Nicole and David will lead warm ups and workshops on June 24 & 25.

Warm up description:
Nicole von Arx offers an advanced level dynamic contemporary class that incorporates elements of floor work, yoga, improvisation, and her latest choreography research. She encourages you to embrace physical and emotional effort, and explore the extent of your body and mind’s capacity. Her warm-up is a series of challenging exercises focusing on isolating, strengthening, aligning and balancing the body. This will lead into improvisation tasks emphasizing sensation, timing and space. The class culminates in a complex phrase work allowing dancers to discover Nicole’s movement vocabulary and musicality. This is an advanced class!

Workshop description:
Our workshop will feature daily warmups integrating floor work and calisthenics, emphasizing mind-body connections and safe partnering techniques for engaging in challenging and virtuosic movement within duets.

Participants will explore narrative duet creation on day one, followed by a focus on physicality, refining lifts, and dynamic interaction on day two. Through tactile feedback and responsive engagement, attendees will gain creative tools to expand their movement vocabulary and build trust in new dance partnerships.

Laja’s workshops will explore three pillars of her work as an internationally sought after educator and choreographer.

FloorworkFlow:
FloorworkFlow is focused on the body flourishing in a highly physical, momentous flow, forming distinction between various dynamic movement textures and connecting to the profound feeling of moving. To begin, a warm up that gently awakens mobility in the joints, moves into strength building exercises that lay the foundation of development into more advanced physicality. Gain confidence to ignite, launch and glide through space while landing softly. Experience moving as a group to sharpen your perception and adapt quickly to your ever changing environment. In tune with the music and playing with its dynamic offerings, take all of the above and tap into that palpable feeling, rooted in community-centered dance forms that transcends the exercise, the move, the phrase and unleashes the spirit and joy of moving.

Dance Theater:
Take a full body deep dive into the realm of LajaMartin style dance theater. Unlock the portals between the real world and the surreal. Access your physical prowess, uncover new ways of moving, deepen your own unique style while exploring the spectrum of theatricality of different characters. Utilizing movement material in various configurations alongside text, lip syncing, sound and improvised speech - the realm of possibilities are endless and open to your individual curiosity.

Partnering:
Expand your ability to ride momentum as you hone the most efficient ways to move dynamically through space individually in partners and as a whole. Building off basic weight sharing skills, learn partnering material and practice the improvisational aspect of listening to the opportunities of connection, flow and flight.

This workshop is open to any body that wants to move, sound, remember, and listen.

Together we will warm up our bodies, voices, senses, imagination, and memory with a guided sequence of prompts and exercises sourced from embodied traditions and technologies such as Jazz, Hatha yoga, BodyMindMovement, improvisation, slow cooking, and garment design.

After a short break, we will take time to locate and experience improvisational recipes, choreographic material, and time reserved for solo and group play, practice, craft, and rest as we build creative relationships with one another.

Participants will be invited to move, rest, change, still, remember, and dream.

I am asking

…how can we source familiar rhythms to locate and acknowledge memories in our bodies with care and attention?

…how can my / your body use memory, sensation, and imagination as ways to enter embodied practices to articulate story, ancestry, and personal truth?

…how can each of us reference our own spectrum of learning? How can we reference all the ways we have learned to dance and move.

You will be asked
to take care of yourself.

To source the languages, spoken and embodied, that bring you most joy.
to move, still, and rest with the body, voice, experience, and space that you have in the present moment.
to be with the spectrum of your joy and grief.

I CARE ABOUT YOUR BODY is a workshop and a life-style. Just saying the sentence out loud brings a wave of calm, a softening, a more empathetic approach to whatever, or whoever might be in front of you.

The workshop, in practice offers gentle, somatic and creative movement rituals that harmonize and co-regulate our collective nervous systems and awaken our imaginations. The research is rooted in neuroscience and grounded by spiritual bodies, and is developed to be accessible to most moving bodies. I strongly encourage caregivers, nurses, therapists, educators, nannies, as well as anyone who could use some restoration and resonates with the material below to join us in the space.

This offering has been loosely modified from its original 3-day format to meet the requirements of New Dialect’s Summer Intensive and might include more rigorous, dance forward, and cathartic improvisational practices. The work will still be deeply nourishing and restorative.

A note from stephanie:

“This offering was dreamed up during a very slow and sweet season of my life - collaborating with my mother in caregiving for my 90 year old grandmother during her final year earth-side. This period of patient care while her conscious mind grew more and more dim taught me so much about the deep importance of trust between bodies as well as the vital practice of self-care, patience, and somatic attunement when in positions of service.

Care is radical. Care is mandatory.

In this slow learning season of my life , I also had the time and space to read and educate myself at a pace that felt embodied. ICAYB’s ethos is humbly influenced by the teachings of somatic abolitionist Resmaa Menakem, trauma informed physician Gabor Mate, consent educator Mia Schacter, and Buddhist monk Pema Chodron, among many more authors, educators, and activists (full list of resources will be provided to workshop participants) and how their teachings intersected with my own discoveries in a long sweet year of pausing my life as I had known it and taking care of someone’s body.

As a lifelong dance artist, the natural progression of the past several years has led me to expand on these practices in a way that felt like dance. Intention plus movement, community co-regulation, empathy building, and simplicity. I believe dancers harness the embodied intuitive power that will transform the world. Let’s carve some time to nourish and be nourished, repattern harmful narratives or behaviors, and place care in the priority position. Say it with me, I care about your body.”