Stockholm University of the Arts

BA Contemporary dance

Fall Semester 2023

This choreographic workshop invites participants to visit a variety of concepts and sites including knowledge-transfer, queer theory, flea markets, silly archives, GIFS, and children's books. As these artifacts propose to show us “what’s in the world” we come into a process to discover our personal worlds of movement. We enter through reflecting and sharing our relationship to learning. What learning style do you think you have? We use these self-perceptions as tools to deconstruct our favorite dances and movement pathways, share them, transform them, and create choreographies with them in a collective process.

ImPulsTanz Vienna International Dance Festival

Field Research Project

Summer 2023

Technical development for choreographic process is taken here as a possibility, a circumstance, an opportunity to engage in a level of embodied skill that can contribute to the vitality of our performance and its perception. Furthermore, we view choreography as a set of tools and ideas that structure and challenge our ways of embodying materials and presenting them. Over the course of the workshop we create and revisit choreographies using our newly developed tools.

Co-facilitated with choreographer Lenio Kaklea, the research project explores the relationship between embodied technique processes and choreographic composition. We recognize the influences that technical expressions can have on the creative process and choreography and vice versa. How can technical, embodied consciousness support the conceptual work involved in the creation of dance and performance? How can a choreographic idea challenge our preconceived notions about technology and technical knowledge?

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Winter Semester 2020

This semester-long course is co-facilitated by Regina Baumgart. Together, we address students who are interested in developing their own movement practice–as a daily practice and training or in reference to a specific choreographic project or performance concept.

Andrew and Regina support and accompany participants’ independent research by offering input and exchange on important aspects concerning movement practice and movement development. We share our daily practices and invite students to facilitate “input sessions” for fellow participants. The course develops student relationships to teaching and feedback structures that are useful to us in relating our practices to others on aesthetic and methodological terms.

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Summer Semester 2021 &

Winter Semester 2021/22

This s mester-long workshop is co-facilitated with jazz pianist Assaf Fleischmann. Together, we facilitate techniques from ballet and music in terms of rhythm and embodiment. In parallel to technical studies we make sequential choreographies and improvisational scores that give us structures to apply our learning. We use musical instruments, voice, and body percussion, explore rapidly changing meters, polyrhythm, syncopation, and learn about music histories such as African American jazz and minimalism. As these traditions are loaded with histories of oppression, we read texts and see films that contextualize on these histories, holding dialogues to reflect on our continued work with ballet, which has been advanced by African-originated skills and aesthetics.

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Summer Semester 2019

Borrowing its title from the novel by Joan Didion, this workshop gives students choreographic tools embedded in performative practices of reading bodies and writing space. We consider various ways of seeing and projecting ephemeral information and laying out in time-structures. A time structure we learn is the pop song. We study the choreography from a 1970s performance by Ami Stewart. We juxtapose this temporality by reading ‘All About Love’ by bell hooks aloud as a group. Scores by Lisa Nelson add layers of witnessing to our process. Through the workshop we use these studies to develop compositions in small groups, alter directives, discussing the effects, and performing new iterations for each other.

Zurich University of the Arts

MA Choreography

Fall Semester 2021

Janet Panetta, a ballet teacher, has a definition of technique. She says, “technique is a system of clarifying how your body works for you”. This is a provocation to conventional ways of embodying ballet and other codified aesthetic forms that say technique is about satisfying the desired image, then the body. This workshop is aimed for dancers at a stage in their movement practice where they wish to examine technique—a vital process in bringing technique in relation to other dancers as teachers and audiences as choreographers.

The workshop asks how a foundation in embodied aesthetic knowledge be used as a bridge to contemporary politics and critical thinking.

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Summer Semester 2020

This semster-long interdisciplinary course examines routine dance practices on personal and interpersonal levels. Together we dive into socio-political and historical perspectives of self-cultivation, building a basis in critical theory with which to examine our relationships to manual labor and productivity as dancers. How is our work as dancers informed by the ways we measure our advancement inside the paradox of ephemerality? Theoretical frameworks about ephemeral come through close readings of ‘The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism’ by Max Weber, ‘Teaching to Transgress’ by bell hooks, and Michel Foucault's 1983 lecture, ‘The Culture of the Self.’ Conversation around the religious, economic, political, and philosophical dimensions of technique from a Western perspective offer us ways of bridging our current experiences of movement training with the history of capitalism and the constructed self.

Universität der Kunst / Hochschule Zentrum Tanz

BA Dance, Context, Choreography

Winter Semester 2020

This semester-long workshop is co-facilitated with sound artist and performer Zen Jefferson. Together, we move with and against electronic sound, touching various themes of popular rhythms, improvised and emergent physical expressions, and codified aesthetics. We hold space for dialogues about our experience moving to Zen’s music, which is influenced by African rhythms and anti-racist statements and sentiments.