Kayla will lead workshops on January 2 & 3.

How Kayla describes her workshop:
My work is rooted in community, identity, transformation, and radical imagination. Through dance-theater, riffing forms, improvisation, dynamic range, partnering, and scene, we come together creating spaces for exploration, questioning, rebellion, and pushing to find growth.

My class amasses through improvisation, dynamic physicality, partnering, world-building, text, and phrasework. We will challenge possibility and impossibility, disrupt structure, and find wildness in movement and character/people. We will find no answers together as artists and move with desire and inspiration as community; and with ourselves.

(she/her) Kayla is New York-based dancer, choreographer, director, and photographer. She is a North Carolina native born into a dance-loving family, and she graduated from the University of Arizona.

Her background comes from contemporary dance, jazz, rhythm/cypher/riff, writing, filmmaking/immersive, and dance-theater forms..

She has freelanced with various artists and companies including Punchdrunk Sleep No More NYC, Kyle Abraham/Abraham. In. Motion, Kate Weare Company, Helen Simoneau Danse, Rashuan Mitchell/Silas Reiner, Aszure Barton and Artists, Madboots Dance, Nicole Von Arx, Danielle Russo Performance Project, Chris Masters Dance Company, Elena Vazintaris/Dance Projects and others.  Both independently and through companies, she has worked as a rehearsal assistant and teaching artist, instructing at various programs including University of NC School of the Arts, University of the Arts, The Juilliard School, NYU Tisch Dance Program, and local dance organizations and studios, and beyond.

Maleek will lead workshops on January 6 & 7.

Workshop Description
Maleek's sessions will include a range of structured formatted movement, improvisation, floor work and dynamics centered around making strong movement choices.

He guides groups in an investigation into their individual qualities of movement, and along the way he integrates acting techniques into the investigation in order to help participants dive deeper into their sense of self and to learn better how to tell a vivid story with one's body.

Maleek is a performer, choreographer, and teacher. He is a 2022 Princess Grace Award winner in choreography, and a 2021 Bessie nominee.

He began his dance training at Harlem School of the Arts and LaGuardia High School before attending Boston Conservatory on full scholarship, going on the collaborate with Kyle Abraham and his company A.I.M., and shortly after joining Punchdrunk’s acclaimed immersive production Sleep No More as the first African American male to perform the work.

He has been a member of Camille A. Brown and Dancers for five seasons, working as Camille’s assistant choreographer. Most recently, Maleek assisted Camille at the Metropolitan Opera for her directorial debut, Fire Shut Up in My Bones.

In addition to his performance and choreographic career, Maleek is a sought after teaching artist, regularly leading workshops at Broadway Dance Center, Gibney Dance, MOVENYC, Joffrey Ballet School, Laguardia High School, and many others.

Rena will lead workshops on January 8, 9, and 10.

Workshop Description
Rena begins her class session with guided imagery, exploring both fluid and stabilizing exercises to inform various structures in the body.

The class then flows into dynamic phrasing that encompasses improvisational tasks, floor work, detailed gesturing, musicality, choice-making and more.

Dancers use these tools in creative process research and an exploration of Rena’s choreographic repertory.

(she/her) Rena Butler began her studies at The Chicago Academy for the Arts, studied overseas at Taipei National University of the Arts in Taiwan, and received her BFA from SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance. She danced with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (also a choreographic fellow), AIM by Kyle Abraham, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, David Dorfman Dance, and Gibney Company.

Her choreographic work includes BalletX, Hubbard Street Dance Chicago, Boston Dance Theater, The New Orleans Museum of Modern Art, The Ailey/Fordham School, TEDxChicago, and more. In 2019, she received a Princess Grace Award for Choreography and was spotlighted in Dance Magazine’s feature “On The Rise”.

Rena has led workshops at L’Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Danse de Marseille in France, The Macau Cultural Center in China, Ailey Camp Chicago, and SUNY Purchase Conservatory of Dance. She served on the Consortium for Chicago Dancemakers Forum for 3 years, was a panel member for Black Girls Dance in Chicago, and co-created and directed DanceLab—a free, choreography course for Chicago teens. Rena currently serves on Dancewave’s Artistic Advisory Council in NYC, and is a mentor to young, aspiring artists as part of the Pointe People Mentorship Program.