Our next Fundamentals Workshop will take place in April 2025. Please email us, if you would like to be notified when registration opens.

FUNDAMENTALS WORKSHOP
Saturday, January 18, 2025
12:30 - 4:30pm
w Francesca Frewer

Early Bird: $60 when you register by Dec 21st
Regular: $80
Registration required, no drop-ins.

If you are new to Contact, this workshop is for you! This workshop will introduce Contact Improvisation basics, and will provide you with the fundamentals to begin your practice.

We will begin with a guided warm-up to deepen awareness of ourselves in relation to gravity. We will practice moving in and out of the floor with ease and efficiency. As we begin to dance together, we will deepen foundational skills of Contact dance, such as rolling point of contact, sloughing (sliding), meeting pressure (continuity of connection), weight sharing, and underdancing (offering mobile support).

What is Contact Improvisation? It is an improvised social dance, involving non-verbal communication between bodies moving through physical contact. It is a meditation on presence and body awareness, as well as a play of physics using gravity, momentum, and inertia to inspire dancing together. Every moment is a collaboration with a focus on “listening” through the skin surface at the physical point of contact.

Francesca's classes are informed by somatics (attending to sensory perception guides our approach to dancing and listening to our partner) and contemporary dance techniques (functional movement patterns and floor work assist us on the technical side.) You will be invited to try things out with an un-precious, experimental mindset, to hone your attention to detail, to get your body moving, and to practice pacing yourself. Options are always provided for multiple ways of participating, and you are always welcome to do as much or as little as you like. No need to bring a partner. Wear comfortable clothing - long sleeves & kneepads are recommended.

Please email info@edamdance.org if you have any questions about attending this workshop.

Our Fundamentals Workshop is held three times a year in September, January and April. Please email us if you would like to be notified when registration opens for our next workshop. If you missed the most recent workshop, our Thursday evening classes are also a good place for beginners to start! Read more and register for classes here.

Indulging | DIMENSIONS OF IMAGINATION 
Saturday, February 1, 2025
12:30 - 4pm
w Arash Khakpour

A Contact Improvisation workshop for intermediate CI practitioners and dancers. Please email us if you have any questions about the workshop level or participation.

Early-Bird: $52.50 when you register by Jan 23rd
Regular: $70
Registration is required. Last day to register: Friday, January 31st

In this workshop, we will bring the value of agility and tactility to awaken our inner CATS. We will work on conscious duetting by using rolling point, sloughing, bridging, yielding, anchoring, pressure modulation, internal expansion and weight-sharing to sharpen our physical awareness and dexterity.

We will explore how the physical skillsets can expand through indulging in the range of our senses, the energetic circumferences of our bones, noticing emotions and tapping into imagination. Can imagination guide us to inhabit our bodies of knowledge and generosity? This leads us into dreaming the body and the extensions of our bodies as a way of expanding the physical body. Can the heart as an organ play a part in linking us and our dancing together?

This workshop will invite us to dive into perceptual possibilities awakening and developing our imagination as a way of bridging the unconscious to the conscious. Can imagination guide us to dream our ancient bodies of otherworldly wisdom? We will work on enhancing personal suppleness and virtuosity through short improvisational duets, tuning into the perception within the group, and utilizing the group's intelligence.

Francesca Frewer is a contemporary dance artist who has been studying Contact Improvisation for 12 years. Her teaching is heavily influenced by training and dancing with Peter Bingham and the EDAM company, and her classes also draw on principles of the Feldenkrais Method, a somatic movement practice she teaches and of which she is an ongoing student. With a particular interest in efficiency, precision, and refined awareness, Francesca offers technical skill-building towards the end goal of finding ever more options within the moment to moment choice-making that is improvisation.


Francesca creates and performs in her own work, frequently in collaboration with Erika Mitsuhashi. She has also worked with Company 605, Emmalena Fredriksson, Company Saint Genet, Future Leisure, and Evann Siebens, among others. She is a co-producer and organizer of the interdisciplinary art series Here For Now, and the DIY performance space Boombox.

Arash Khakpour (آرش خاکپور) is a dancer and choreographer from Tehran and is privileged to be a dance artist based in the Coast Salish Territory (Vancouver). Arash has been practicing dance and performance for the past 15 years and has been a company member of the EDAM Contact Improvisation ensemble since 2017. He tends to invest in the nuances of prejudices in the body as a way of inviting the unconscious to the conscious, and as a doorway to confront unknown emotions. He sees dance as a process of physical, emotional and spiritual discovery and a mode of transformation. He works with dance as a language that researches the human condition through mythical, historical, social, political and existential interpretations. As a first-generation immigrant, he continuously considers what healing he can bring to the land and communities he works with. He is building a culture of relationality and reciprocity that celebrates the multiplicity of presences and approaches. Arash is the co-founder and artistic director of the dance-theatre-film company The Biting School (alongside his brother Aryo Khakpour).