WEEK ONE
MAY 18 - MAY 24
Sherwood Chen
Rachel Dichter
These Things When We Are Together
How do we see each other? What are ways of looking/allowing the gaze that invite or deflect intimacy? How do we see our audiences and how do we invite others into our performance?
In this two day workshop we'll work in duos and group structures engaging exercises that explore sensing, interest, care, power dynamics and proximity towards a potentially greater intimacy, troubling the idea that closer is more intimate and finding ways of being close without letting others in. We will work with finding ways of inviting the gaze we want. Discovering ways of watching, challenging and negotiating that lead us into a deeper understanding and control over the intimacy we invite with each other as performers and intimacy with we engage, invite and relish with the audience.
We’ll be moving, talking, touching but you don’t need to have a movement or performance background to take part. The workshop is designed to be relevant to both professional dance and performance artists and those with an interest in these issues.
Rachael Dichter is a San Francisco based dancer, performer, choreographer and curator. She makes work about closeness. About the shortest distance and shortening the distance between things - between people. She grew up on the ocean and in the mountains and forests of Northern California, performing as a ballerina and attending Mills College. She studied performance and classical techniques in New York and Bangalore, India and danced with Fougere Dance in Brussels, Belgium. She was a Danceweb Scholar, a resident artist at the Marin Headlands, Caldera OR, the Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and her work has shown locally and internationally. She has been lucky to collaborate with a number of fierce and talented folks, and for four years she co-curated the San Francisco based live arts festival THIS IS WHAT I WANT. Since 2014 she has performed and collaborated with Gravity in San Francisco, and currently serves as Gravity’s co-artistic director.
Maria Scaroni
Influencer Dance
Poetic Intro: Dancing appears to me as the centerpiece to hold the holes together, a place where it is easier to accept another and cultivate curiosity for the possible physical and metaphysical shapes. Dance is awesome, a state of awe, where we can hold the complexity of our identities, yet dissolve or blur into a raw aliveness. Dancing allows for both discomfort and joy, the sweet spot between grievance and celebration. As a personal and collective energetic hygiene project, dancing can be a powerful medicine, giving permission to sift through our impulses, historical and daily absorptions and impacts, to press out what we swallowed, yet, where is it appropriate to make unorthodox shapes perceptual sorceries heretic playgrounds of the monstrous between subconscious suppression desire to un-become and digest the head with the rest of the body spilling imploding to acknowledge the miracle of another living being and accept our own distortion for they are what we are, dancing as politics of loss, a fugitive state, a prayer, just being, not alone not alone not alone, to get around to love tenderness and again and again loosing syntax making meaning?
What’s the practice: Born digital during the pandemic and re-adapted to analogue, Influencer Dance is a hybrid between Authentic Movement practice and dance-play with an attitude, dispelling influencer culture, in favor of IRL mutual with-nessing. The session is made of a warm up centering pulsation as the matrix, in the dimensions of length, width and depth. A longer dance session on a beat will follow, alternating between dancing with eyes closed or open and witnessing with direct or indirect looking. It is done in pairs. This practice widens the habits of witnessing. De-prioritizing the visual, we get to practice to witness kinesthetically, vibing, echoing and ultimately addressing each other directly. The witness is under the influence of a dance. The dancer is unconditionally accepted. Dance is acknowledged as an energy that shapes us, unbecoming authors to become hosts of a dance. We close with a brief verbal or written reflection to integrate. The class is accessible to any moving body, with or without dance training experience.
Steph Maher
A morning practice & Dialogue: Mole Rats & Bone Sex revisited
Staying simple and guided by an improvisational exploration of ease, rolling, folding, and bonding with the ground in all directions.
I will offer a very open frame for people to join together and settle into their morning bodies.
Giving attention to settle into pleasure, passive rest, sounding, and an energetic tuning.
Some meditations and an invocation to praying may occur.
Stories may wind into the room like becoming a mole rat seeking warmth or “bone sex”…a class that was devised by Stephanie & Jess after the making of Sex and Gravity(1995).
Visiting “bone sex”, memories integrate a period of time of spiritual and sexual healing exercises that came about in the 90’s. Jess Curtis had a love for acknowledging his teachers and researching his most recent obsessions of stolen/shared material. These dialogues became woven into his artistic work and his classes and our collaborations together.
Body Electric School & Annie Sprinkle’s performance work at the time, blended with David Zambrano’s “Flying low” & Steve Paxtons work on gravity like “The stand”, and even Release based teachers like Susan Klein’s work had an impact on the making of Sex & Gravity, and above all the seeking within the contents of touch based Contact improvisation, jamming and an opening to a committed yes.
1993-96 was a different time- There is full permission to stay in one owns solo experience throughout the class.
Stephanie Maher BA Dance/ SUNY Purchase, MA Dance/ Smith College
Maher has been inhabiting all aspects of dance and improvisation in an International setting since 1990. Her deep involvement in cooperatives, and communally owned projects and founding concepts has helped share how one can create a lifelong and versatile platform for being an artist. Originally based in New York, she relocated to San Francisco in the 1990's and was an active player creating for 848Community space. Performing with the Margaret Jenkins Dance Co. and co-founded the collectives: CORE(K.Hennessy,J.Beckmann, S.Kahn & J.Curtis) and COLLUSION (K. Hermesdorf) who became her life long dance collaborator. Between 1996- 98 Maher relocated to Berlin, Germany, where she continued to organize and teach in community-based settings, founding K77 Studios in Berlin, Ponderosa Nonprofit, P.O.R.C.H. Professional program and SeminarHaus GmBH (business), and Gut Stolzenhagen e.G.-a living cooperative in Stolzenhagen, Germany. 
Abby Crain
THIS SH** is GOOD
Abby Crain (b. 1971): I teach because I love dancing and I want to make space for rigorous movement practice that moves towards possibility, connection, and life.
My teaching sources from long term study of experiential anatomy combined with a commitment to movement practices that are in no way limited by this study and encourage an expansive and fantastical body. My teaching works from the understanding that embodiment is shaped in, with, and alongside cultural forces, histories, and futures. I draw from my training as a teacher of Open Source Forms (a maverick version of Skinner Releasing as transmitted by Stephanie Skura), my study of Body Mind Centering, a twenty year practice of teaching pilates, my study of craniosacral therapy, extensive practice and study alongside Miguel Gutierrez, and my practice and study with Sara Shelton Mann since 2001. This week’s work also sources from the thread of 20 years of friendship, mentorship from, thinking with, and bouts of dancing and teaching with Jess Curtis.State based DANCING from the heart, imagination and sensate self WITH ABBY CRAIN.
Inspired by Jess Curtis’ contagious pleasure in movement, sensation, being, and dancing, we spend two days devoted to moving together and on our own – working with the ecstatic, the dreamy, and the pleasurable. We will use attention, body-based, and imaginative prompts for moving; all work will be improvisational. We will be giant like Jess and always have time to hang out.
We will dance a lot, watch, and also likely write, chat, draw.
WEEK TWO
MAY 25 - MAY 31
Mudd the Two Spirit
Drag As Storytelling
A drag make up & performance workshop
~Are you a diva? A super star? Do you ✨have the rizz✨but craving a more expansive technique to gag them furthermore, boots?
Look no further than here; Mudd the Two Spirit teams up with GRAVITY x ROT to give you a two day workshop in the art of storytelling through drag.
Day one will be Drag make up application, color stories, and line werq.
Day two will be Movement, Lyric choice, breath, and the art of subtlety!
You will learn the ability to create further impact through this two day series with Mudd the Two Spirit.
✨TLDR: let’s play with make up and performance and outline drag as the vehicle to tell a story.
Mudd the Two Spirit (they/he/she) is a BiPoc Deaf/HoH two-spirit multidisciplinary drag and performance artist residing on occupied Ohlone Lands. Mudd operates on and off the stage as a full time performer, crew member and Haus member for the iconic drag shows “Tito Soto’s: Princess”, “Clutch the Pearls” and “Reparations: and All Black Drag Show.” Mudd’s approach to performance is focused through the lens of multiply marginalized identities which provide a richness of depth and perspective that’s been acquired through self-exploration within the support of these diverse communities.
You can find Mudd on Instagram only @muddthetwospirit
gizeh muñiz
florwerk
This is a dynamic floorwork technique class that invites dancers to move from their fluid body. It focuses on the somatic process of learning (or remembering) and embodying movement, which allows us to not only train the body for aesthetic and performative purposes, but for building neural pathways that can help us expand our awareness of space, time, and connection to the land. Through breath, warmth, stillness and movement, this workshop explores a rigorous and buoyant physicality that embraces pleasure and tenderness, through phrases, somatic practices and improvisation. This class is intermediate level.
gizeh is a movement, teaching and performing artist currently co-existing in Ohlone territory. They are dedicated to the study of being a breathing body through movement and stillness. Through their work, they create spaces that allow them to play and divest from concepts of linearity in a creative process, with the intention of practicing freedom. gizeh’s choreographic and teaching work has been shared in the United States, Mexico and Europe in festivals such as P.O.R.C.H in Germany, Improspeckje in Croatia, GUSH in San Francisco and 4x4 in Tijuana, to mention some. gizeh has been an artist in residence at Atland Residency, CounterPulse, PUSH, BANDALOOP, and Bridge Live Arts, and was the 2023-25 Radiate fellow of RAWdance. gizeh is the curator and producer of Gatherings - a free movement workshop series in the Bay Area. gizeh carries within their body their work with Kathleen Hermesdorf, Sara Shelton Mann, and a decade of study with Dance, Music and Theater teachers throughout Mexico.