Nora Alami is a Moroccan dance artist and creative producer living in Brooklyn. Her work builds performative contexts that investigate the embodied and contradictory experiences of our chosen and inherited identities. In flux between fluidity, tension, awkwardness, and discomfort, Nora presents evocations that are dramaturgical, conceptual, and in ritual. Her tools: radical acts of permission-giving, intentional displacement of cultural vantage points, and multidisciplinarity braiding.

Her choreography has been presented at Danspace Project's DraftWork series, Triskelion Arts, Houston Metropolitan Dance Center, Center for Performance Research, New York Live Arts, International Center of Photography, pOnderosa, Colorado College, and Movement Research at Judson Church. She has performed at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, River to River Festival, and toured internationally with Jadd Tank at the 2018 Focus on Mediterranean Choreography platform in Castiglioncello and Spoleto, Italy.

She has been awarded the Alliance for Artist Communities’ Diversity + Leadership Fellowship, the New York Live Arts Fresh Tracks Choreographic Residency, and Miguel Gutierrez’s Landing 2.0. She has been awarded the 2021 JACK Residency, 2021 BRIClab: Performing Arts Residency Artist, 2021 Rest and Restore Residency at The Petronio Center, and 2022 Resident Artist at Triskelion Arts. She was recently invited to attend the Arab Arts Focus and Downtown-Contemporary Arts Festival in Cairo as a delegate of Movement Research’s Global Practice Sharing Program. Currently, Nora joyously collaborates as a creative producer with Jasmine Hearn and is on the Steering Committee for FAILSPACE. IG: @noralami; thenoralami@gmail.com.

CLASS DESCRIPTION
In our time together for GLUE we will explore the relationship between concepts and embodiment through low-stakes performance and a shared creative process. Working together with materials such as text, fabric, objects, each other, and our own bodies, we will create containers to ask dramaturgical questions. Together we will practice offering and refusing, witnessing, triangulating desire, crafting and interruption. This process made visible is an exercise in listening, curiosity, instant performance, and the spaces between it all. Through a ritual of witnessing each other and witnessing ourselves, we will practice our own taste-making.

Photo by Scott Shaw

Nicole von Arx is a Swiss & British dancer and choreographer actively working in Canada, the USA, and Switzerland. She is a 2023 NYSCA grant recipient, 2022 Dance Initiative artist in residence, 2022 Leimay Incubator, 2020 Lauréate of a Gland Culture Grant, a 2020 Jacob’s Pillow Choreography Fellow, and 2018 STUFFED artists in residence at Judson Memorial Church. After graduating from the Alvin Ailey School in 2008, her performance career led her to become a soloist at the Royal Opera House in London and Chicago Lyric Opera while dancing for Jasmin Vardimon. She’s worked for Carte Blanche - The Norwegian National Company for Contemporary Dance, The Metropolitan Opera, Company XIV, Loni Landon, Romeo Castellucci’s Democracy in America, and Bryan Arias. Nicole recently choreographed the opera Der Freischütz at Wolf Trap Opera in Virginia. She’s been commissioned to create original works for Stanford Live, Whim W’Him, LINK Choreography Festival, Luminato Festival, and the Edmonton Opera. She creates under the company name NVA & Guests.

CLASS DESCRIPTION
Nicole von Arx creates an environment where all is possible. She will start by sharing both movement vocabulary (qualities of form and shapes that move and come from within the body) and improvisational tasks (which are inspired by the team we are dancing with and the space we are dancing in). From these tasks, we will create a list of directions that we will use as inspiration to generate solos and/or duets. These materials will be shared with others and then entered into a choreographic score. Pulling from the immediate, we together will attempt to create several playgrounds where each of the participants will be responsible for the framing and timing of our actions.

My work gets built...

...from and within the mind and body
...with a splash of physical comedy
...in collaboration with the space and object found in the space
...in collaboration with the collaborators
...for people of all kind

Nicole will give space for reflection. Throughout the workshop, you will have the possibility to share and absorb.

Photo by Todd Rosenberg

Symara Johnson, a Portland Oregon native, currently residing in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, has immersed herself in interdisciplinary and choreographic studies globally. Her work varies due to the different influences she’s embraced throughout her life. She is a recipient of the Dai Ailian Foundations' Scholarship based in Trinidad and Tobago. The scholarship led her to Beijing, China where she spent two years gaining an associate in modern choreography at the Beijing Dance Academy. Symara is a graduate of SUNY Purchase’s Conservatory of Dance program. She was a resident artist for Bearnstow, Gibney 6.2 Work Up, Gallim moving Artist 2022, BAX Fall space grantee 2022 and CPR 2022 AIR. She has had film works commissioned by Berlin based choreographer, Christoph Winkler. Johnson has presented work at the WIP Showing at Bates Dance Festival, Smush Gallery, The Craft, BAAD, CreateArtXGallim, WIM Salon, Mount Vernon Community Theatre, ACMA, The Forum Art Space, Moving Art Exchange, Chez Bushwhick, The Beijing Dance Academy Theatre and venues throughout NYC and Germany. She is an Urban Bush Women company member and is grateful to have worked alongside artists such as Ley Gambucci, Ogemid Ude, Jasmine Hearn, Pioneers Go East Collective, Rena Butler, Slowdanger and Joanna Kotze.

CLASS DESCRIPTION
This class is in practice with your romantic present, a conversation that ignites the many parts within us to activate and shift our perceptions of the world . We take time to choose where we want to go and dive into our agency. Symara Johnson plays the role of a facilitator as she shares entrances and exits formulated through her own experience of being. You are invited to be whoever and whatever during this.

Photo courtesy of Brooklyn Arts Exchange

Erick Montes is a dancer and interdisciplinary artist who believes in the technology of movement as the threshold towards ancestral wisdom. His research gravitates between memory and representation at the intersection of dance aesthetics. His dances, practice, and training are highly influenced by choreographer Bill T.Jones and the late Luis Fandiño (Mexico City, 1931-2021), among his transnational, cross-cultural mentors between the US and Mexico who have guided his dancing to date.

Erick is interested in authenticity versus the manufacture of dance making and the body as a confluence of biology, biology as in culture. When not producing dances, he teaches a course at UArts, in Philadelphia, for the School of Dance or guides vinyasa practices upstate New York.

Erick Montes is a two times New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” recipient with the Bill T.Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company for Outstanding Revival of D-Man In The Waters (2013) and Best Ensemble for Chapel Chapter (2007). He holds a fellowship from The New York Foundation for the Arts (2008); Fund for New Work Harlem Stage (2005/2010); National Endowment for the Arts; FONCA (National Endowment for Culture and Arts, México, 2003/2005); Mexican Studies Institute CUNY (2022); and the Dance Fellowship and Life Experience Award at University of the Arts (2021–2022). His work has been presented in New York by Movement Research at Judson Church, E-Moves HarlemStage, CPR, Dixon Place, River to River Festival, DUMBO Festival, Triskelion Arts, and the Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance. His latest project, Moving Landscapes, is a collaborative performance/installation that premiered at Triskelion Arts in the spring of 2022. Montes is also a Vinyasa yoga certified practitioner in mindfulness meditation–oriented toward harm-reduction philosophies.

CLASS DESCRIPTION
Tracing Technique is a movement exploration practice toward composition. In this class, the focus of investigation gears up from inward concentration to sensation to further usage of the space as an improvised ensemble for creating movement phrasing. We will discuss anatomy and physiology in response to movement, explore solo and build up movement together to understand kinetics as an essential part of the dancer as a performer.

The class is directed to dancers interested in postmodern movement practices. Sharing practice: In this class, you may find discussion, sound and breathing exercises (Pranayama), Vinyasa Yoga, and improvisation.

Photo courtesy of the artist

Kimiko Tanabe is a fourth-generation Japanese American artist. Her work combines her background in contemporary dance floorwork and butoh with her love of storytelling to create surreal performance art that is both joyful and haunting and that gives platform and power to the Asian-American experience. She welcomes chaos and play, valuing different mediums of storytelling whether it be text, movement, collage, installation, projection, or sketching and then searches for the thread that weaves it all together. She places equal value on working inside of a studio and in her bedroom, embracing her aesthetic as raw and intimate.

Kimiko graduated from Colorado College with a degree in Creative Writing and Dance in 2016. She is a BAX Space Grant Recipient, a Gallim Moving Artist Resident, Artist in Resident at The Floor, and Fresh Ground Pepper Play Ground Play Group Residency Cohort Member. She currently performs with and glenn potter-takata and has performed with marion spencer, Kizuna Dance, Seymour::Dance Collective, Lisa Fagan and Hannah Mitchell, HIJACK, and Nial Ibragimov.

CLASS DESCRIPTION
Our improvisation will be rooted in desire. We will use a Three Part Approach as our framework for our practice.

Part 1 - tracking and rooting into creative/embodied desires

Part 2 - making compositional and or movement decisions based on these desires

Part 3 - practicing performing these desires with full vulnerability and embodied commitment

We will also pull inspiration from our practices outside the dance studio - drawing, cooking, writing, singing, voice-memoing your friends, taking care of plants, folding clothes, collaging, the mundane or the sacred habits of our lives - and bring them alive in our dance practice to root it into the context of our lives, cultures, and communities.

Photo by Malcolm-X Betts

Larissa Velez-Jackson (LVJ) is a NYC-based choreographer, movement educator and multi-platform artist who uses improvisation as a tool for research and creation; blending dance, healing modalities, sound, humor and strategies of self-compassion in her original performance practice called Star Pû Method (a.k.a. Star Crap Method). LVJ has presented work at numerous NYC venues such as: Museum of Art and Design, Abrons Arts Center, Chocolate Factory Theater and in 2017 at New York Live Arts with Yackez, a collaboration with her husband, Jon Velez-Jackson. Called “an adroit physical comedian” who “seems to be questioning entrenched conventions of contemporary performance” in The NYTimes, LVJ was nominated for a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” award for Outstanding Emerging Choreographer. LVJ was awarded the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Grant to Artists, in 2016 and was a Caroline Hearst Choreographic Fellow at Princeton University. www.larissavelez.com

CLASS DESCRIPTION
This workshop will begin with a simple warmup of developmental movement patterns suited to each participant, that integrate brain and body. Then drawing upon the primordial, elemental, and archetypal qualities of our being, inspired by Ayurvedic anatomy, Jungian concepts and my own liberatory choreographic methods, I will share frameworks and activities of improvisation that fully engage you and the studio space. These “scores” are meant to lead to a fuller, more profound, and more imaginative experience of movement/creation. As a disabled Latinx artist and classical yoga philosophy practitioner; notions of power, access, care, and agency are always at the forefront, as we individually and collectively call in these increased embodiment riches.

Photo by Gregory Kramer

Nicole Wolcott is a movement artist and teacher who splits her time between Brooklyn and Missoula, MT.. In 2003 she co-founded KEIGWIN + COMPANY and was the Associate Artistic Director until 2013. She continues to work with Keigwin on a myriad of independent projects, including their recent online collaboration for Guggenheim Works and Process and ‘Bolero Juilliard’ (broadcast on PBS ‘Great Performances’) She directs ‘The Well’, a dance theater production house she founded in 2018 that is rooted in a collaborative process, generating performances endemic to the artists that create them. The throughline of her independent creations of the last twelve years is the artistic collaboration with sound designer, philosopher and friend Omar Zubair. Rooted in improvisation, they create hyper-live dance theater performances with whimsy and aplomb. Wolcott has been in show business for over thirty years. This fact astounds her. In that time she has danced in the rural and the chic, she was a cultural diplomat for the United States through DANCE USA dancing with Ethiopians, Tunisians and Ivorians; learning more than she taught. She has helped create dances for Broadway, Off Broadway, a major motion picture, an international art rock band, for shows at The Guggenheim, The Kennedy Center, The Joyce, The American Dance Festival, and CBGB’s. She has been in the ensemble and she has been the star. She loves dance.

CLASS DESCRIPTION
CREATING COHORT DAY 1 // This is the introduction to GLUE. Using low stakes improvisational play, we will introduce and share ourselves at the ground level, creating a cohort and energizing the space for our time together. This will prime us for the week where we will be committed to a rigorous process armed with a sense of humor. I want this to be the time where we shed judgment (of ourselves, others, aesthetics, propositions, the clothes we decided to wear…) and invite in curiosity with a sense of humor, so we can laugh at ourselves and break new ground.

Photo by Whitney Browne