Faking It With Gravity

A workshop with Nica Portavia and Karen Nelson

January 11 and 12
10 am - 4:30pm
Open Saturday JAM with live music by Evan Strauss ~ 7-10pm

Workshop and evening Jam
Sliding scale: $170 -$270
Sliding scale: QTBIPOC $110 to $190

Jam only:
$10-20 (paid at door)

Registration

The workshop is open to all bodies, all identities. We are making efforts to create a more diverse space for practicing, we encourage queer and racially diverse identities to join this workshop.

At the Peace, Education and Somatic School (previously called the Aikido Peace Education Center) in the Masonic Hall, downtown Bellingham, WA. 

Faking it With Gravity creates a space of inquiry to explore presence in our improvisation dancing. We ask ourselves, what is presence? How do I experience the falling part of falling? Or, the sensation of letting go into the unknown even for a brief timeless moment? Am I still improvising in this present moment? In Contact Improvisation we dance with gravity. That sensation, our first handshake-touch with the earth, dances us through its field for our whole lifetime. When we turn our attention to it, what happens? This is the basis of our practice.

As co-facilitators Nica and Karen teach together, each supporting the other’s voice, as the material shifts through numerous somatic and compositional approaches to essential aspects of the touch-based partner communication style of dancing known as Contact Improvisation. Prompts for training will include the “small dance” of standing which shines awareness on aspects such as simple embodiment, the natural dance of the reflexes, and the ability of the body to balance in a constantly shifting relationship to gravity. The intention of the workshop is embodying presence. It is to distinguish between our concept of ourselves including our goals, and our actual felt experience in dancing. Scores that apply choice making and redirection, or surrender and instinctual reflex response will challenge or excite our habitual expectations of dueting and ensemble play. Material for the Spine* practice will illuminate the double helix spirals thru the body, and energy extension beyond our finger prints as we travel through space.  Exploring both stillness and movement as in the work of Tuning Scores* will highlight the ever-changing active dance of our senses, confound and illuminate our patterns of survival, and allow natural delight of ordinary compositional choice to reveal wonders of dancing in a dancing world.

In Faking It With Gravity we work with looking at our patterns and making choices. Previous workshop participants noted such inquiry and commentary: 

• When do I know I am faking? 
• Is faking bringing me into realness? 
• When I fake caring for someone elses safety, it quickly becomes actual caring. 
• I have been faking myself (identity) all my life.

Karen Nelson and Nica Portavia met exchanging dancing and love for gravity. This meeting between different human beings and generations creates a space to dance, to hope, to remember, to fall and to be together. Contact Improvisation is our common strategy, our vocabulary, our home.

*We thank Steve Paxton (1939-2024) for his ground breaking practice of the “small dance” (1960’s), and his instigation to collectively discover with many others the ongoing and evolving partner dance practice called Contact Improvisation (1972).

*We acknowledge Lisa Nelson for her proposal of Tuning Scores which reveal much including communication through the senses, compositional choosing, communication through action and call, and deep respect for individual experience as the part of the whole.

*MFS underlies so much of the movement discovered in CI. This body of work was articulated by Steve Paxton and points to deep anatomical inter-relationship emanating from the small dance, and beyond.