Upside Down/Right Side Up
defy gravity

Classes will draw upon an athletic background to develop a comfort with utilising 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 emphasise 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.


Make a Dance: Fast
choreographer and individual performer

During this process students will create individual phrase material and learn phrases from Race‘s movement repertoire, then mash them together, pull them apart, stretch them out, compact them. We will also learn movement from one another, all to create a brief dance piece to be performed at the sharing on the last day of the festival. Our structures for creating the dance will be both compositional and improvisational in nature, developing the idea that any movement or series of movements can be guided to enhance the voice of both the choreographer and the individual performer.



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 Kitchen‘s 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 Dnace from 1989-2000, and was honoured 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 a.o.

Race has taught and choreographed at many universities and festivals around the US as well as creating works for 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 completed an MFA in Dance at Hollins University/American Dance Festival. She has traveled to Siberia, Russia to perform her dance work "Garden: Retreat." In summer of 2008 she taught 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.