When
Where
PRACTICES – WEEKEND 2
Chani Bockwinkel > SAPPHO and SWEAT
Saturday – Sunday
January 18-19, 2020
12:30pm- 2:30pm
A Queer Feminist Dance Class
Kate Bush*Somatics*Aerobics
Open to All levels/Genders
A place for us to get sweaty, learn some 80’s sci fi dance moves, give attention to our pelvis and the magik that is our anatomy. Read a little sapphic poetry, honor some deep femme idols, and dance WITH each other.
Chani Bockwinkel is a filmmaker and performer. She makes interdisciplinary-collaborative-queer-feminist imagery for the stage, gallery, and internet. She is currently working as co-director on her first feature film, Those Who Wait. The project is a poetic re-telling of a 19th century doomsday movement. She has taught Sappho and Sweat on the West Coast, East Coast, Texas, Canada and Berlin. Bockwinkel is a founding member of SALTA, a dance collective.
dana e. fitchett > Signature Line
Saturday – Sunday
January 18-19, 2020
3:00pm- 5:30pm
Signature Line”is a workshop I created to consider the relationship between improvised bodily movement (dancing, if you will) and improvised drawing (doodling), conceiving of the drawn line as a simple continuation of the natural movement that lives in a dancer’s body, and vice versa: understanding improvised bodily movement as an extension of line drawn on paper. “draw write move” is a next iteration of this idea, adding written text into the equation.
On both days, the workshop will begin with a groovy warm-up to get into bodies and connected to music. On day one, participants will learn a short phrase that was constructed by following the path of a line doodle as a movement map. As the focal activity of day one, each participant generates their own, similarly derived phrase by first translating a segment of their improvised movement into a drawn line doodle, and then following the line of that doodle to create a movement phrase. On day two, after warm-up, participants will learn a phrase generated to text. They’ll then turn their attention to the written word, taking time to generate a free write, perhaps with some prompts offered. Participants will then extract some text from their free write and create a phrase to that text. Different iterations of these exercises may ensue, if time allows.
The loftiest goal of the workshop is to move its participants even just slightly to a less colonized point on the grand spectrum of colonization. Marcus Garvey said, “Liberate the minds of men and ultimately you will liberate the bodies of men.” I concur with Garvey’s statement and also believe the liberation of mind and body are all tangled up in—and reliant on—one another’s progress. So, in that vein, I focus in this workshop on the inversion of Garvey’s imperative, and hope that re/connecting movers to their organic, self-directed line, path, and voice can also serve to help liberate psyches from the burden of narrow ideas of what expression “should” look like.
dana e. fitchett (she/her/they/them) has worked in schools and in arts-, education- and social justice-focused organizations, with roles ranging from direct classroom work, dance education, and family organizing to event management, arts administration, and marketing and communications. A multidisciplinary artist currently pursuing a self-directed Masters of Fine Art in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College, dana writes, makes visual art, teaches movement classes, choreographs, and directs Movement for Liberation, a project-based dance collective. dana seeks and finds endless lessons in literature, human engagement, and nature, and splits most of her time between the Bay Area, New York, and Boston. All of her pursuits are unified by her explicit concern for moving our individual and collective realities closer to liberation.
REGISTER TODAY AT FRESHFESTIVAL.ORG/PRACTICES