WEEK 1
16.00 - 18.00
WAKING UP TO CONNECTIONS
This is a movement lab exploring our modes of bodying and moving in relation to site, the Berkshire hills. In this double practice, moving and the apparatus of movement are both interrogated, held accountable and examined. We will explore landing and launching, tone and tension, lead and lag, all movement practices in relation to our own bodies. While at the same time we will examine how our very movement, as nomadic dancers, is implicit in the flattening of the ground that allowed western dance as a colonial project to emerge. We ask: How can our dancing attend to the grooves of the particular terrain where it presents itself? How can dance making practices create deeper and wider narratives of living and learning in connection with others and with the land that the practices are situated on?
18.15 - 19.15
BECOMING TENDER
The etymology of the word tender is to grow soft. The term can be traced to the Latin “tender”, derived from the Sanskrit “tan”- “to stretch” or to reach. We will move and think with fascia and biodynamic craniosacral practice to tenderize our body-minds through physical practices.
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BIOGRAPHY
Kevin O’Connor is a multidisciplinary artist working as a choreographer, dancer, improviser, circus artist and installation artist from Ontario, Canada and now based in the San Francisco Bay area . He is involved in a decade long artistic collaboration exploring participatory de-colonizing performances within watersheds in Ontario. He is also currently working with NAKA dance in Oakland exploring the intersection of race and gentrification in the Bay Area, where he finished a year long residency and performance with the residents of the Tenderloin in San Francisco. In both artistic collectives the dance method of scoring is used as a mode of training attention differently. In each site radically different communities collaborate through improvisation. His attentional practices have been made different by working as a biodynamic cranial sacral practitioner, learning alongside Inuit hunting families on Baffin Island, and joining the round dance protests during the Indigenous uprising called Idle No More. He has been learning with the axis syllabus community for over a decade. His is currently finishing his PhD at UC Davis where his research examines anatomies, body performance capacities and imaginations in relation to new science studies on fascia.