamp of spontaneous self-discovery, to produce knowledge from the past, and from speculative futures. Object play, spatial games, and rhythmic prompts combine to shape a collective subject. Together, how can we unearth aspects of ourselves which exist at the margins, at places of possibility and discovery?

This workshop will explore improvisational modalities used in our ongoing practice desire lines. Drawn from our choreographic interest in transformation, we will expand our sense of attention through a focused yet playful connection to our environment.

Moriah Evans | Making […/+*^%<>€£¥$&@!!!!^^^] Breaking

5-Day Intensive | AUG 3 – 8 | SIGN UP

We will work with a speculative relationship to one’s own body and the bodies of others to grasp what our bodies contain. Feminisms are the groundwork as we work through a variety of dancing methodologies. Through various systems of perception-action, dancing methods will be initiated from deep inside one’s internal organs; others will be formed in relation to one another as a temporary community. We will consider the bodies within bodies within bodies within frames in order to harness the social potential of dance/choreography to envision the future and reflect on the now. A set of experiential protocols will be proposed and further proposed. Relations will not be fixed to find unexpected structures, formats, and thinking/being. Dialogues shall slide between sense and nonsense, rational and irrational and more. In order for something to be radical, we cannot know the model it will take.

Keith Hennessy | Dance as Political Healing

4-Day Intensive | AUG 3 – 7 | SIGN UP

Prioritizing improvisation and collaboration, we will play with the possibilities of healing, politics, and dancing together. I welcome your curiosity and concerns. What inspires you or prevents you from dancing more freely, especially with others? What activates or impedes your healing potential? How is your body responding to new wars, censorship, precarity, and embodied traumas? How can dancing be activated as anti-capitalism, as a new ethics of relationship, pleasure, and shared power?

Which ideas and movements might help us now? I will invite the prophetic ancestors Gustav Landauer and Octavia Butler into the studio to renew our dancing. Depending on interest, we will integrate performance practices throughout the week.

Sheri Cohen | Whole Self Integration: Feldenkrais® Awareness Through Movement®

3-Day Intensive | AUG 3 – 5 | SIGN UP

The Feldenkrais Method provides a radical technology for investigating one’s sense of self through moving, sensing, thinking and feeling. The process can be light and breezy, magically leaving you with a new sense of ease; it can also be profound in the ways it brings forward your habits and challenges your reliance on them. This intensive will center on Awareness Through Movement, guided movement sequences that we inhabit with gentleness, curiosity, and freedom of exploration. We’ll bring in other materials—writing, drawing, partner work, dance forms—as needed to support your process of self-discovery and whole self integration. Read more

*Photo by Dave Knott

Mai Lê Hô | LayeRhythm Playground: House Dance, Live Music interaction, and Freestyle Practice

3-Day Intensive | AUG 3 – 5 | SIGN UP

Rooted in the vibrancy of street and club dance traditions, LayeRhythm Playground invites participants into a three-day journey that balances technical grounding with improvisational play. Each day will explore a distinct entry point into freestyle practice:

Rhythm Conductor with Live Musicians: Partnering with live musicians, participants will experience LayeRhythm’s signature pedagogy of rhythm games and structured improvisations that open up new ways of listening, responding, and co-creating in real time.

Freestyle Practice: Expanding beyond form, we’ll explore improvisation through multiple lenses, giving dancers tools to generate authentic movement while cultivating presence, risk-taking, and connection.

Throughout the intensive, participants will be guided to shift between learning set material, engaging with live music, and practicing improvisation, allowing both individual artistry and collective creativity to flourish. LayeRhythm Playground centers dance as a living, breathing conversation between body, music, and community.

Kayla Hamilton | Improvisation as Disability Culture

4-Day Intensive | AUG 3 – 7 | SIGN UP

This class description was written by Kayla Hamilton in collaboration with Alexandra Beller and  Alison Kopit.

This class explores disabled embodiment and creativity as fertile ground for improvisation. Accessibility is not treated as an exception or adjustment, but as a set of givens that ground the creative process. While disabled and non-disabled people are welcome in this class, we seek to upend ableism and non-disabled normativity in dance by placing disabled embodiment at the center of our explorations. We uplift the improvisational edge inherent to disability culture, forged by the primal creativity of surviving our environment on a daily basis.

We release fixed categories of artistry and practice, treating the classroom as a living ecosystem—where agenda is flexible, student wisdom drives the work, and rest, joy, and ease are celebrated