PANDA LABS 2024
This summer PANDA LABS return for 2 immersions into performance and dance development!
PANDA [Performance And New Dance Arrivals] are some of the longest programs offered at the Field Center and they are deep dives into living with one another as artists while training daily with established teachers in the field. Daily classes are punctuated by swims in the river, saunas, fresh food from our gardens, long naps in the library, field trips and performances at night.
PANDA LAB I: CHRISTINA ROBSON + SHANE LARSON
With Special Guest HEIDI HENDERSON | JULY 11 - 21
SHANE LARSON:
Together we will generate a modular warm up that deepens with task-based repetition, while building new pathways through basic shapes and great music. We learn through doing, rather than ‘performing’, relying on muscle memories to become strong. Architectural forms of the body are created, deconstructed, and recycled within momentum and temperature, allowing us to swing through energetic, unpredictable movements.
CHRISTINA ROBSON:
This movement class offers a variety of improvisational and set structures aimed to mobilize and ground the body, rewire habits and expand qualitative range. Practices will fluctuate between solo, duet and group investigations. We will layer episodes of improvisation, weight sharing and choreographed phrasing to build dynamic support around foundational principles of weight shift, opposition, and momentum. We will seek opportunities off the vertical axis and build stability and three-dimensionality through spiral and weighted release. Phrase work is dynamic and expansive, prioritizing efficiency in and out of the floor.
PANDA LAB II: KEITH HENNESSY + ISHMAEL HOUSTON-JONES | SEPT 26 - OCT 6
Closer
A workshop, laboratory, test test for dancers, performance makers, and you
The laboratory will attempt to generate a precarious and curious space between engagement and refuge, being present with queerness, the ongoing impact of political-health-ecological crises, and the importance of shared dance and inquiry. We will hang out in playful and non-productive spaces, being in a contagious relationship to past and future, ghosts and desire. We will approach queer and decolonial futurities through practices of opening to the unknown. We seek a soft experience where political crises and dancing bodies can be woven into a single conversation. Where bodies are energies, always entangled within the ecologies from which they emerge. There will be time for performance making, showing, and discussing.
Ishmael and Keith’s work does not always focus on their subjectivities as racialized, queered, aged, or gendered bodies but these issues, identities, privileges and harms are always present, always available materials for improvising and other practices of less conscious or mysterious action. Play is risky and revealing.
REGISTRATION OPENS JULY 1ST!
SCHOLARSHIP + WORK TRADE
We offer 3 full scholarships for Black, Indigenous and People of Color [BIPOC] folks in each session. As well as 3 Work Trade spots in each session. If interested please select 'BIPOC Scholarship' OR 'Work Trade' when registering via the link below. For more information about the work trade exchange, go to the Work Exchange page.
*Payment Plans: We do offer payment plans for most of our workshops. We can accept payments divided into 2-3 installments paid over a 3 month period. For more details and to set up a payment plan please EMAIL US with the name of the Workshop you wish to attend and 'Payment Plan' in the subject line.
REFUND POLICY: Full refunds or workshop credit available up to 10 days prior to the event. Please inform us if you cannot attend an event up to 10 days prior [including Scholars and Work Traders]! Refunds/credit within the 10 days prior to the event may be available on a case-by case basis, please reach out to communications@thefieldcenter.com
ABOUT THE FACULTY
Christina Robson is a performer and educator who flirts with choreography. She has performed with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, David Dorfman Dance, Sean Curran Company, Monica Bill Barnes & Co, Alexandra Beller, Lisa Race and Third Rail Company and has decade long collaborative tenures with Heidi Henderson, and Kendra Portier. Christina has an MFA from University of Maryland and started teaching full time at George Mason University in 2022.
Shane Larson is a New York City based artist—both performing and creating movement and video. He was raised in Minnesota, where he received his early training at the St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists. He graduated from New York University and also studied at SEAD in Austria. Since living in New York City, he’s branched out to collaborate with punk musicians, film makers, improvisational music ensembles, and site-specific visual artists. Shane joined the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company in 2015. He is also a multimedia video artist making collage-based work about memory and movement.
Photo by Maria Baranova
Ishmael Houston-Jones is an award winning choreographer, author, performer, teacher, and curator. His improvised dance and text work has been performed in New York, across the US, and in Europe, Canada, Australia, and Latin America. Drawn to collaborations as a way to move beyond boundaries and the known, Houston-Jones celebrates the political aspect of cooperation.
Houston-Jones and Fred Holland shared a 1984 New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” Award for Cowboys, Dreams and Ladders, which reintroduced the erased narrative of the Black cowboy back into the mythology of the American west. He was awarded his second “Bessie” Award for the 2010 revival of THEM, his 1985/86 collaboration with writer Dennis Cooper and composer Chris Cochrane. In 2017 he received a third “Bessie” for Variations on Themes from Lost and Found: Scenes from a Life and other Works by John Bernd. In 2020 he recieved a fourth "Bessie" for Service to the Field of Dance. Houston-Jones is the DraftWork curator for works-in-progress at Danspace Project in New York. He has curated Platform 2012: Parallels which focused on choreographers from the African diaspora and postmodernism and co-curated with Will Rawls Platform 2016: Lost & Found, Dance, New York, HIV/AIDS, Then and Now both at Danspace Project.
Keith Hennessy dances in and around performance. Born in northern Ontario, he lives in San Francisco since 1982 and tours internationally. His performances engage improvisation, ritual, collaboration, and protest as tools for investigating political realities. Practices inspired by anarchism, critical whiteness, post/Modern dance, activist art, the Bay Area, wicca, punk, contact improvisation, indigeneity, and queer-feminist performance motivate and mobilize Hennessy’s work. Keith’s 2016-17 collaborators include Peaches, Meg Stuart, Scott Wells, Jassem Hindi, J Jha, Annie Danger, Gerald Casel, and the collaboratives Blank Map and Turbulence. Keith's recent teaching in universities, independent studios, and festivals includes Ponderosa (Germany), FRESH (SF), HZT (Berlin), Movement Research (NYC), Impulstanz (Vienna), Portland State University, Sandberg Institute (Amsterdam), St. Mary's, VAC Foundation (Moscow), and Warsaw Flow International CI Festival. Awards include the Guggenheim Fellowship, United States Artist Fellowship, a NY Bessie, multiple Isadora Duncan Awards, and a Bay Area Goldie. Keith's writings have been published in Contact Quarterly, Movement Research Journal, Performance Research (UK), Society of Dance History Scholars Journal, Dance Theatre Journal (UK), Itch, Front, and In Dance. Hennessy directs Circo Zero and was a member of Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann. Hennessy is a co-founder of CounterPULSE (formerly 848 Community Space) a thriving performance space in San Francisco. He earned an MFA and PhD from UC Davis.