Workshop and Jam facilitators: Brian Buck, Maria McCain and Persi Mey

Each month with feature a facilitated workshop at 6:30pm, followed by an Open Jam Space from 7:30 - 9:30pm

Pre-Registration is open for March's workshop and jam!

There are many ways of defining the dance form Contact Improvisation. Here More information available on the contact quarterly website

Contact Improvisation is an evolving system of movement initiated in 1972 by American choreographer Steve Paxton. The improvised dance form is based on the communication between two moving bodies that are in physical contact and their combined relationship to the physical laws that govern their motion—gravity, momentum, inertia. The body, in order to open to these sensations, learns to release excess muscular tension and abandon a certain quality of willfulness to experience the natural flow of movement. Practice includes rolling, falling, being upside down, following a physical point of contact, supporting and giving weight to a partner.

Contact improvisations are spontaneous physical dialogues that range from stillness to highly energetic exchanges. Alertness is developed in order to work in an energetic state of physical disorientation, trusting in one's basic survival instincts. It is a free play with balance, self-correcting the wrong moves and reinforcing the right ones, bringing forth a physical/emotional truth about a shared moment of movement that leaves the participants informed, centered, and enlivened.

—early definition by Steve Paxton and others, 1970s,
from CQ Vol. 5:1, Fall 1979

Additional resources, articles and information on Contact Improvisation:

• Contact Quarterly

• Texas Dance Improvisation Festival

• TDIF JAM GUIDLINES

• The 4 Rules That Will Get You Through Your First Contact Improvisation Class, Dance Magazine, Jan. 2018

• A Beginner's Guide to Contact Improvisation, Dance Spirit, July 2019

Sign up for the next Work in Progress Showing April 21st

The feedback and discussion will be facilitated by trained Fieldwork facilitators. ​

The Fieldwork process establishes a space for artists to learn about their work, develop their ability to give feedback, and build a community of artistic peers.

You can learn more about Fieldwork by visiting www.coredance.org/fieldwork

General protocols:

• Sign up for each showing will open 1 month prior to showing date.

• Choreographers are asked to submit 1 work per showing up to 15mins in length.

• Sign up is 1st come 1st serve.

• Sign up will close once we reach 60 mins of work.

• There is no charge to participate.

• Doors will close promptly at 3:15pm.

• Late arrivals will not be admitted once the showings have started.

• Studio will open up and be available for warm up starting at 2:30pm.

Each showing will follow the same schedule:

• 2:30p Space opens for warm up

• 3:15p Showing begins (late arrivals will not be admitted to the session after the showings start)

• 4:15p Short break

• 4:30p Feedback and discussion

• 6:00p Session complete

Question? Contact Office@metdance.org

Spectrum of Strength

An Improvisation Class with Jasmine Hearn

Tuesday Evenings 7:30pm - 8:15pm (75mins)

(ongoing through spring 2024 see HMD’s mindbody site for specific dates or contact office@metdance.org)

$20 pre-registered/ $22 Walk up

This weekly class is open to all bodies that want to move, remember, and listen. 

Intention is to share an interdisciplinary practice rooted in traditions, practices, and methodologies of improvisation, dance, somatics, performance, preservation, sound composition, garment design, and cooking.

Every Tuesday, we will warm up and attune our bodies – connecting our sensorial experience to memory and imagination. We identify and learn from our individual experiences to source embodiment material that is unique to each of our personal stories. 

We will dance together – following where our bodies want to go. 

together by talking and practicing using the languages

This will be followed by time and space held for play, practice, and craft. As we build creative relationships with one another, there will be space reserved for collaboration to make  multi-dimensional compositions together.

As the facilitator, I am asking

…how can we source familiar rhythms to move caught memory through our bodies with care and attention? 

…how can my / your body use memory, sensation, and imagination as ways to enter embodied practices to articulate story, ancestry, and personal truth?

…how can each of us reference our own spectrum of learning? How can we reference any way we have learned to dance?

You will be asked 

to take care of yourself. 

to move, still, and rest with the body, voice, experience, and space that you have in the present moment.