Mary Armentrout Teaches
Beginning Adult Ballet
This ongoing class/lab is a fun, relaxed, but very serious exploration of ballet based on my understanding of the Corvino method. In small classes with a relaxed learning atmosphere and personal attention, I work on the fundamentals of ballet, alignment, and the principles of movement, with an emphasis on clarity and ease, so that my students experience the joy of movement and the satisfaction of understanding the principles governing it.
7:00-8:30 pm Wednesdays
10:30-12 am Sundays
drop-in $12/class
at Danspace
473 Hudson St., Oakland
510 420 0920
Feldenkrais for Dancers and other Movers
The Feldenkrais Method is a wide ranging system for understanding how the human being functions and learns how to learn, using the body as its primary laboratory. This four week workshop is an exploration of how bodies in motion and at rest work. Learn to truly experience - from the inside - how different parts of your body move and work together. Discover how very subtle changes can fundamentally alter and refine all the movements you do - from sitting at your desk, to carrying groceries, to double pirouettes, to standing on your head - and can increase awareness, release inefficient patterning, tension and pain, and increase flow. This is a wonderful opportunity for dancers working in any style to bring greater felt understanding of how their body is constructed, as well as greater ease and articulation, into the execution of their movements. This pathway of exploration is open to movers in all walks of life, including martial artists, athletes, armchair warriors and couch potatoes, as all of us are included in the set of those who have bodies and move them in the course of our everyday lives.
Please wear loose and comfortable clothing
At Shawl Anderson Dance Center
4 Saturdays in August - 8th, 15th, 22nd, 29th, 2009
1pm to 2:30pm
Call 510 654 5921 or
shawl-anderson.org for more info
Dreaming Out Loud: A Composition Intensive
During this week-long intensive, we will explore:
techniques for opening the body and letting its stories spill out.
techniques for appropriating the "real" outside world to embody your inner world.
techniques for collaging different media together to most accurately embody your ideas.
We will start with the body, exploring many different ways to access its rich wealth of material, and move out into playing with its relationship to the outside world, building up different strategies for connecting (and disconnecting) the two. We will spend some time working with the idea of collage, creating different approaches to layering, so that moving between media becomes a fluid, easy option. We will incorporate any media that seems central to our ideas: movement, text, images (created through visual art media and video), objects, set elements, sites, and sounds, and learn how to combine them to create a seamless whole. We will use the beautiful industrial wasteland of the Sunshine Biscuit Factory as our giant site-specific laboratory. We will work all week and have an informal showing on Friday night at the space.
This is a workshop for dancers, choreographers, actors, theater makers, and any performance art makers interested in the interplay of media in live performance.
Upcoming: July 20-24, 2009
10:30 to 5:30
At the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in Oakland
Feel free to call: 510 289-5188 or email if you are interested in details.
The Field East Bay
I am committed to facilitating one round of fieldwork in the East Bay each spring. This year it is happening at Danspace. It will be a ten week workshop with a showing at the end. The showing will be May 3rd, at 6:30 - feel free to come on down and see what we are working on! Fieldwork is a wonderful process-based method of giving feedback on new work and is open to all artists working in dance, theater, music, film/video, new genres. I am also considering teaching a shorter session this summer - I'll keep you posted! And, look at
thefieldsf.org for more information.
