My technique classes are grounded in contemporary release technique springing from the downtown New York City and Judson Church lineage of dance artists and improvisers. I offer anatomically sound, creatively stimulating, and physically rigorous practices focused on sophisticating perception in dancing and expanding possibilities for creative choice-making. I draw upon years of anatomical study and a variety of somatic practices including experiential anatomy, Body-Mind Centering, Klein Technique, Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais, Bartenieff Fundamentals, and Laban Movement Analysis to support students in holistic exploration of their bodies and dancing. Informed by my professional experience in highly athletic contemporary forms in combination with the quiet intentionality of somatics, I join clarity of initiation and form with the three-dimensional approach to space, refined awareness, and modulation of momentum exemplified in practices like Contact Improvisation to develop dancers who have the capacity for precision inside abandon and a deep awareness of self in dialogue with their surroundings.

My improvisation courses foreground dancing as a mode of research and as a practice of awareness, attention, and poetics. Through a wide range of puzzles, structures, and scores, students activate their individual sensibilities in their dancing, and explore diverse approaches to making-in-the-moment. Activities in class create space for students to hone somatic sensitivities, establish active relationships to their habits, deepen spatial, interpersonal, and compositional awareness, take risks, and embrace the unknown.

My composition and choreography courses center creative process as a generative and far-reaching method of humanistic inquiry—a way of experimenting with how to be together. Through individual and group making projects, students uncover and challenge their unconscious biases about dancemaking and clarify their unique means and methods of making and creative process. Frequently in dialogue with other disciplines, we question what dances are and can be, and explore what dancing and dancemaking can do.

The study of dance history is a study of aesthetics, culture, politics, and sociality-- and a study of dialogues between these spheres--rendered through bodies and movement over time. Similarly, the study of dance theory foregrounds embodied knowledge in the ongoing work of understanding our past and present, so that we might navigate towards a more just and resilient future. I have focused dance history and theory courses on 20th and 21st century American concert dance broadly, as well as on improvisation practices specifically during this same time period.

My conditioning courses support dancers to address their bodies and movement holistically, exploring perceptual habits and dysfunction alongside biomechanical, kinesiological, and anatomical principles. In class, students deepen their theoretical and embodied knowledge of the design and function of their bodies in motion, investigating body structures and systems through reading, drawing, writing, watching, and moving. While coursework includes building cardiovascular stamina, functional muscular strength, and functional mobility, the primary focus is to deepen students’ awareness of their own bodies, to grow their sensitivity to sensation and to the subtle nuances of movement, and to practice directing and redirecting their attention to coordinate movement with efficiency and ease.