The time frame for each program is adaptable—running from one to many sessions within a period of a day to several weeks—depending on the depth and detail appropriate to given circumstances.
Movement & Alphabets (grades K-1)
This workshop begins by exploring movement and sound in Nature. Simple pure sounds are moved. Then gestural movements are given sound. Then body feelings are given movement and sound. This continues to moving phonemes, like the beginning sounds of names. These phonemes are then expressed in gestural painting of colors and shapes, and visa versa. This teaches an experiential understanding of where written alphabets come from, and is basis for creating alphabets through art as precursor to formal writing and reading. ©2005
Picture books (grades 1-6)
This workshop starts with storydance and the moving and telling of personal stories in Nature. These stories are used for making a storyboard—as used by writers and illustrators of picture books—for creating picture books with paintings and text. ©2008
Carnival of Animals (grades 4-6)
This workshop explores animal character and language as preparation to explore the music of Camille Saint-Saens’—Carnival of Animals—to structure gestural vocabulary for improvisational dance and performance. ©1990
Shapeshifting Dance (grades 3-8)
This workshop uses the notion of shapeshifting, as found in folktale and myth, to evoke expressive movement. Student’s warm-up with movement games to become familiar with the art of shapeshifting dance and then work into individual autobiographical storydances. Finally students create a structured improvisational dance piece based on a traditional folktale, with or without an improvisational musician. ©1986/2008
Animals and the Origins of dance (grades 4-9)
This workshop explores the origins of dance through animals, elementals, myth, art, and masks-making. This approach stresses the transformational, shapeshifting vocabulary of movement as expressed in the art forms of primal peoples and their communicative relationship with the Natural world. A performance piece is created. ©1985
Languages of Nature Languages of Art® (grades 4-12)
LNLA is a dance workshop that translates the raw elements found in Nature—movements, sounds, forces, textures, shapes, and colors and more—into the immediate expression of dance. The workshop begins with an improvisational movement introduction to the gestural meaning of movement and its basis in Nature. Then progresses in an expedition to explore Nature’s expressions and gather themes to create a series of mini dances working with improvisational musician. ©2010
Move * Draw * Write (grades 7-12) ©2006
This workshop plays with the translation of artistic modes of expression from movement to sound to feeling to image to spoken word to written word. The process begins by exploring how movement is the foundation for this expressive continuum, and its basis in human relationship with Nature and the non-verbal languages. The process finishes with an open-structure improvisation where participants will have a chance to combine understanding and practice, as well as set scores based on their experience, for all to dance.
Structured Improve—High School into Elementary School (grades 9-12)
This program teaches high school students in the fundamentals of structured improvisational dance from a Nature based and child developmental perspective. With this experience, a student group is formed to field teach a series of dance workshops for elementally school children, culminating in a performance by all. ©1990
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Photo Credit: Rebecca R Burrill