Workshops

All workshops part of Movement Research MELT Series

(re)treat yourself: staying in and coming out
July 5-9, 2021, 1pm-3pm
Virtual
"In our rooms (on the Zooms), we’ll move together, veering in and out of improvisational scores. Time and space to re-encounter the body dancing again; luxuriating in slow activation; shaking the body loose; giving way to swells and swoops.

Each day is grounded in a short text on the politics and poetics of queerness; on oppositional aesthetic strategies—e.g. de-familiarization, un-representability, un-translatability. (Texts provided in advance.)

The question: how is my body/choreography normatively scripted? As the scripts come into view, we treat them like they’re ours and not ours: what do i want to integrate, what do i want to resist, how to move otherwise?

Bring water, pencil, paper, desire."



the body lo(o)ses the score
January 13-17, 2020, 3:30pm-6pm
Movement Research, 150 1st Ave (New York, NY)
"Is an improvisational score like a magic carpet or more like a crockpot? Does it get me lost or get me found? Does it contain me or turn me loose?

In this workshop
we practice improvisational scores and score making;
we encounter limits, problems, possibilities as the terms “improvisation” and “score” are stretched this way and that;
we critically consider and discuss specific histories and instances of improvisation, their conditions and effects;
we pay particular mind to the improvisatory registers of multiple Black aesthetics and forms;
we dance, listen, talk, write and wander.

The following 2 texts will inform our discussions. Read them/bring them if you’d like.
--Malik Gaines: Black Performance on the Outskirts of the Left: A History of the Impossible - Intro chapter (pgs. 1-19)
--Danielle Goldman: I Want To Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom - Intro chapter (pgs. 1-27)"



i, abject: queer objectivities, or the art of ma(s)king dances
July 8-12, 2019
Danspace Project, 130 E 10th St (New York, New York)
"This workshop is a compositional interrogation and an interrogational composition. We will consider our partialness and our specificity, troubling the deep grooves of authorship, identity, and representation. Through improvisational movement scores, choreographic studies, writing, and dialogue, we will gather around such questions as: How have I composed myself in order to compose? How have systems of power composed me to compose myself? What is it that I habitually relegate to the background while dancing, or in order to dance? What do I assume to be stable in order to produce mobility for myself? What does my dancing (re)produce? Can I become aesthetically clearer and (yet) less legible to a normative (or normativizing) gaze? How can I refuse to reproduce the lines of whiteness?

The following texts will frame our discussions. Please read them before our first meeting.
--Sara Ahmed: Queer Phenomenology, Chapter 3: The Orient and Other Others
--José Esteban Muñoz: Cruising Utopia, Chapter 4: Gesture, Ephemera, and Queer Feeling: Approaching Kevin Aviance
--Claudia Rankine and Beth Loffreda: “On Whiteness and The Racial Imaginary” – https://lithub.com/on-whiteness-and-the-racial-imaginary/"