2018 Spring Teaching Artist Kristin Horrigan: (Un)Doing Gender in CI
June 2 & 3, 2018
12 - 5 PM
Location: S.F. Conservatory of Dance, 301 8th Street, San Francisco
Cost: Sliding scale $125-$200
WORKSHOP DESCRIPTION
The Bridge Project and CIIS co-present
A Contact Improvisation Workshop with Kristin Horrigan: (Un)Doing Gender in CI
Contact Improvisation is about responding in the moment, playing with the possibilities, creating with what we find, and using our full physical capacity to navigate the situations that present themselves. Within this form, we have tremendous freedom to move our bodies and to discover different dynamics of dances. But, what if we are holding ourselves back from the full range of possibilities in our dancing, in ways we do not even realize? Gendered patterns of movement and interaction play a larger role in CI dancing than one might think, given that CI is a form without any proscribed gender roles. In our days together, we will seek to deepen our CI dancing, strengthen our technique, and expand the range of dances we have by discovering how gender lives in our movement and building strategies to undo the ways it limits us.
Kristin Horrigan is a contact improviser, Professor of Dance and Gender Studies at Marlboro College in Vermont, and the former Artistic Director of the intergenerational company Dance Generators. She has been dancing contact improvisation for 20 years, teaching regularly in the US and abroad. Begun as an exploration of the queer potential of CI as a gender-fluid dance, her current research is a practice of unearthing the habits and histories that limit us to gendered stories. In addition, Kristin’s CI teaching explores pedagogy that preserves the accessibility of CI for people of all body types and abilities, the skill of being interested in the moment, and relationships between play and composition. At Marlboro College, Kristin directs a curriculum that is oriented towards social justice, creative process, critical thinking, and interdisciplinarity. Kristin holds an MFA in Choreography from Ohio State University and works as a community-based artist, drawing together untrained and trained dancers to collaborate around issues of mutual concern.