Photos of the Salt Experiment for Monday Night Art Workouts 2011 here.

And a video: http://vimeo.com/32600883

KAREN NELSON: Warm-Ups for Improvisation and Tuning

JANUARY 18 – 20, 2012

Dancing our luscious, present, sensationally aware impulses is like rolling off a log into the moss of naturalness. We will practice developing the habit to “return to our senses” while dancing, and use that knowledge to “tune” dances in space. Tuning Scores, as introduced by Lisa Nelson, illuminate our individual perceptual experience, and use actions and verbal calls to communicate to others and the environment during the improvisation. Sessions will begin with training in sensational awareness and build towards compositional ensemble work.  All expressions being equally valid and positive, tuning work allows a natural collaboration amongst the players.

Karen’s 35-year dance and performance practice has been directly influenced by Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark Smith and Lisa Nelson and their respective work in Contact Improvisation, Material for the Spine and Tuning Scores, and through collaboration with many others in venues around the world. She co-founded the Breitenbush Jam, Dance Ability, Image Lab, Diverse Dance, among other projects.

AT SUBTERRANEAN ARTHOUSE

WED, January 18, 5:30 – 8:30 PM

THURS, January 19, 4:30 – 8:30 PM

FRIDAY, January 20, 3 – 6 PM

$120 – $150 early bird special, register by January 5

$145 – $170 after that!

To Register, contact Margit: margit@physicalintelligence.org * (510) 761-6097

FACEBOOK EVENT PAGE: https://www.facebook.com/events/248739651848285/ 

I thought to myself, how to lead people through something that would offer them a sense of themselves, multi-sensorially? Building off the research questions that Abby and I are in as teachers and as co-conspirators in the experiment for this session, I let many of the ones between us so far enter into my construction of the class, and through our recent performance research in letting-it-go, I simultaneously let the preparation and the questions all go when I taught, and let it come from all the conditions that led up to making our environment be as it was in the room together. It is a mysterious thing to be-in-the-teaching-moment, to really let the people and the work we are doing together open up within myself so that I can somehow be a curator for our collective ideas, like a filter with its own motor, some kind of glow-in-the-dark fish.

continued….  interviews and conversations page

Recent art research with Mara pointed us to the couch-lips by Salvador Dali for Mae West

This is a sign we should all take Monday Night Art Workouts, right?

Come for the final installation of Margit Galanter+ Abby Crains’s Foxing Performance Series. Two nights only. Friday night, September 30 and Saturday October 1, 8pm. Performed by Abby and Margit, with live audio mix and assembly by Adam Sonderberg. Tickets $10-$20 sliding scale (no one turned away) Seating is limited. Advance purchase of tickets is highly recommended.

Like blacksmiths, we reworked our material over and over, over the course of fourteen months, until it mysteriously forged into new forms. The Foxing Series has been a research into the aesthetic worlds of Duchamp’s final installation Given; its imagined converse, the work of Eva Hesse; and all that this conjured up. We created beautiful installations from newspaper, twine, and pink foxes both in San Francisco and Los Angeles. In the pieces we visited eras of feminist thought, from 70’s Berkeley separatism to 90’s grrl power, and in doing so, dealt aesthetically and content-wise with the vast landscaped difference from binarism and dialectics to a kind of foxing, or third-ing, and invited multiplicity and tricksterism as a way to subvert assumptions in worlds-of-thought as they are mirrored on stage. We embodied foxes, lay on rocks like animals in the sun, found pelvic power, danced with layers of music on top of one another, and wrestled insanely slowly.

Then with an understanding of the form this content wanted, we came to know it was time to release it, so from that intention comes the piece and its title. In Letting the Fox Go, the elements of the work at first allow the artists to experience the image space along with the audience, and then enter into what is understood together. With the awareness that releasing is a process and practice, we are committed to unwinding the elements that we have constructed, and then, even that we hope to let go.

We are excited about his final phase of this work together and are looking forward to the opportunity to experience with all of you there.

Our fall intensive starts October 17 – a five-week series. To register, contact Abby at: (512) 705 – 8869 ; or abigaillilly@yahoo.com

We hope you join us….

ART WORKOUTS FALL SESSION
With Margit Galanter and Abby Crain

We invite you to a five-week intensive process of experimentation, research, and conversation. We do this because unexpected and profound things happen when you work the art. In these sessions, movement for our thinking bodies will be the foundation of our practice together. We will look at provocative contemporary art and performance, and talk about ideas that we find compelling. We’ll take performative risks and do things we haven’t done before.  To invite this freedom, we will experiment with the boring and interesting. We will watch one another. We will bring our entire selves, flawed and sublime, into the room and see what we create.

$100 for Art Workouts and Words and Deeds alumni
$100 for early bird by October 7th
$120 after October 7th.

Limited work study is available by application.

6:30-9:15  Monday Nights
October 17th through November 21st ( no class October 31st)
At Kunst-Stoff Arts 1 Grove Street, SF (at the Civic Center Bart)

Performed by Abby and Margit, with live audio mix and assembly by Adam Sonderberg

Friday September 30 + Saturday October 1, 8pm * At Subterranean Arthouse, 2179 Bancroft, Berkeley, CA.

With support from artist residencies at the stupendous Subterranean Arthouse (Berkeley), the kind Kunst-Stoff (SF), & unParalleled Pieter Performance (LA).

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=226398430740836

BIOS:

Abby Crain enjoys art that is awkward, difficult, and transformative. She teaches frequently, and creates solo and collaborative performance experiments when the mood seizes her. Past credits include extensive dancing with Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People (NY), being a member of David Dorfman Dance (NY), and working with Bay Area luminaries Sarah Shelton Mann and Kneejerk Dance Project. She also can be found teaching pilates at  www.missioncreekpilates.net

Margit Galanter is a movement investigator and dance poet living in Oakland. Her fascination with the construction and value of movement has drawn her to the many forms live action can take. Her unique practice, Physical Intelligence, helps people experience the innate clarity and vitality one can uncover through the potency of movement, through her expertise as a Guild Certified Feldenkrais Practitioner, acupressurist, qigong practitioner, and movement artist. – Arts Site: http://www.margitg.wordpress.com/ ; Practice: http://www.physicalintelligence.org

Adam Sonderberg is a composer working predominantly with concrète-based compositions utilizing the computer as a discreet processing and assembly tool. His selected discography includes over two-dozen releases, both solo and ensemble work, published by a number of different labels including: Entr’acte, Absurd, Cathnor, Crouton, and/OAR, Compost and Height, FSS, and Longbox Recordings. He is the author of the recently published American Hours with German Efficiency (Entr’acte) and maintains a blog by the same name.

Sonderberg is one third of Haptic, a texture-centric performing and recording entity formed in the spring of 2005. Their multidisciplinary work has been presented in venues ranging from basements to museums throughout the United States. The group’s latest recording is the forthcoming full-length Scilens (released simultaneously on CD by the UK-based label Entr’acte and on cassette by Chicago label FSS).

He was also co-director (2003-2008), with Salvatore Dellaria, of the Dropp Ensemble (pronounced ‘drope’), which consisted of an international grouping of musicians and technicians that worked together through mail-based data transfer and extensive post-production. Their latest (and final) recording is Safety, published in 2009 by either/OAR.

Past and present cooperations with Jon Mueller, Carol Genetti, Steven Hess, Boris Hauf, Brendan Walls, Asimina Chremos, Mark Solotroff, Eric la Casa, Sandra Gibson/Luis Recoder, Joseph Clayton Mills, Tomas Korber, Civil War, Katherine Young, Michael Graeve, Olivia Block, Michael Pisaro, and Tony Buck, amongst numerous others.

Since 2003 Sonderberg has collaborated with theatrical and movement artists and ensembles throughout Chicago by producing sound work for theatre, performance art, dance, and film.

the NON-MAJOR SHOW is a benefit for Letting the Fox Go ( Art Workouts final performance installation) featuring un-performances by Ted Nesseth of the Heavenly States, Big Fat Circle, Keith Hennessy, paige starling sorvillo, Harold Burns, Monique Jenkinson, Sara Pritchard, Garrett Neudeck, Asia Wong, and more..

Luminaries from the Bay Area performance, writing, and music scenes have been asked to perform/ present something in an unfamiliar medium. Expect brave failures, rash undertakings, and brazen courageousness that may quite possibly amount to nothing.

$8-$15 no one turned away…

MGM (Modern Garage Movement) Takes Their Latest Dance Creation, NUT, On Annual West Coast Tour

Saturday August 27  at Shadetree, 3pm start time, 6pm show time

BYOM BBQ

48 5th Ave, Oakland, CA 94606

 w/  Freddi Price, solo, The Ad Hoc Brass Band 

& Little Middle by Margit Galanter and Abby Crain

https://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=199313936795040

NUT is structured like a nut: a fruit with a skin, meat, and a seed. NUT speaks to our relationship with dance, as practice and as a discipline. NUT is MGM’s first dance created during the winter months. It questions the aesthetics of produced dance, and how it is expected to affect an audience and a venue. NUT takes cues from diverse performance cultures and historical influences such as Motown, elements of the mid-90’s NYC dance improvisation scene and Tommy DeFrantz’s dance class for undergraduates at MIT.

MGM is Biba Bell, Jmy Leary and Piage Martin, with R McNeill.

August 23, 2011 – Sept 1, 2011 :: Los Angeles, Big Sur, Santa Cruz, Berkeley, Oakland, San Francisco, Occidental, Portland

THE STATE OF WHOA
With Margit Galanter and Abby Crain
Sunday, June 19 * 2 – 5pm
Ellen Webb Studio, in the East Bay

Art Workouts is seeking profound movement states. We invite you to an afternoon intensive process, research, discussion, and experimentation in pursuit of the state of embodied abandon.  In Art Workouts style, we will read about it, dream about it, dance in solos, work in the group, use touch, use our voices, write about it, and anything else we can think of to deepen our work together.

It will be better if you are there.

Love, Abby And Margit

Ellen Webb Studio – 2822 Union Street Emeryville, Nearest to the West Oakland BART
$40 – 50 sliding scale ($5 off for Early Bird Registration by June 10)
Contact: Abby 512 705 8869; abigaillilly@yahoo.com

We will do a BART pick-up a half-hour before if you contact us in advance by the night before.

Facebook Event Page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=201610559883691