Moving Practice is a weekly class series for professional dancers. Classes prioritize rigor, diversity of contemporary aesthetics, variety of class content, and commitment. Professional level dancers of all styles are welcome.
Tuesdays, 10:00-11:30am at The Arena
Taja Will teaches through June 21: Duo and Ensemble Improvisational Partnering. Class is a place for co-learning, collaborative training and meeting in places of creative focus, skill building and current fascination.
Drop in: $17. Buy a 10-class card and save.
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FREE parking on all side streets: Aldrich, Bryant, Colfax, 31st
Class culture: My pedagogy is grounded in healing justice and restorative justice at its foundations; this is to say all histories of power, privilege and oppression live in the room, when we don’t pay attention to them we maintain a status quo based on oppression. For me, giving voice and space to the practices of equity and awareness in creative/artistic spaces encourages the field to diverge from the status quo. Classes are open level, you are invited, regardless of your experience in the dance form/style. Classes will center accessibility and inclusion for QT + BIPOC folks.
Class content: Drawing from my longtime commitment to Contact Improvisation this class will focus on duo and ensemble improvisational skills and structures. We’ll use somatic modalities to warm up awareness, and compositional instigations to encourage movement from small isolations to greater locomotion and possibly bombastic movement emergence. This is a place for us to gather and practice improvisational technique, awareness of our individual choice making alchemies, attunement to each other, and I will invite partnering that includes weight sharing and touch to your desire.
Taja Will (pronouns Taja/they/them) is a queer, Latinx (Chilean) adoptee, performer, choreographer, somatic therapist and Healing Justice practitioner based in Mni Sota Makoce, on the ancestral lands of the Dakota and Anishinaabe. Taja’s approach integrates improvisation, somatic modalities, text and vocals in contemporary performance. Their aesthetic is one of spontaneity, bold choice making, sonic and kinetic partnership and the ability to move in relationship to risk and intimacy. Will’s work explores visceral connections to current socio-cultural realities through ritual, archetypes and everyday magic.
Photo credit: Nanne Sorvold