Archive: Workshops, Intensives, Master Classes, and Open Houses

Creative Movement is a workshop for adult movers who are just beginning to enter, or re-enter, a movement practice and are curious about improvisation within the realm of contemporary dance. However, more experienced movers are also welcome in order to explore their own practice in a relaxed and open environment.

This class will include a group warm-up, several layers of prompted improvisation, and a shared improv score set to music. The atmosphere is welcoming and celebratory of all styles, levels, and abilities. It is a chance to explore your own body and self through motion and flow, bringing out your authentic movement voice, and taking whatever it is you need from what is offered. Let’s have fun, be playful, and get curious together through dance. 

This is an optionally hybrid class if you would like to livestream it on Zoom. The maximum number of participants in studio is 12, so if it fills up, or you feel more comfortable dancing at home, please feel free to join online. 

Saturday, December 18
2:00-3:00pm

Over the course of this three-day contemporary movement workshop, move BIG, sweat, and play with us while we build awareness and explore expansive possibilities within our own bodies. With improvised and structured movement vocabulary, we will research freedom, 3-D expansion, mobility, rigor, presence, agency in choice-making, and empowerment within ourself. Led by AMP Co-Director, Joanna Lees.

Suitable for professional, pre-professional, and/or intermediate/advanced movers, ages 18 and older. Knee pads recommended. This is a great way to keep moving over school or holiday breaks. Low/no cost options available. Come as you are!

In person and virtual options available. Drop in for one, two or all three days. Pre-registration highly encouraged through AMP’s website. Those who pre-register will be given priority should class size need to be limited. Current CDC guidelines for COVID-19 safety will be followed.

Monday, December 20
Tuesday, December 21
Wednesday, December 22
10:00am-12:00pm

Rates
Single day/drop in rate: $18
Two-day bundle rate: $32
Three-day bundle rate: $45

Registration and more info at alternativemotionproject.org. Email questions and inquiries to alternativemotionproject@gmail.com.

Join TCB’s professional ballet dancers at the Lakeville Area Arts Center for a fun-filled interactive performance event designed for families and children ages preschool through eight. The programs are less than an hour long—the perfect length for busy schedules and curious minds.

Dance With Me highlights age- and ability-appropriate body movement using different forms of dance, and features unique monthly themes, short dance classes, optional audience participation, and short performance demonstrations in costume by TCB’s professional company dancers. You are welcome to enjoy one, many, or all of the programs!

Tuesday, January 11, 2022
10:30-11:30am
Tickets: $6

Purchase tickets online, or by calling 952-985-4640.

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
Elayna Waxse teaches throughout December

Pre-register at https://www.arena-dances.org/class-payment/
$17 drop in. Flexible pricing and free parking!

Elayna’s class contextualizes contemporary dance technique as an ongoing process of body awareness within larger ecological systems. How we exist in our bodies replicates how we exist in the world. Utilizing improvisation, set phrase work, somatic exercises and conversation, we will explore physical prowess, performativity, and authenticity in movement and activism. 

Elayna Waxse is originally from Overland Park, Kansas and is now based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She began her training at nine years old with Alecia Good and also at the Kansas City Ballet School under the direction of Karen P. Brown, spending her summers at the School of American Ballet in New York City.  She continued her training at the Professional Division program at Pacific Northwest Ballet School in Seattle, WA., where she regularly performed with the company. 

Professionally, Elayna has danced with Minnesota Dance Theatre, Colorado Ballet/Colorado Ballet Studio Company, Black Label Movement, BodyCartography Project, and with Cie. Ismael Ivo at ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival 2014. She was a member of TU Dance from 2012 to 2019, and was part of the original creation team of Come Through, the collaboration between TU Dance and Grammy-award winning musical group Bon Iver. Through this collaboration Elayna performed at the Hollywood Bowl (LA, CA), the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts (Washington, D.C.), and at Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival (Manchester, TN).

Other credits include work by George Balanchine, Glen Tetley, Loyce Houlton, Eliot Feld, Uri Sands, Dwight Rhoden, Francesca Harper, Gioconda Barbuto, Katrin Hall, Greg Dolbashian, and Stephanie Batten-Bland. Elayna is a 2019 recipient of a McKnight Fellowship in Dance. 

Over the course of this three-day contemporary movement workshop, move BIG, sweat, and play with us while we build awareness and explore expansive possibilities within our own bodies. With improvised and structured movement vocabulary, we will research freedom, 3-D expansion, mobility, rigor, presence, agency in choice-making, and empowerment within ourself. Led by AMP Co-Director, Joanna Lees.

Suitable for professional, pre-professional, and/or intermediate/advanced movers, ages 18 and older. Knee pads recommended. This is a great way to keep moving over school or holiday breaks. Low/no cost options available. Come as you are!

In person and virtual options available. Drop in for one, two or all three days. Pre-registration highly encouraged through AMP’s website. Those who pre-register will be given priority should class size need to be limited. Current CDC guidelines for COVID-19 safety will be followed.

Monday, December 20
Tuesday, December 21
Wednesday, December 22
10:00am-12:00pm

Rates
Single day/drop in rate: $18
Two-day bundle rate: $32
Three-day bundle rate: $45

Registration and more info at alternativemotionproject.org. Email questions and inquiries to alternativemotionproject@gmail.com.

Over the course of this three-day contemporary movement workshop, move BIG, sweat, and play with us while we build awareness and explore expansive possibilities within our own bodies. With improvised and structured movement vocabulary, we will research freedom, 3-D expansion, mobility, rigor, presence, agency in choice-making, and empowerment within each of our selves. Led by AMP Co-Director, Joanna Lees.

Suitable for professional, pre-professional, and/or intermediate/advanced movers, ages 18+. Knee pads recommended. This is a great way to keep moving over school or holiday breaks. Low/no cost options available. Come as you are!

In person and virtual options available. Drop in for one, two or all three days. Pre-registration highly encouraged through AMP’s website. Those who pre-register will be given priority should class size need to be limited. Current CDC guidelines for COVID-19 safety will be followed.

Monday, December 20
Tuesday, December 21
Wednesday, December 22
10:00am-12:00pm

Rates
Single day/drop in rate: $18
Two-day bundle rate: $32
Three-day bundle rate: $45

Registration and more info at alternativemotionproject.org. Email questions and inquiries to alternativemotionproject@gmail.com.

An Eight-week Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement Series with Sarah Baumert

Sundays, 4:00-5:00pm CST and Wednesdays, 6:30-7:30pm CST on Zoom
November 14-January 19

FREE intro class November 17th @ 6:30pm
No class November 24 and 28, December 26 and 29.

This series will explore how we can interrupt our habitual patterns of stress. We will investigate how we hold tension in our system, observing it and then disturbing it, and looking for sensations of comfort and pleasure. In Awareness Through Movement®, we explore how we can move with the smallest amount of effort. The smallest amount of effort or exertion will facilitate the maximum amount of sensory differentiation and thus make information available for new learning. Slow movements will facilitate a parasympathetic response, the rest and digest response of the nervous system.

Interested in this series, but experiencing financial hardship? 
During the last year I have been called to offer the healing work I do, through yoga and the Feldenkrais method to more people, and a more diverse demographic. With the support of my scholarship fund, I am able to offer these classes at a reduced rate. If you need financial assistance, please contact me directly. I would like to make these teachings accessible to everyone.

“That was awesome, my neck feels so much better!”
“Amazing changes in my thoracic spine! So relaxed.”

In honor of Give to the Max day, ARENA Dances will be live at the studio, in person and online with Facebook.

The students and I will open up curiosity, finding internal pathways within the body and the contrast of those same pathways to promote extension of skeletal mobility beyond one’s own range. An assortment of texture, speed, density, length, force and resistance will be taught to open these skills.

My work is best described as contemporary, spanning an array of styles – from quietly evocative to physically demanding and full of spiraling momentum that draws energy into the core and spreads it out like disco ball beams of light. At times, the work focuses on the dancers’ bends and folds, creating shape as one shifts and moves. My work strives to create moments of connection.

Free Contemporary/Modern Dance Technique
Thursday, November 18: 10:00-11:30am

Pre-register at https://www.arena-dances.org/class-payment/

Mathew Janczewski’s inquisitive, immersive and heartfelt approach to contemporary dance reaches beyond the surface and holds the viewer in its embrace. With over 35 works in his repertoire and more than two decades of experience as a choreographer, Mathew has cultivated a highly diverse and mesmerizing style of movement.

Mathew’s work has garnered praise in the Twin Cities and beyond. He has created commissioned works for companies such as Minnesota Dance Theater, Cleveland Repertory Co., aTrek Dance and Zenon Dance Company. He was the Bates Festival choreographer (2001), received the Sage Award for Outstanding Performance (2005) and won the McKnight Choreographers Fellowship (2005). In 2008, Dance Magazine named him as one of their “25 to Watch.”

Shortly after receiving his degree in dance at the University of Minnesota, and performing internationally, Mathew founded his own non-profit dance company, ARENA DANCES, in 1995. ARENA serves as the vehicle for his body of work and provides young, aging and underserved segments of the Twin Cities community with opportunities to experience the transformative power of dance.

Unicorn Sweat is a dance party workout celebrating the joy of moving to pop music and the liberation of all bodies.

The teachers for this class are Abigail Whitmore (she/her) and Annika Hansen (they/them, she/her).

This class takes place on the last Saturday of every month from 11:00am-12:00pm at The Arena. $17 drop-in. Discount cards available.

UNICORN SWEAT
Saturday, November 20
11:00am-12:00pm

Drop-in $17. Flexible pricing and free parking!
Pre-register at https://www.arena-dances.org/class-payment/

Come dressed up in your unicorn spirit gear and have some fun!