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 this classical technique, 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 occasional on-going 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
Call 510 654 5921 or www.shawl-anderson.org for more info

Feldenkrais + Dance = ?

Nina Haft and Mary Armentrout team up to co-teach a summer intensive workshop exploring how the Feldenkrais Method can deconstruct and support contemporary dance technique. Nina Haft teaches contemporary technique drawing upon aspects of Limon and Release-based techniques, Bartenieff Fundamentals, and martial arts. Mary Armentrout is a Feldenkrais practitioner. 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. Together Nina and Mary will interweave elements of Feldenkrais and dance technique in this workshop. Working with this fusion, we will discover how very subtle changes can fundamentally alter and refine all the movements we do -- and can increase awareness, release inefficient patterning, tension and pain, and increase flow. This is a wonderful opportunity for advanced 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.

Details :
2 Wednesdays - 9am to 12:30pm, 8/18 and 8/25
2 Saturdays - 12pm to 3pm, 8/21 and 8/28
$100 for the workshop
at Shawl Anderson Dance Center
Call 510 654 5921 or www.shawl-anderson.org for more info
Nina and I are teaching this now, and plan to continue teaching in this format in the future

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.

This workshop happens roughly about once every year. Five days, 10:30 to 5:30
At the Sunshine Biscuit Factory in Oakland
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. Locations change from year to year. It is a ten week workshop with an informal showing at the end. 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. Look at thefieldsf.org for more information.