Drills - Technical vs. Organic Logic

-intensive, muscle-and-brain-challenging body work makes us stronger dancers – for sure!  But purely technical drills can sometimes create a habit of robotic movement that becomes hard to break.  Choreographies become busier and look like a drills class themselves!  Yikes!  Organic Drills, i.e. simply following a seasoned dancer in her movement (ala 1970’s style learning) can reveal a more emotional, genuine, melodic path of movement that, when combined with the technical work, produces a fuller experience for everyone.  Compare, contrast, and combine the two styles of drilling!

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Combos - Evolution and Growth 

This is yet another method for extracting the maximum use out learned combinations OR using our own combinations as a springboard for new movement.  In this workshop, we will learn several combinations (and/or you can bring your own!!), and experiment with how many ways you can “shrink” or “grow” your combination in size and dynamics AND how many ways you can reframe/reinterpret the combination in your own mind to generate other similar ideas for movement.

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Drum Solo Riffs - 

Learn some tips and tricks to get the most out of your drum solo!  

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Improv Roadmap -

    “I want to wait until I know more steps” said the dancer asked to improvise – and into the trap she fell!!! 

     Successful, musically relevant improvisation is based on a COMPLETELY different skill set than the one needed to execute a choreography or even a dance combination.  Collecting steps can’t help you if you don’t also work to develop your indexing and accessing mechanism.  So how do dancers who have trained in the traditional “choreography-based, recorded-and-perfectly-engineered music” system make the shift?

     In this class, you will learn tools for indexing and accessing what you already know, practice techniques for quickly linking movement to sound and vice versa, explore how to allow your current movement to inspire subsequent movements, and perfect remedies for the inevitable misplaced steps. 

     Even if you never plan to improvise, this class will make you a better choreographer!