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About Dance Nights

Dance Nights is an 8-week workshop series bringing a different Vermont dance teacher to the Â鶹´«Ã½ÉçÇø each week. The workshop leader for each week will offer an advanced level class for experienced/professional practitioners and creators each week. 

Each workshop will give a sneak peek into skills and processes, with choreographic tools, devising mechanisms, improvisational games and scores, unique training techniques and avenues for somatic inquiry. 

Workshop leaders' diverse backgrounds of training include specialties in: floor work, interdisciplinary composition, collaborating across mediums, House & Hip Hop, Butoh, and performing improvisation. 

The Dance Nights Series will provide rigorous training experiences to empower and influence our art making; encourage local dancers to meet one another; expand the style and content of offerings to be found in Vermont; highlight experimental training with unique teachers; provide accessible ways for all bodies to move. Dance Nights will be a training ground for discovery, expansion, development and connections through movement.  

The Dance Night Series is curated by production company ANIMAL Dance, and hosted by the Â鶹´«Ã½ÉçÇø.  

Dance Night Series Calendar Schedule

In these Butoh workshops, we enter the terrain of the unknown. We begin not with an idea of what movement should be, but with a return home to breath, sensation, and presence. From this place, we make ourselves available to emergence; feeling, image, and choreographic structure. Something is stillness, something is wild and untamed. The invitation is not to control or define it, but to witness, shape, and be shaped by it. This is a practice of discovering the body, not as a fixed point but as a living threshold. Through improvisation, attention, and structure, we explore the delicate balance between form and freedom. Like a butterfly, what arrives cannot be gripped too tightly. We learn to touch and be touched, to release and begin again. Each session will take the work a step deeper. Experience is not required—only a willingness to arrive, explore, and return again.

The body speaks through gestures, posture, pace and shape. Movement is a form of expression. This workshop is a study on how movement can help us to better get to know ourselves, understand each other and connect to the world around us. Through thoughtful tactics and structured scores, we will play with spontaneous & impermanent dance creations, with the body as our tool and improvisation as our mechanism. We will practice embodying imagined and real-life images, physically telling abstract stories, and “trying on” the personality of each another’s moving form. Please bring a journal and pen, and an extra shirt layer that can be shared with other participants in the group.

This class will merge foundational House dance with voice activation, jumps, leaps, turns, rolling deliciously on the floor, and character play. The class will consist of a warm up that breaks down foundational House: a style derived from the underground Black and gay clubs of Chicago and NYC in the late 70s/early 80s; Latin social dance meets Hip Hop meets Capoeira meets Jazz meets Irish Step meets Ballet meets Breaking and more. The class will move across the floor and gradually build a longer choreographed sequence with room for personal interpretation and choice. Freestyle games will be played, and we will practice the magic of social dancing, in pairs and groups.

This workshop offers a playful and dynamic introduction to dance improvisation as a tool for deepening body awareness, fostering community, and igniting choreographic curiosity. Through movement exploration, we will focus on liberating physical expression, blending structured warm-ups with guided improvisational exercises that enhance attention, quality, and dynamic range. Drawing inspiration from contemporary techniques, contact improvisation, and ensemble-based performance, and a bit of theater, the class invites participants into a space of rigorous play—where freedom, imagination, and rebellion intersect in a collective celebration of dance. Open to all, regardless of experience, this workshop welcomes anyone eager to move, explore, and connect.

Through partner, small group, and ensemble work, we’ll experiment with different ways of relating to ourselves and our collaborators: the space, our ideas, sensations, and other moving bodies, to co-create and allow for the collaborative emergence of dance. Permission, play, agreements, parameters, questions, and curiosities will help to guide us into finding our mutal yes -- the invitation into making worlds and moving into them.

Text can inspire rich and flavorful movement. Words can act as score, introducing unexpected dynamics. And choreography can launch vectors of meaning that align or work in tension with spoken language. In this fast-paced and full-bodied workshop, we lean on text as a choreographic and compositional tool. Through set phrases and devising games, we explore how movement and language can converse, riff on each other, and deepen the layers of our dance.

Working from a (potentially) familiar foundation of contemporary movement vocabulary, we take time to commune with the energy around us, listening deeply to our bodies’ authentic desires for momentum and recovery in an effort to expand our physical grammar and expressive autonomy. Through meditative exercises, investigative prompts, and choreographed containers, we hone access to a flow state that is full of possibilities—both within ourselves and in the world through which we move.

This is a release technique class that centers on the principle of releasing so that we can open space within and around us for clear, full bodied and articulate dancing. The warmup will include improvisation and follow along exercises that will lead us to full bodied dancing.