COMING IN AUGUST!

DANCEbank Summer Workshops

Saturday & Sunday, 11am-1:30pm

$15 single class/$25 both days

August 1 & 2 - Simone Forti

August 8 & 9 - Taisha Paggett

August 15 & 16 - Mira Kingsley

August 22 & 23 - Sabela Grimes

August 28 & 29 - Anna B. Scott

August 1 & 2 - Simone Forti

A Weave of Moving, Speaking & Writing

We respond to our environment, both immediate, and broad and complex. Our bodies change tone, experience and act on kinesthetic impulses, while our minds wander and focus. The structures of body, of language, of feeling, interact. That’s what we will explore.

Simone Forti is a dancer and writer in her seventies, enjoying maturity while urgently exploring new strategies.

August 8 & 9 - Taisha Paggett, Everything bodies

This movement class will begin with floor and standing exercises based on connecting breath with movement, joint articulation, and tapping into both internal and external focus and awareness. Phrase work will be pulled from a current choreography project “everything,” which plays with the task of physicalizing multiple sensations in a single moment.

We approach movement with an inquiring, non-judgmental mind, with the goal of finding new sensations of awareness in our individual physicality.

Taisha Paggett is a Los Angeles based dance artist and co-founder of the dance journal project, itch. Her work and collaborations for the stage, gallery, and public sphere have been presented and supported by several venues throughout California as well as in Chicago, New York City and Utrecht, The Netherlands. She has worked extensively in the projects of Victoria Marks and David Rousseve, and is a member of the audio action collective, Ultra-Red. She holds an MFA from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures.

DANCEbank presents guest artist, Ralf Jaroschinski
Saturday & Sunday, July 11 & 12th, 11am-2pm
$17 single class, $30 both days.

Ralf Jaroschinski was born in Southern Germany and grew up in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He received classical and modern dance training in Germany and then studied contemporary dance techniques in New York City. That’s where he discovered contact improvisation (CI) about fourteen years ago – mainly in Daniel Lepkoff’s and Alito Alessi’s classes among others. He currently works as a dance teacher and choreographer mainly in Europe and the Americas. He enjoys using CI in his creations and teaching it since about eight years.

In the beginning of the class, we’ll focus on our center and awareness: We will look for the true internal source and the authentic external expression of our own dance. We will then investigate attentively the texture of our connection with our partner(s) through listening to their and again our actions and reactions in the ongoing dance. During this, we will be able to fully enjoy participating in the dance, because our and our partners' contributions to it will be generous and full-hearted, since they are at all times nurtured from within and therefore inexhaustible. And so, finally, we will feel union and satisfaction while dancing with our partner(s), because we’ll not only be experiencing the freedom of space and the excitement of momentum in the dynamic dance, but also the heightened support we get from dancing in communication with our center and other persons’ centers as well.

For more information please visit:
www.ralfjaroschinski.de <http://www.ralfjaroschinski.de>

DANCEbank Summer session Arianne Hoffmann Saturdays 11am-1pm, June 6, 13, 20, $12
The class will, after a loosening warm-up, move into structured improvisations. We will play with a various scores while conceiving of them as metaphors for socio-political issues. In that sense, we will be theorizing (in) space by the means of our bodies moving. But let’s not get too heady here. We will move in relationship to each other, and find out more about how we can structure improvising. This class is open to anyone willing to move and explore!

Arianne Hoffmann is a German born choreographer, currently in her second year of the M.F.A. program at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures, where she has had the pleasure to study with Simone Forti, Susan Foster, and Victoria Marks. She creates scored improvisations that function as socio-political metaphors and are based on the physical body as a means and focus of expression.

Her work has been shown around Los Angeles, most recently at Highways Performance Space, the Unknown Theater, and at Anatomy Riot. She has performed in and produced events with the performance art group Rent-a-friend and at TanzTangente in Berlin/Germany. As a performer, she recently worked with Rachael Lincoln, Krenly Guzman, and Kristen Smiarowski.

She is the producer of AN EARFUL OF DANCE, a series of podcast conversations on dance, partially funded by the University of California Institute for Research in the Arts (UCIRA), and co-producer of Anatomy Riot. She has received the Forti Family Scholarship for Artistic Achievement twice.

DANCEbank Spring session - Michael Sakamoto

Saturdays 11am-1pm, May 16, May 23,  May 30 - $12

Mind/Body/Time: A Workshop in Contemplative Movement and Character Development
Utilizing pedagogical and participatory techniques rooted in Butoh, postmodern dance, and improvisational performance, this movement-based performance workshop addresses socialized habits and tendencies in our daily mental and behavioral patterns and modes of being.  Participants are led through gestural and image-based exercises designed to decipher, interpret, and literally “break” thought, language, and action, empowering our mind/body instruments via semi-improvised structures that perform vulnerable, “dis-abled” versions of ourselves through a process of cyclical self-destruction and reintegration.  
Michael Sakamoto is an interdisciplinary dance, theater, and performance artist whose works have been performed in Thailand, Mexico, and throughout Europe and the USA.  He is the recipient of numerous local and international awards and grants, including from the Japan Foundation, Arts International, Meet the Composer, California Community Foundation, Asian Cultural Council, and many others.  His performances idiosyncratically blend intercultural themes, postmodern pastiche, and the visceral presence of butoh and physical theater in order to challenge audience expectations and reflect on the relationship of self with others and humanity with the world around us.  His latest full-length work, "Vestiges of Creation," will premiere November 20-21, 2009 at UCLA World Arts and Cultures.  For more info: <http://www.michaelsakamoto.com> 

Old-Time Social

Metabolic Studio hosts the entire day Saturday, May 17th.  Starting at 2pm, workshops for  fiddle, banjo, and square dance calling are followed by a square-dance featuring the live music of bands K. Boogie  and the Brownbaggers (LA) and Pearson’s Pork Pies (Bay Area) with calling by Susan Michaels and Amy Hofer. The evening begins at 6:30 with a kids’ dance and a cakewalk with the big square dance commencing at 8pm. All 

Saturday events at Farmlab and are free.