WEEK A: Monday, July 31 – Friday, August 4, 2023
IMMERSION:
Co-sensing: Relationality in Aerial Practices and Performances – (Fabric) Intermediate – Professional
9 AM – 12 PM. Week A.
Ages: 16+. $350. Dairy Gordon.
Prerequisites: Geared toward intermediate to professional artists curious and desiring a research ecology to challenge their practice and assumptions. Willingness to improvise, tap into deep movement unknowns and practice awareness with sensation as a challenge to primarily aesthetic-based work.
Merging ideas from dance, circus, interactive installation, sonic media, body politics, performance art, ritual, and somatic awareness: we will awaken our ignored senses. With an intention to cultivate an ecology of care, this experimental research unearths a non-conventional approach to aerial work through a peculiar, sensational lens, and striking fabric configurations, spanning vertical, tangential, and horizontal (non-rigged) ever-evolving structures. We will attempt to co-sense how our nervous systems respond to layers of contact ranging from the internal to external, amplifying the affective resonations within our embodied/virtual networks, honing a practice to notice our habits, reflexes, inhibitions, and disorientations. Guided by pleasure, we will explore where our individual desires collide with and then alchemize aesthetic expectations within aerial encounters. This emergent research will scaffold entanglements between bodies, space and materials, while seriously questioning and tending to the concerns of touch, consent, agency, economics and choice in our aerial practices. The process asks us to be present with unfolding complications, while honoring expressive differences in relationality. This immersion resists a coherent identity by dwelling in the periphery of performance research, and will offer a complex interplay of rigorous movement, somatic propositions, and texts/concepts/poetics shared prior to the immersion.
WEEK B: Monday, Aug. 7 – Friday, Aug. 11, 2023
Low Suspending: Alchemizing Pressure and Pleasure on Fabric – Int/Adv
5:30-7:00 PM. Week B.
Ages: 16+. $175. Dairy Gordon.
Prerequisites: Intermediate/advanced artists interested in flowing, contemporary, somatic and experimental movement-based guiding and choreographic sequences. For artists wanting to explore how the body can feel integrated movement chains from the rigging point, through the fabric, into the body and ground.
We will unearth the magical balance of tension and suspension, levitating between the floor and air, guided by technical approaches to support us in hovering. We will learn a plurality of variations at different levels and orientations with the fabrics that enhances our dancing capabilities with vertical tissues from the ground using technique of gliding, suspending, levitating, wringing, and skimming. Honing our desire, sensation, practice and performativity of suspension. It will be a choreography-based, technique class. This awareness tries to support a relationship with the fabrics, shifting our perspective and engagement with “material.” Slithery, pleasurable choreography will unfold through a technique on knotted vertical fabrics promoting the sensation of touch with the material. The juxtaposition and balance between set choreography and individual expression allows a nuanced and subtle emergent alchemy between our bodies. Aerial transitions, unique sling movement, suspension and weight-transfer using the fabric as a partner will be mediated, asking what distribution of PRESSURE is good right now, and letting it mobilize and be ever-evolving.
Danielle Garrison creates interactive, provocative, and somatic aerial experiences to re-ignite embodied interaction in a post-touch era questioning who and how we can do aerial. During her MFA in Dance at the University of Colorado Boulder, Danielle received a Fulbright artist grant to France, performing creative research on the intersection of aerial, dance and circus. Recent aerial residencies include Mondes Visuels (Chalôn), SenseLab (Montréal), Milieux (Montréal), Nils Obstrat (Paris),) and the Circus Dialogues Project’s 4th encounter. Danielle has performed and/or taught for Aerial Dance Chicago, Frequent Flyers Productions, Frequent Flyers Aerial Dance Festival, Les Rencontres de Danse Aérienne, the Berlin Circus Festival, Santa Barbara Floor to Air Festival, Aerial Greece, and the San Francisco Aerial Dance Festival. In 2020, she co-created Aerial Reflexionando (virtual aerial arts colloque) with Ana Prada to support critical exchange on contemporary aerial arts in the Americas.Currently, Danielle is a PhD student in research-creation at Concordia University (Montréal) and the University of Montpellier 3 (France), as well as a 4-year Fulbright Specialist artist.
