dance dance class class

An east bay dance class series organized by mara poliak.
Rotating teachers, all sorts of practices + experiments.

$0-15
BODY STUFF
EVERYONE WELCOME

The Finnish Hall - 1970 Chestnut street, Berkeley
10 minute walk from north berkeley bart + onsite parking
10 steps to enter the space (they are working towards an accessible entrance, but no ramp yet).

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ARCHIVE:

***MONDAY MAY 6***GABRIEL CHRISTIAN***

adulting
most mornings i feel like larva. so this is a morning class and we are going to be larva. bring blankets. bring your favorite books of poetry. I will too, ad nauseam. we will flex stretch shiver talk too loudly and learn how to talk to ourselves. we will throw ourselves through space with the help of our stream of consciousness. and, mostly, we will adult.

Gabriel Christian is an increasingly amorphous artist bred in New York City and baking in Oakland. Their work metabolizes the vernaculars within BlaQ diaspora –– futurity, afrovivalism, faggotry –– through body-based live performance and poetics; moreover, they feel the bio to be an unfortunate by-product of capitalistic modes like chattel slavery.

photo by Robbie Sweeney from "to become other than dust"

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***MONDAY MAY 13***MARA POLIAK***
fountainfountain :::: a portal is also a hole
not asking our bodies to be anything else and not asking them to stay the same. making space for rest, attention, disorientation, transformation, messiness, illegibility, specificity, pleasure, presence, power. we will practice seeing and being seen, leaving room for the unseen and unknown. we will practice being with the porousness and boundaries of our bodies, being with each other and the place that we are in.

mara poliak is a dancer, artist, writer, and teacher living in Oakland, occupied Ohlone land. Right now, they are mostly practicing dance that is not performance, collaborating with ancestors and others, and co-organizing a yearly residency with a group of interdisciplinary artists at Dos Rios land project in Northern California.

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***MONDAY MAY 20***ALEX CRUSE***
heavily interrupted in order / / moving with and as information

textual scores, draw together, trick the sentient world simulation. please wear comfortable clothing and bring writing/drawing implements (paper & materials will be provided.)

alex cruse has worked as an artist, writer, curator, and educator in the Bay Area since 2006. cruse maintains several, sometimes overlapping practices, and has danced with Margit Galanter's Cave Coast Collective and with Kevin CK Lo as DROUGHT SPA.

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***MONDAY MAY 27***KEVIN CK LO***
autopoetic dance structures

hi all. we're interested in the ways receiving information (sonically, visually, kinesthetically) can modulate our bodies and impulses, we're interested in how we can modulate these modulations and have them be inscribed on us by others, we're interested in engaging with music that contains all manner of abstract gestural processes and transcribing these on our bodies at variable speeds, we're interested in the idea of a modular choreography, of self-generating interplay dynamics.

Kevin CK Lo is a composer, choreographer, writer and artist living in Oakland. In his compositions for live performance and installation, he utilizes instruments, digital sound processing and generative programming environments to examine spatial and auditory sensitivities, topological structure and audience kinesthetic response while seeking to corrupt conventional compositional/performative/installative rationale. He is also one half of the experimental multidisciplinary duo, DROUGHT SPA, with alex cruse.

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