This movement workshop will explore jazz dance as an American art form. Emphasis is placed on cultural context, embodied discourse, rhythm and musicality, sequential training, improvisation, and performance. Styles of jazz dance to be investigated in this workshop include, but not limited to, commercial, lyrical, contemporary, Latin, funk, and musical theater.

🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥 (dance is my career— professional level)

This workshop begins with an improvisation-based warm-up designed to awaken physical awareness, creativity, and presence through guided movement explorations and theatrical tasks. Drawing from contemporary dance, dance theater, and improvisational practices, participants will engage in exercises that cultivate spontaneity, imagination, sensation, and physical storytelling. The second half of the class will focus on learning and workshopping original choreographic material from Stephanie's repertoire. Participants will learn a movement phrase that fuses contemporary dance and dance theater. The material will then be further explored through creative tasks, improvisation, and collaborative investigation, encouraging personal interpretation while offering insight into the choreographic process. The workshop will conclude with an open jam and movement exploration, offering participants space to integrate the material, experiment, and create within a supportive and collaborative environment. Open to intermediate and advanced movers with an interest in contemporary dance, improvisation, and dance theater.

🔥🔥🔥 (some experience — I can learn and follow)

This class is open to any body that wants to move, sound, remember, and listen.

Together we will warm up our bodies, voices, senses, imagination, and memory with a guided sequence of prompts and exercises sourced from embodied traditions and technologies of Jazz, improvisation, slow cooking, and garment design.

After a short moment to record (write, draw, water), we will take time to locate and experience improvisational recipes and phrase material, as we practice, craft, and rest. Participants will be invited to move, rest, change, still, remember, and dream.

The workshop is guided by the following curiosities:

…how can we source familiar rhythms to locate and acknowledge memories in our bodies with care and attention?

…how can my / your body use memory, sensation, and imagination as ways to enter embodied practices to articulate story, ancestry, and personal truth?

…how can each of us reference our own spectrum of learning?

...how can we reference all the ways we have learned to dance and move? (referencing Jawole Willa Jo Zollar) 

You will be asked:

- to take care of yourself.

- to source the languages, spoken and embodied, that bring you most joy.

- to move, still, and rest with the body, voice, experience, and space that you have in the present moment.

🔥 (trying something new — all levels welcome)