A workshop with Nica Portavia and Karen Nelson
NOTE. WORKSHOP IS NOW FULL!
January 18-19
Workshop
Saturday 10am-5pm (with one hour break)
Sunday 10am to 3pm
Open Jam
Saturday 7-9pm
Performance Works NW
4625 SE 67th Ave.
Portland, OR 97206
Sliding Scale Workshop Fees
*includes admission to Friday 7:30 performance of SMALLER and Saturday Jam*
$150-$205
$75-$160 QTBIPOC
*for low income support or questions please inquire here*
Jam only- Sliding $10-20 (pay at door)
The workshop is open to all bodies, all identities. We are making efforts to create a more diverse space for practicing, we encourage queer and racially diverse identities to join this workshop.
Faking it With Gravity creates a space of inquiry to study and research Contact Improvisation* (CI), including Tuning Scores* and Material for the Spine* (MFS.)
In CI we dance with gravity. That sensation, our first handshake-touch with the earth, dances us through its field for our whole lifetime. “small dance,” the quiet inner sensation of our reflexes balancing us is something we are always doing in our bodies. When we turn our attention to it, what happens? This is the basis of our practice.
In Faking it we work with looking at our patterns and making choices. We’ll be sensing into the questions: When do I know I am faking? Is faking bringing me into realness? With deconstructing/reconstructing, reflexual reliance, friendly falling, rolling, and flying with easy landing, we will embody to fake, make, explore, restore, unravel, travel and play within a research space of constant learning from the momentum and changes in our dances.
Karen Nelson and Nica Portavia met exchanging dancing and love for gravity. This meeting between different human beings and generations creates a space to dance, to hope, to remember, to fall and to be together. Contact Improvisation is our common strategy, our vocabulary, our home.
*We thank Steve Paxton (1939-2024) for his ground breaking practice of the “small dance” (1960’s), and his instigation to collectively discover with many others the ongoing and evolving partner dance practice called Contact Improvisation (1972).
*We acknowledge Lisa Nelson for her proposal of Tuning Scores which highlight the small dance of our senses, confound our patterns of survival, allow natural delight of ordinary compositional choice to reveal wonders of dancing in a dancing world.
*MFS underlies so much of the movement discovered in CI. Spirals thru the body, and energy extension beyond our finger prints. This body of work was articulated by Steve Paxton and points to deep anatomical inter-relationship emanating from the small dance, and beyond.
Performance Works NW || Linda Austin Dance 