Interdiscipline: Channeling Impulse into Form

This course is about discovering the wonderment of dance through an interdisciplinary lens. The more disciplines we interface with through dance, the more rich and surprising the outcomes will be. When our primal urges for expression are interfaced with technology (any tool) they become rendered as artifacts, as something `real' in the world. By repurposing those artifacts and folding them back into dance we can significantly deepen the complexity and quality of our dance expression. This course is a manual for finding more depth, more truthfulness and ultimately honing your excellence in dancing, in order to find meaning and serve purpose for others.This course is designed to radically deconstruct assumptions about Contact Improvisation and contemporary dance, in order to reassemble new possibilities for individual expression. The course will provide a hands-on-opportunity for utilizing exercises rooted in the disciplines of visual art, music, photography, or architecture as they relate to embodied and kinetic experiences in movement. In the process, we will contemplate the phenomenology of performance both inside and outside of the theater, as we are endlessly 'seeing others' and 'being seen by others' out in the world or on stage. The material for this course draws on principles from Steve Paxton, Rudolph Laban, William Forsythe and draws inspiration from Gutai Art Association, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Devised Theater and other approaches. All are welcome and asked to bring boundless curiosity and an appetite for rigorous focus and sustained play.