MEG STUART

Creative Process with Meg Stuart (Friday with Amy O’Neal)

Join Meg Stuart in exploring her Creative Process during this 5 day intensive.

“[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.

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

Jungwoong Kim

​​Stone and Water/ Stone moving like Water

Join Meg Stuart in exploring her Creative Process during this 5 day intensive.

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.

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. Sabela Grimes

Flowstates: MediKinetics of Groove and Becoming

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.

BIO:

d. Sabela Grimes is a choreographer, writer, composer and educator whose interdisciplinary performance work and pedagogical approach reveal a vested interest in the physical and meta-physical efficacies of Afro-diasporic cultural practices. Sabela’s AfroFuturistic dance theater projects, like World War WhatEver, 40 Acres & A Microchip, BulletProof Deli, and ELECTROGYNOUS, consider invisibilized histories and grapple with constructed notions of masculinity and manhood while conceiving a womynist consciousness. Using a mix of socio-historical observation, self-examination and exploration, each creative chronicle manifests and exists through layers of non-linear arrangements that sonically, visually and kinesthetically blur the line between our most precious and protected binaries. Audio sampling as citation is a critical compositional tool used in Sabela’s dance and music making endeavors. His compositions employ technology to create unusual sound-shapes that twist the form and function of modern sound design and maintain the custom of “versioning” found in Afro-diasporic music traditions.

Malcolm-x Betts

Chasing the Framework

CHASING THE FRAMEWORK  is an open framework that centres 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 conceptualising 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.

Make what you want… bring it all in the room! A Choreographic / Performance making lab.

“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. “

BIOS:

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 Christopher Duggan

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.

BIOS:

Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters met in San Francisco in 1997 dancing on steel apparatuses under the direction of Jo Kreiter. Since then, with gaps and lapses, they have been in the middle of a project together more than not, creating across various life stages and state lines. Their work has been presented in many of the places they’ve lived including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and Sweden. It has also taken them to Almada, Portugal where they tasted the world’s finest egg tart, Jakarta, Indonesia, where they had a surreal karaoke experience, and Bytom, Poland, where the entire town’s power shut down for 15 seconds in the middle of their show. Their dances have been both lauded and panned by press, have sold out and been ignored, and have provided them with 25 years of process and friendship and sometimes ambition and occasionally depletion, and always something both known and a mystery. Rachael is an associate professor at the University of Washington and Leslie is a professor at San Diego State University. Some of their shared mentor/collaborator/influences are: Sara Shelton Mann, Jo Kreiter, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Bebe Miller, K.J. Holmes, Amelia Rudolph, Keith Hennessy, Kim Epifano, Joe Goode, and LIVEpractice/AVID. They are currently touring Long Playing, part three of an accidental trilogy of evening-length duets.

MELTED RIOT: THE INTENSIVE

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.

BIOS:

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.