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Western Mass. Moving Arts Festival

August 7 (Thursday evening) - August 10 (Sunday afternoon)

This is Earthdance at its best: A chance to study improvisation intensively as well as to sample from an array of local and national teachers (and did we mention the inspired students, sacred sunrises, and homegrown food?) Morning mini-intensives are an opportunity to dive deep, while the afternoon schedule rotates so that you can try out diverse modalities. Evening events include a not-to-be-missed performance by festival faculty and a jam with live, improvised music.

Come for the whole festival, or just for individual classes and events! This event is also a part of the larger SEEDS Festival. Come for just the Moving Arts Festival or for longer.

Intensives:

Transitions: From and To. Jennifer Monson. The focus of this workshop will be transitions- motion to stillness, day to night, growth to decomposition, image to structure. Using processes that have developed from a wide range of dance and environmental research we will develop systems to both observe and create transitions in our own dancing and dance making in relation to our environment.

The Art of Making a True Move. Arawana Hayashi. A true move is the powerful expression that emerges moment by moment from a space in which self and the world are playing. The workshop explores genuineness, expressed as the harmony of attention, body and environment. Participants practice four forms – the Twenty Minute Dance, the Village, Duets and the Field Dance -- to deepen improvisation capacities.

ReWilding. Aaron Jessup. Using Contact Improvisation, nature awareness and wilderness survival skills we will slip between the cracks in the walls that separate us from nature, ourselves and each other.  Lets have fun, get dirty, experience intensity and reconnect to our instincts as we move our bodies, explore the land and expand our senses. 

Afternoon Classes:

FRIDAY

FLIGHT SCHOOL. Aaron Jessup . Humans were meant to fly, that's why they've been given contact improvisation! In this class we will explore the dynamics, principles and techniques of safe, unforced lifting and flying. Come prepared to sweat, play, get upside down, be challenged and have fun! 

SKINNER RELEASING TECHNIQUE. Wilhemeena Gordon. A deep kinesthetic movement experience that uses imagery, movement studies, partner work and deep meditative states. Unfold movement patterning and tap into a primal source of grace and power in movement from basic walking to high velocity dancing. Liberate your bones, flesh, imaginative freedom, subtlety and authenticity.

OUTSIDE IN. Tamara Ashley. Forming relations within and without, we will invite the outside in - inside our bodies and inside our lives, by exploring an ecological pattern of immersion in landscapes, movements and technology. We will attend to our changing experiences of place by moving through tasks that facilitate exchanges between outside and inside, material and virtual, live and mediated, intimate and globally dispersed. Participants are welcome to bring cameras, journals, dictaphones and any other portable equipment that supports their practice.

SUB AND TOTAL. Ku and Dancers . The classes are designed with Contact Improvisation base and highly influenced by somatic studies. Participants will explore the micro movement inside the body, and then reflect it to partnering works. The goal is to use the information as spontaneous knowledge, to meet the rapid exchange of energy and force between partners.

THE ECOLOGY OF PERFORMANCE. Jen Harmon. What are our current interests? Where do our predilections reside? Let the moment inform us.  Let the movement inform us.  How do we work with the sensation of space and time? How do we choose to form/ frame an experience for others? Seeds are welcome.  Nothing is welcome.  Everything at once is anyways. We have sight, we do not see at all.  What is it to be seen in a performance context? We have voice. We wonder as we work together.

TRANSITIONS: FROM AND TO . Jennifer Monson. See intensive description.

LA FORET DES SIGNES. An evening performance with Olivier Besson and Emanuelle Pepin

SATURDAY

THE POWER OF TWO. Olivier Besson . Improvisational partnering is a compassionate dance of reciprocity. How do we create a space that allows us to jump into the unknown from what feels like a safe place? Through the practice of following and leading one another, we eventually join forces and evolve the traditional duet format into a simultaneous collaborative gesture. This class welcomes people of diverse background and ability who want to experiment with the concept of partnering.

THE ART OF MAKING A TRUE MOVE. Arawana Hayashi. See intensive description.

CRUNCHING CONTINENTS, GLACIERS, LICHENS, AND EMBODIED FORMS OF DISCOVERY. Christopher and Lailye Weidman. What massive glacial events created this rock I now touch with my hand? How many tiny organisms live on its surface? We will investigate geological history and lichen ecology with our moving and sensing bodies; walk, crawl, slide, smell, and dig into the stories told by every day rocks and one very communal life form.

THE ZEN OF BOOM . Tony Vacca . We are rhythmic creatures living on a rhythmic planet in a rhythmic universe. We are literally made from and by the moving cosmos that surrounds us. I'll lead a hands-on percussion workshop based on these concepts, using gongs, drums, bells and other percussion instruments.

MY NATURE AND NATURE. Emmanuelle Pepin. There is a close relationship between nature and man. Constantly connected to space, we are actors in what gets created and transformed around us. As we prepare the body using various energies, the breath and our relationship to the ground and the air, we awaken perceptions, sharpen consciousness and trigger our senses. This class will happen both inside the studio and in the natural environment outside.

NOT THE USUAL CERTAINTIES: NON-VISUAL ENCOUNTERS WITH THE WORLD . Dana Salisbury
What if we don't depend on the immediacy of visual information and instead gather our environment and our place in it in ways that circumvent our usual certainties? What if you were led blindfolded to a tree, tied to it by a long cord so you couldn't get lost, and left there for an extended period to take in all the information available to you? How would you approach the task and what would be the breadth of your experience? What if we re-examine certainty?

SUNDAY

SUB AND TOTAL. Ku and Dancers . See Friday's Description

MY BODY THE WETLAND. Elaine Colandrea. The shared patterns and parallel functions of the human body and wetlands can be accessed through the breath, sound and movement inquiry practices of Continuum. This movement workshop and writing emerged from a lifetime of somatic study combined with many years of observing natural wetland environments. Please read the article My Body the Wetland (online).

SKELETON WOMAN. Wilhemeena Gordon. Explorations of the life/death/life cycles of nature and soma, between life and death, beginning and ending, being and not-being, between you and me. The cyclical nature of transformation through embracing the Skeleton Woman. A performative imagery based earth and soma exploration.

FESTIVAL FACULTY

Arawana Hayashi 's work as a choreographer, performer and educator is deeply sourced in improvisation, collaboration and the ancient Japanese court dance, bugaku . She directed the Jo Ha Kyu Performance Group in Cambridge, MA until 2000. She currently teaches at Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership, Nova Scotia; the Presencing Institute, Cambridge, MA; and the Naropa University Authentic Leadership program, Boulder, CO.

Aaron Jessup 's first movement discipline was circus acrobatics but his first movement love was Contact Improvisation, which he began teaching in 1997.  In 2006 Aaron completed a yearlong wilderness skills, animal tracking and ecology training at the Wilderness Awareness School. He recently founded OutsideIn Adventures.  www.OutsideInAdventures.com .

Christopher Weidman, PhD is the Research Coordinator at the Waquoit Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve on Cape Cod, MA, where he engages in oceanographic, geological, and ecological research for the purpose of shore and wetlands protection. He has been a fisherman, cartographer, truck driver, and sprout farmer. His passions include roadside geology, concrete and paint, maple sugaring, dancing with chainsaws, and swamp stomping.

Dana Salisbury is a multi-disciplinary artist whose investigations span dance, visual art, site-specific performance/installation, video and language. She is the Creator/Director of Dark Dining Projects, a highly successful on-going series of sensory feasts served to blindfolded diners.

Elaine Colandrea is an authorized Continuum Movement teacher based in New York's Hudson Valley. A dancer and choreographer since the early 1980's, Elaine has created a number of evening length projects including, Marsh Dreams . Professional credits also include The Muscular Therapy Institute Certificate program and a M.A. in dance, Columbia University. Please visit www.elainecolandrea.com.

Emmanuelle Pepin has performed for various French dance companies (Decoufle, Blanca Li, J.C Pare, La Comedie francaise). In 1995 she creates her own company "Vertige" in Nice ( France) where she develops her research of the body and its relationship to nature through improvisation and choreography. She presently collaborates with Olivier Besson. She also teaches and choreographs for the Circus School "Piste d'Azur". Jen Harmon creates and performs hybrid dance, theatre and film projects in NYC and Western Mass.  She is interested in the art-making process and artists flourishing everywhere.  She is a certified Topf Technique practitioner and Somatic Movement Educator. She has taught through Movement Research, The Guggenheim Museum, The loft, and at PS 232 in Queens.  She has an ongoing practice of ideokinesis, contemplative dance, clowning, viewpoints and contact improvisation.

Jennifer Monson is artistic director of iLAND – Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature and Dance. Her work grows out of the combined practices of dance and environmental research. She is a professor at the University of Illinois and teaches to a wide range of communities internationally

Ku and Dancers was established in Taiwan in 1993 by dancer, choreographer, teacher Ming-Shen Ku. In additional to Ms. Ku's choreography works, the company is known as the only professional dance company devotes itself to the development and exploration of improvisation performance in Taiwan.

Lailye Weidman is an improviser and choreographer, currently based in the ecological and geological danger zone of Los Angeles, CA. She teaches site-based improvisation and Contact Improvisation, and is a student in the World Arts and Cultures Department at UCLA. In the past, she has gardened and lived in the woods at Earthdance, been an administrative assistant at Contact Quarterly, and taught yoga and gymnastics for children.

Olivier Besson is on faculty in the dance division at the Boston Conservatory and teaches regularly at Canal Danse (Paris). He has taught and performed in France, Japan, Russia, Taiwan and throughout the US. His ongoing performance projects involve collaborations with Emmanuelle Pepin, Liz Roncka and musician/composer Mike Vargas. He continues to run the Movement Improv Jams with Live Music (Cambridge, MA).

Tamara Ashley (UK) has undertaken a number of durational and site sensitive improvised performances, such as Performing the Pennine Way , a 31-day performance along the UK national trail with fellow artist Simone Kenyon, and 32 degrees , an improvisation in a world of tiny glaciers. She teaches and performs nationally and internationally on a variety of interdisciplinary projects.

Tony Vacca is an innovative American percussionist with Jazz and World Music roots going back to 1972. Over the course of his career, he has made a habit of pushing the already adventurous conventions of World Music into new territory, both as a soloist and as the leader of his World Rhythms Ensemble. He is part of a wave of 20th century musicians whose work has fueled the rediscovery of the power of the drum, and the power of music to build global common ground. His fourteen trips to West Africa have contributed to his unique approach to playing the balafon, and to his depth of knowledge regarding African and American musical traditions.

All this is part of the reason he has recorded and/or performed with such a wide range of musicians. These include pop icon Sting , Senegalese Afro-pop star Baaba Maal , Jazz trumpeter and World Music legend Don Cherry , poet Abiodun Oyewole of The Last Poets , Senegalese Hip-Hop stars Gokh-bi System , and Massamba Diop , Senegalese master of the tama or talking drum.

Tony Vacca's solo performances are a nearly non-stop athletic spectacle of percussion music and spoken word. He incorporates percussion instruments from a world of traditions that includes African, Caribbean, Asian and Middle-Eastern influences, to which he adds some of his spoken word and rhythm poetry.

Born in the Antipodes, Wilhemeena Gordon has produced, directed, choreographed and performed in over 160 events and films in the last ten years. She has been a dancer in many companies and for independent choreographers globally and has taught in festivals, dance programs and in the independent community from Amsterdam to NZ.   www.danz.org.nz/wilhemeena.php

Registration and Fees

Entire Festival (3 Tiers Available):
   Student Rate: Economically challenged students and the unemployed: $245
   Regular Rate: Employed but struggling (teacher, librarian, lots of kids, etc.): $270
   Professional Rate: Actually contributing to your retirement plan (support the arts!): $295
Single Day (Includes Classes, Meals and Evening Activities): $75
Early Registration Discount: $25 off if registered by June 15
Deposit Required: $75

Arrival Thursday, August 7, after 5 p.m.
Last session ends Sonday afternoon August 10

*You will not be officially registered until we receive your deposit.