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Interdisciplinary Project: August 6 – 7
Dirt and Digging: 2 days towards a 2h Performance
Claudia Wittmann
This 2-day long workshop will prepare us for a 2-hour long performance during which we will use our hands to dig into soil. The work will focus on physical and emotional transformation, using butoh principles and some concepts and techniques drawn from the curriculum of Jerzy Grotowski.

Claudia Wittmann (CH/CA) works as a butoh performer since 2003. Her work deals with body memory. Her process is based on her butoh training with SU-EN and on her regular work with artist Paul Couillard who guides her through the curricula of Jerzy Grotowski since January 2006.

Interdisciplinary Project: August 6 – 7
Three Miles an Hour
Tamara Ashley
This workshop involves deep immersion in the landscape through walking, moving and perceiving. We will develop sensitive response to processes of bodies and landscapes: change, duration, erosion, deposition and exchange between landscape and performer. What emerges from the sustained investigation of the movement of the mind and body at three miles an hour? 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.

Interdisciplinary Project: August 10 – 17
Through Science to Somatics: Exploring the Physical Components of Thought
Melinda Buckwalter, with science and somatic specialists
Single-Day Drop-Ins Welcome!
In this week-long laboratory we'll engage in fieldwork with scientists from a variety of disciplines (e.g. botany, entomology, geology) in the woods, streams, and fields around Earthdance in pursuit of examples of physical components of thought which we'll further explore performatively in facilitation with somatics and movement investigators.

Melinda Buckwalter is an improviser, dance maker, and writer. She has a BA in physics from Cornell University and an MFA in dance from Bennington College. Currently she teaches anatomy and kinesiology for yogis and dancers, and is writing a book on dance improvisation for Dance & Movement Press, Composing while dancing: An Improviser's Companion, coming in 2008. Melinda lives Cummington, Massachusetts with her husband and dog and is an associate editor for Contact Quarterly.

Interdisciplinary Project: August 10 – 17
Dancing with Forest: Open Experiments in Living Ecology
Terre Unité Parker and Kate Bailey
In Open Experiments , we blend forms, develop trust, and push the boundaries of performance. Through mind and body perspectives, both artistic and scientific, we move beyond awareness to living ecology. We create performance scores as an invitation for the environment to “speak” through us.

Terre Unité Parker is an experimental dancer and member of Anna Halprin's performance collective. When Terre was one, her mother placed her in the grass and she began to dance. Through dance, Terre seeks a direct experience of interdependence and hopes to inspire sustainable action. Kate Bailey is a passionate environmental educator, artist, and explorer of life and nature. Kate's accessible, engaging activities illuminate interdependence in the environment. A former teacher at Slide Ranch (CA) and the Hitchcock Center for the Environment (MA), Kate's passion for environmental and food justice is apparent in everything she does .

Interdisciplinary Project: August 12
"Eco-moves for Kids" Curriculum Development Think-tank
Martha Eddy and Jane Vorburger
"Eco-moves for Kids" Curriculum Development Think-tank will give childhood educators an opportunity to discuss and explore potential lesson plans that would foster students' stewardship of the earth and social development via interdisciplinary coursework that combines creative movement with environmental science classes. This is a three-day research think tank that culminates with this one-day training open to all.

Martha Eddy, Director of Somatic Studies/Moving On Center & Center for Kinesthetic Education (www.WellnessCKE.net ) , is an internationally recognized leader of dance somatics. Began the first somatic training to blend LMA and BMC in 1991. Consults in schools integrating kinesthetic awareness into academic, aesthetic, health, and socio-emotional lives of diverse children. Jane Vorburger began dancing with American Ballet Theater at age 16. She left to study Contact Improvisation and Biology at Oberlin College and completed her MFA degree at Tisch NYU. Jane currently teaches dance in NYC and is collaborating on the outreach project “Eco-Moves for Kids” with Martha Eddy.

Interdisciplinary Project: August 14
Eco-systemic Cognition: Relational Presence and Dynamic Embodiment Marlon Barrios Solano
We will explore the many forms of metaphorical trade between dance, science, technology and religion in order to understand a very complex cognitive phenomenon: dance. This practical workshop will be framed within the influential embodied cognition approach, the history of cybernetics and its "mind/body stories" and its impact in new dance practices.

Marlon Barrios Solano is a Venezuelan independent movement and new media artist, on-line media producer and consultant based in NYC. His interdisciplinary work investigates improvisational performance in its intersection with real-time digital processing, on-line communities, distributed creativity and cognition and notions of embodiment; his projects include collaborations with musicians, choreographers, dancers, architects, theater artists, community organizations, new media artists and the creation of on-line platforms for collaboration and community development. He is the creator of http://www.dance-tech.net and it series of vodcasts http://dancetechnet.blip.tv on interdisciplinary exploration of the performance of motion. He has lectured extensively on improvisation, new media, embodiment and cognition and performed in South America, Europe and the USA. He is the new media and on-line communication specialist at Dance New Amsterdam and Dance on Camera Festival in NYC. Marlon holds an MFA in Dance and New Media from The Ohio State University

Interdisciplinary Project: August 15
Soundscaping the Land Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren
Sounding the Landscape will investigate diverse ways of mapping noise in soundscape of the land in order to allow us to hear, to respond to, and move with that which we do not typically hear, and subsequently to re-imagine the moving body and its relation to the land.

Kanta Kochhar-Lindgren , a performance artist, scholar, and Certified Laban Movement Analyst, teaches courses such as Garbage as Art, Creativity Studies, and Performance and Healing at the University of Washington, Bothell. Her current performance work includes “scratching through the memory lines” and “protective skins and trip wires.”