JUNE 12-15  – After Italycontactfest  @ Spazio Seme, Arezzo Tuscany (IT)

Aaron Brandes (USA) and Shaina Cantino 

WORKSHOP / JAM / PERFORMANCE

Contact Improvisation

The Sweet Ride of Momentum

Gravity is an exciting and useful tool to use with momentum. We can open to the “slide and the ride” and find the deep pleasure in perpetual motion. So let’s take this ride together, and find how momentum opens us to surprise and grace in our dancing! Through informed touch and inquisitive movement we will explore the strength, mobility and lightness of our legs, pelvis, and ribs. We will apply these tools for giving and receiving information as well as navigating easeful pathways to and from the floor.  We will expand our capacity for low level and high level falling as a doorway into improvisation. We will be sure to continue nourishing our bodies after the festival with long warm-ups, bodywork, and deep listening that naturally leads to easy connected pathways into dancing!

Brando (Aaron Brandes) teaches CI internationally.  He serves on the Board of Directors for Earthdance and has worked with CI programing there since 2005.  Brando has been instrumental in creating CI Ground Research, which encourages the ongoing research of contact improvisation by dancers from around the world.  He trained with Tom Myers at the KMI Institute and is a certified Fascial Bodywork/Structural Integration practitioner.  Brando’s pedagogical approach is combination of humor (inherent in this divinely awkward dance form), anatomical mapping, and his extensive background in meditation.  The combination of technical specificity in CI with the deep and nuanced listening creates the foundation for exploration in accelerated states of movement.  More information, including links to Brando’s youTube videos can be found @ www.heybrando.com

Shaina Cantino holds an MFA in Dance Performance and Choreography. Cantino teaches, directs and performs contemporary, dance theatre, improvisation and contact improvisation.  Cantino’s choreography has received numerous accolades including being chosen for national performance at the Kennedy Center for the American College Dance Festival in 2010. Cantino has collaborated and performed in choreography by Angie Hauser, Chris Aiken, Kathleen Hermesdorf, Paul Matteson, and Colleen Thomas. Cantino explores humor in quirky grace, the edge between ‘pedestrian’ delivery of text and more poetic, highly physical movement.  She is also interested in how our bodies are vehicles for re-conceiving, through sensory perception, the dynamic relationship between our environments, communities, and art.