Faking It With Gravity
The Work Room
Saturday 26 April & Sunday 27 April | 10.30am to 4.30pm each day
- FULL BOOKED (email hello@theworkroom.org.uk for waiting list)
The Work Room, 25 Albert Drive, G41 2PE
£100 (£80 for members of The Work Room, limited spaces) - if paying in full to secure your place is a barrier please contact hello@theworkroom.org.uk to arrange a instalment option
Presented in partnership with The Glasgow Jam
Faking it With Gravity creates a space of inquiry to study and research Contact Improvisation* (CI), including Tuning Scores* and Material for the Spine* (MFS.)
In CI we dance with gravity. That sensation, our first handshake-touch with the earth, dances us through its field for our whole lifetime. “small dance,” the quiet inner sensation of our reflexes balancing us is something we are always doing in our bodies. When we turn our attention to it, what happens? This is the basis of our practice.
In Faking it we work with looking at our patterns and making choices. We’ll be sensing into the questions: When do I know I am faking? Is faking bringing me into realness? With deconstructing/reconstructing, reflexual reliance, friendly falling, rolling, and flying with easy landing, we will embody to fake, make, explore, restore, unravel, travel and play within a research space of constant learning from the momentum and changes in our dances.
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.
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.
*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 highlight the small dance of our senses, confound our patterns of survival, allow natural delight of ordinary compositional choice to reveal wonders of dancing in a dancing world.
*MFS underlies so much of the movement discovered in CI. Spirals thru the body, and energy extension beyond our finger prints. This body of work was articulated by Steve Paxton and points to deep anatomical inter-relationship emanating from the small dance, and beyond.
ACCESS
The Work Room is situated within Tramway which is a level access building and you can read their access information here.
Our aim is for classes to be accessible for all physicalities. If you’d like more detail about this access information or, if there’s anything else you’d like to talk about that would make attending easier and more enjoyable for you, please email hello@theworkroom.org.uk. We will endeavour to support you to fully participate or provide you with further information to help you decide if this event is suitable for you.
Optional Saturday evening Jam orginased by The Glasgow Jam
Saturday 26 April | 7pm | GTAC
Special Jam with Nica Portavia and Karen Nelson: Remembering Steve Paxton and “smaller” dances. Join our Special Glasgow Jam with Nica Portavia and Karen Nelson including a duet performance, a video tribute with participant replay, a guided Stand, and a jam.
FREE to workshop participants but booking is required. See full details here.
ARTIST BIOGS
Karen Nelson (she/her), plays experimentally within dance improvisation lineages of Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Simone Forti, Nancy Stark Smith, Mary Fulkerson, and many more. And forms including: Tuning Scores, Contact Improvisation, Material for the Spine, and other movement arts. As explorer-collaborator, teacher, maker, touring performer, author/contributor to “Dancing with Dharma” and “Contact Quarterly”, she has been a mutator of the form Contact Improvisation since 1977. She co-founded mixed-ability experiments Dance Ability and Diverse Dance Research Retreat and co-created Tuning Score Observatories with Image Lab i (1990’s) and Tunezoom (2020’s) and within many collaborations that integrate a physical-sensation based approach to dancing. Investigating dominant cultural narratives and re-vers(ion)ing these fictions comes with the territory of playing in her own embodiment and within a wider world community. Explomov Website.
Nica Portavia (she/they) was born in Fano, Italy from an Italian father and my mother from Lebanon. A dancer, teacher, researcher, and performer they discovered Contact Improvisation in 2003 after first training in contemporary dance in Italy and Barcelona. She fell in love with Contact Improvisation since the first moment, then studied abroad with many CI teachers including Steve Paxton, Daniel Lepkoff, Charlie Morrissey, Angelika Doney, Asaf Bacharach, KJ Holmes, Anya Cloud, Karen Nelson. Diving completely into Material for the Spine, she had the big pleasure to study with Steve Paxton. In her teaching she integrates Tatto Interno ( Deep Touch) ephasizing the relation between fascia and the nervous system. She teaches in France, Ukraine, Italy, Spain, Argentina, Russia, Poland, Germany, Lituania, Portugal, USA, Mexico. 'SottoSale' toured in Russia and Italy 2019-21, and they are currently performing with Karen Nelson a research-meditation-ritual called SMALLER in Bologna, USA, and Mexico. She organizes many projects including the 11 year running international Italy Contact Fest (www.italycontactfest.com) and Being Touch Festival “a radical journey into CI” (www.beingtouch.org)