Upsight Down/ Rightside Up
defying gravity

Classes will draw upon an athletic background to develop a comfort with utilizing the hands as a weight-bearing source, and as a means to integrate the capability and strength of the upper body into dancing.  With these skills we will investigate ways to effortlessly suspend and up-end the body in space, while remaining thoroughly grounded to the floor.  Dance phrases will emphasize the use and thrill of momentum and gravity as a means to full-bodied, risky dancing, and at times challenging the body to defy those qualities of momentum and gravity.



Improvisation for Performers
Making Choices

Improvisation is a movement practice that challenges the body and mind together: logic and emotion, physical and spiritual, personal and communal. The class will focus on various modes of improvisation, including Contact Improvisation, a movement form based on the use of shared weight and leverage to lift and/or propel another person effortlessly through space. All forms of improvisation rely on a keen sensitivity towards fellow classmates and a willingness to trust one another in situations where the outcome is unknown. We will also work with compositional games and skills that can serve purely as improvisational structures from which to compose/perform in the moment. Our play with movement will yield extraordinary kinetic predicaments and solutions.





Lisa Race
Lisa Race has spent most of her career as a performer, teacher and choreographer in New York, where her dances have been seen at venues including Dance Theater Workshop, Danspace Project, Movement Research at the Judson Church, The Kitchenís Dance in Progress series, and the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse. Her work, under the guise of Race Dance - as well as in collaborations with Sondra Loring, Tom Thayer and Ginger Gillespie - has also been seen in various locations around the country, in Argentina and Hong Kong. Race danced with David Dorfman Dance from 1989-2000, and was honored with a New York Dance and Performance Award (Bessie) in 1995 for her dancing with the company. In May 2005 she returned for performances with DDD as a guest artist. She has danced with Sara Pearson/Patrik Widrig, and Ronald K. Brown among others. Race has taught and choreographed at many universities and festivals around the U.S. as well as creating works on D9 (Seattle), Labco (Pittsburgh), Atrek (St. Louis) and Aaben Dans (Copenhagen). In addition, she has given workshops at festivals in Europe, South America and China. Race taught at Trinity College/Performing Arts at La Mama in New York City from 1997-2005, at Wesleyan University in 2005, and is on faculty at Connecticut College. She recently completed an MFA in Dance at Hollins University/American Dance Festival. She has recently traveled to Siberia, Russia to perform her recent dance "Garden: Retreat". In summer of 2008 she is teaching in a newly created summer dance program "Made In France" (in conjunction with Washington University), at the American Dance Festival and at ImPulsTanz in Vienna.