Ground Work
Fall in love with falling

Train and experiment low, inverted and off-balance. Fall in love with falling. Begin with a thorough warm up and partner practice to build strength, structural instincts and control in relationship to the ground. Discover new pathways and conquer old fears moving in and through all planes. Knee pads are recommended.


Partnering
power and leverage, frame and grip

Gravity and levity, weight-sharing, power and leverage, frame and grip, rhythm and momentum, velocity and suspension. Practice through the training of common and uncommon skills, learning repertory and improvisational structures, generating material together to enhance strength, timing, precision, communication and performance.


Integration
Pool all of your resources and dance

Investigating approaches to the act of motion, the creative process and performance. Engage in energetic, somatic and hands-on experiments to generate sensation. Explore improvisation in solo and contact realms to discover new ideas with spontaneity and clarity of intention. Navigate groundwork and motion techniques to ignite and inform physical intelligence, power and three-dimensional range. Learn and create material to quicken the mind and fine tune the body. Give and receive feedback to articulate a language for action and reaction. Pool all of your resources and dance.



Kathleen Hermesdorf
Kathleen Hermesdorf has been dancing in San Francisco since 1991. She co-directed Hermesdorf & Wells Dance Company with Scott Wells, sharing a GOLDIE Award in 1994, and was a member of Margaret Jenkins Dance Company, receiving an Isadora Duncan Award in 1999. She worked with Contraband/Sara Shelton Mann from 1993-2003 and joined Bebe Miller Company in 2002. Hermesdorf is the Artistic Director, with Musical Director Albert Mathias, of Motion Lab (www.motion-lab.net), an experiment of movement and sound in training, creative process, performance and production. They have been on the faculty of ODC School since 1996 and the company has presented four critically acclaimed seasons, released five CDs and toured much of the USA, teaching performing and setting commissions, since 1998. Hermesdorf holds a BFA and MFA in Dance and certification from the San Francisco Shiatsu Institute and has trained intensively in somatic, improvisational, technique-based and compositional forms. She has been called ".....possibly the most vibrant dancer currently working in the Bay Area.....liquid, lightning fast and moving from deep inside herself, she is a wonder to behold." by the San Francisco Bay Guardian, and the San Francisco Examiner finds her work ".....all-enveloping.....pure shape, partnered with an even purer dynamism, that arrests the imagination."