wccijAM
2019 Teachers
We had an awesome 2019 teaching team. Stay tuned for wcciJAM 2020 teachers!
Intensive Teachers for wcciJAM 2019
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Sara Shelton Mann (All-levels Intensive)
Andrew Suseno (Workshop is open to all)
Rosemary Hannon & Vitali Kononov (All-levels Open Intensive)
Click on the images above for Single Class Teachers!
Sara Shelton Mann (All-levels Intensive)
Intensive Description: "Deep Touch"
A workshop in exploring the layers of touch - the grounds from which you are moving from – The intention – the force, integration purpose and power of touch. Touching through the airwaves and via being in the same world, country or room together - Implied direction - touching the body and working with directional clarity and follow thru. Then touching on reversals and how the contact premise is also the solo premise which entrains the universal flow. How do the emotional and physical body thrive and fly? How does the witness ground you?
Chi cultivation included – always grounding and energizing and empowering both the individual and the group.
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Biography:
Sara Shelton Mann has been a choreographer, performer, and teacher since 1967. She was a protégé of Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis in New York City before moving to Canada where she met Andrew Harwood and fell in love with Contact Improvisation. In 1979 she moved to San Francisco to work with Mangrove, now Mixed Bag Productions, for which she serves as artistic director. One of its early manifestations was the company Contraband, launched as a performance group and research ground combining the principles of contact, systems of the body and spiritual practice into a unified system of research. Among her awards are a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, 7 Isadora Duncan Awards, including a special achievement award for “erasing time: celebrating 30 years a radical dance legend” (Sara Shelton Mann with David Szlasa and Norman Rutherford), Djerassi Artist in Residence Awards, Headlands Center for the Arts Residency 2016, Lifetime Achievement Bay Guardian Award, 10 Women Who Made a Difference, Bay Guardian "Goldie" Award, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2016). Her Movement Alchemy training is an ongoing teaching project and is influenced by certifications and studies in the metaphysical and healing traditions. Sara’s performance work is a platform for collaboration and research in consciousness.
Andrew Suseno (Open to all abilities and ages teens and up. People should come with the willingness to roll around outside and to get dirty!)
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Intensive Description: "Parcon Resilience: Stick stroll"
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Parcon Resilience is a POC-centered relational somatic movement form. Parcon Resilience invites us to engage with the thinking, feeling and sensing of ourselves and our world(s) in full out movement and verbal expression. It capitalizes on the power of Parcon to bring attentional and intentional relationship with all things through the direct exploration of balance and momentum with oneself, objects, others and the environment. In the field of somatics, it bridges our work to meaning making and thoughts and how we negotiate relationships while connecting to our changing somatics.
What is Parcon? (www.parconrc.org) It emerged from a class in Contact Improvisation that I was teaching to Parkour coaches at a retreat in the fall of 2015 and developed through labs and performances with the collective Parcon NYC and later through classes that I taught. In Parkour we obstacle through an environment (often urban), with vaults, jumps, and rolls to move with precision and efficiency. In Contact improvisation (CI) we share balance, momentum and touch through any point of our body in a dance studio. Parcon can use the exploration of shared weight and momentum from (CI) while pushing the boundaries of negotiating the environment as is done in Parkour. Hence it may be done with a partner and/or may be done solo, or in partnership with an object, such as a stick, ball or tire, but in general instead of the environment as obstacle, it becomes a dance partner which one can join intimately with. In this case, we will also become intimately familiar with solo and duet movements with a stick and the environment.
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Parcon Resilience is connecting the art of living an engaged and conscious life with a responsiveness to the relationships and systems we find ourselves in. We challenge the separation of mind and body, individual from collective, present from the past, and body from environment -- by practicing a framework of connection in full on movement, full on thinking, and full on collective. Parcon Resilience is for all bodies, all abilities, and various ages (in this workshop I am looking for teenagers and up.) Participants are asked to commit to anti-racist practice in being part of this intensive.
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See Introduction to Parcon video and Stick Stroll video to find out more!
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Biography:
Andrew Suseno, a long time contacter, is founder of Parcon Resilience, a method for learning Parcon that incorporates somatics and social justice with the site specific parkour/contact inspired dance form. He has been teaching parcon since 2015 to communities of color in East Harlem: seniors, people with disabilities, youth and able bodied adults. He has offered Parcon workshops at Contact Improvisation Jams and communities in Earthdance, Madrid, Sweden, Puerto Rico, Toronto, and New York City.
www.parconrc.org
Rosemary Hannon & Vitali Kononov (All-levels Open Intensive)
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Intensive Description: "Fundamentals of Contact Improvisation"
In the heart of Contact Improvisation practice is our ability to listen, hear, understand and respond to each other movement and creative impulses. We will examine, challenge and re-construct some of the core practices in the original proposition of CI practice and infuse it with the skill that is perhaps the most essential in contact - the art of listening, trough the dynamic interflow of leading and following, weight sharing, moving in and out of the floor with precision and ease. We will explore scores that investigate physical listening and communication, falling, sharing weight, structural support, momentary readiness and safety assessment.
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Biographies:
Rosemary Hannon is a dancer, choreographer, and teacher, who has studied Contact Improvisation since the late 1990’s. She has taught CI since. She rotates her teaching among weekly CI classes in the Bay Area at ODC, CounterPulse, Finnish Hall, and 8th Street Studio. She has also taught at colleges and festivals including: The West Coast Contact Improvisation Festival and Jam, The Sierra Contact Festival, The Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation. As an Axis Syllabus teacher-candidate, she facilitates work groups studying human movement and applying practical anatomical principals to dance. She has also spent the last 20 years teaching dance to children and working with arts education organizations. She holds an MA in Education from the University of San Francisco. Her performance work has enjoyed residencies at DancGround Keriac, SafeHouse for the Arts and Studio 210. Her 2014 piece, ‘Gallus Gallus Domesticus,’ was nominated for an Isadora Duncan Dance Award. She is currently working on a performance project in collaboration with Miriam Wolodarski titled, ‘Crane & Crocodile 2.1: Domestic Interrogations’, also known as ‘last year’s show’. She also has a long history of performing in the work of other choreographers including Scott Wells & Dancers, Christine Bonansea, Nita Little, Avy K Productions, and Alma Esperanza Cunningham Movement.
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Vitali Kononov is a movement artist, bodyworker and somatic movement educator, working with improvisation as a performance discipline, therapeutic tool and a contemplative practice. He was born in St-Petersburg, Russia, in 1966. He has been teaching contact improvisation since 1997 in Russia, Europe, USA and Mexico. His background includes contemporary dance, physical theater, contact and ensemble improvisation, Somatic Movement Therapy, Body-Mind Centering and yoga. He has been teaching at Moving On Center – School for Participatory Arts and Somatic Research since 2002 and was a faculty member of American Dance Festival (2003-04). Vitali has a private bodywork and Somatic Movement Therapy practice in Berkeley, California. Recent years artistic collaborations included improvisational works with Brenton Cheng, Carol Swann, Rosemary Hannon, Andrew Wass, Erika Tsimbrovsky and Vadim Puyandaev, Scott Wells, Taja Will, Jo Kreiter and others.
