+ a performance on Thursday, January 23rd from 3 - 4PM

EDAM and Foolish Operations are excited to host an intensive week of training + a stand-alone workshop with four members of the Lower Left Collective: Nina Martin (Marfa, TX), Margaret Sunghe Paek (Lawrence U., WI), Karen Høybakk Mikalsen (Oslo, Norway), and Julie Lebel (Vancouver, BC).

Location: EDAM — 303 E 8th Ave
> Flexible participation available
> Workshop descriptions and teaching bios below
*Info + tickets for the performance on Jan 23rd coming soon.

If you have any questions about attending, please email us at: info@edamdance.org

CONTACT IMPROVISATION
MORNINGS
M - F / 10am - 12pm
w Nina and Margaret

5-Day Workshop

With attention to lineages, attribution, and accessibility in CI and improvisation practice, dancers will utilize materials from Nina Martin's ReWire Dancing States and other Lower Left techniques to warm up, enhancing awareness of "dancing in the gap" between preconscious and conscious movements to articulate clear physical communication and compositional approaches to weighted duets/trios. Previous experience with CI is encouraged for this class.

For professional dancers, movement practitioners and artists; and those who are familiar with Morning Class at EDAM.

Early-Bird: $175
Regular: $225

ENSEMBLE THINKING
AFTERNOONS
M - Th / 1 - 4pm
w Nina, Margaret, Karen and Julie

4-Day Workshop

Ensemble Thinking is a system of improvisational compositional, group scores that increase capacity for collaborative creation. Dancers will explore Ensemble Thinking's principal scores to tune and refine the individual’s ability to perceive, initiate, and support collective action and create a "Big Picture" to support articulated compositions. Facilitators welcome contributions of diverse backgrounds, aesthetics, performance practices, or physical capabilities in this workshop.

For professional dancers, movement practitioners and artists; and those who are are familiar ET or improvisational dance.

Early-Bird: $210
Regular: $265

SATURDAY CI + ET
WORKSHOP
12:30 - 4:30pm
w Nina, Margaret, Karen and Julie

1-Day Workshop

Saturday's workshop will summarize and review material covered during the week's intensive, including CI and ET materials, to welcome dancers who wish to be introduced or to deepen their practice.

Open-level. All welcome.
Open to those who have not participated in the intensive.

Early-Bird: $70
Regular: $85

Nina Martin’s (Lower Left co-founder) choreographic and improvisational work (Improvography) has been performed in Finland, Ireland, Italy, Austria, Venezuela, and the US including 17 years presenting her work while living in New York. Her choreography has received support from numerous sources including New York State Commission on the Arts, the Jerome Foundation, and seven choreography fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts. Recently, she has received two Tommy’s (San Diego), an Irvine Foundation California Dancemaker Grant and collaborated with Shelley Senter and taught in Japan. Her work has been influenced by Elaine Summers, Mary Overlie, Trisha Brown, and Steve Paxton among other Post-Modern greats. Nina has performed with David Gordon Pick Up Company, Martha Clarke, Deborah Hay, and Simone Forti as well as being a founding member of Channel Z in New York. (see Sharing the Dance; Cynthia Novack.) Presently, Martin carves out a new dance destination in the wild west in Marfa, Texas.
www.ninamartin.org

Margaret Sunghe Paek is a collaborative dance artist whose research engages in inclusionary methods, ensemble enterprises, finding spaciousness in liminality and joy in creative practice. She sees dance as a life practice and life as a dance practice. As a mixed-race performer, maker, educator, and community builder, she is deeply influenced by her relationships with contact improvisation, Ensemble Thinking, Alexander Technique, Barbara Dilley, The Resident Artists/Dancing Mamas, Uh Oh Trio, Loren Kiyoshi Dempster, and their daughter. A member of the international Lower Left performance collective since 2000, the group continues to provide her artistic foundation and home. Her dance works have been presented in Europe, Mexico, and the US, including at Judson Memorial Church and in collaboration with musicians Jason Moran and Alicia Hall Moran for the 2012 Whitney Museum Biennial in NYC. Margaret has been on faculty at Movement Research, Marymount Manhattan and Manhattanville Colleges in NYC, as well as taught at many international festivals. She has authored articles for loveDANCEmore and Contact Quarterly and is on the boards of Marfa Live Arts and Renaissance Charter Arts High School. In 2015, Margaret moved from New York City to ancestral homelands of the Menominee and Ho-Chunk people (Appleton, Wisconsin) to teach dance in the Conservatory of Music at Lawrence University, and she loves it.
www.margaretpaek.com

Karen Høybakk Mikalsen is a dancer, artist, mover, choreographer, teacher and community builder based in Oslo, Norway. She has been deeply invested in improvisation, composition, group work and contact improvisation since the late 1990’s and traveled and lived abroad for 9 years. She did her dance studies in Oslo, Stockholm, Salzburg and New York and sees traveling as part of her artistic lineage. She met Lower Left and Ensemble Thinking in New York in 2007 and has since then dived into research on collective work and built a community around improvisation in Oslo through ImproLAB and Improfestivalen, now PRAXISfestivalen. She is also a founding member of PRAXIS Oslo – an arena for artistic sharing for performing artists. Karen runs her own company Living Movement, she has presented her work in Norway and the Nordic countries, is active in various artistic collaborative constellations (such as music, theater and narrative art), and she choreographs for others companies and theaters in Norway. She is also part of Lonely Riders - a Nordic network on community work and improvisation with dancers from Sweden, Finland, Iceland and Norway. From 2015-17 Karen was the recipient of an artistic work grant from the National Arts Grants. Currently she is teaching movement at a performance art college in Oslo and recently did a research project on Ensemble Thinking facilitated for acting studies. Karen is thrilled to finally hold an Ensemble Thinking Teacher Certification and to be a Lower Left member!
http://www.livingmovement.no/karen-hoslashybakk-mikalsen.html

Julie Lebel gratefully lives and dances on the ancestral and unceeded Indigenous territories of the xʷməθkʷəjˀəm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səl̓ilwətaɁɬ (Tsleil Waututh) First Nations. She is a choreographer invested in community engaged dance and in interactions between public space and community - involving musicians, visual artists, film makers and writers with a body of work spanning 25 years. She is the Artistic Director of Foolish Operations, creating new dance experiences for and with people of all generations, especially very young children. She is a member of Lower Left Collective (USA, Germany, Norway and Canada) teaching and performing Ensemble Thinking.
www.foolishoperations.org
https://julielebeldanceprojects.wordpress.com