Workshops

 

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN!

The Summer UNtensive is a 4-day virtual gathering for body-based artists, students, and teachers offering embodied anti-racist creative practice. With three intertwining streams: Embodied Anti-Racist Practice, Pedagogy For Change, and Creating Worlds, participants can craft their own learning experience including race-based affinity spaces, syllabus workshops, movement practice and more. As anti-racist dance practitioners, our communal call to the field is to get grounded, get fleshy, and get slow together, so that we may deprogram from the violence of the busy.

The UNtensive is programmed by Kai Hazelwood and Sarah Ashkin of Practice Progress, hosted by innovators in dance, technology, and community stewardship, ARCOS Dance, and held by a team of renowned guest artists. Over the 4-day gathering participants will co-learn, co-dream, co-manifest into the embodied future we need and deserve. Let’s all get free. 

The UNtensive 2023 is supported by the Actions that Promote Change (ACT) Grant awarded to the MFA in Dance and Social Justice Program at University of Austin, Texas.

1. Embodied Anti-Racist Practice: Our Relationship to Time Can be Anti-Racist (10a-12p PST)
Registration is required for the full 4-day workshop. This series takes place in two race-based affinity zoom spaces:

BIPOC Communal Rest Circle led by Kai Hazelwood: We will cultivate rest, pleasure, and community. Through guided discussion and movement exercises, participants will have their feelings and experiences witnessed in knowing community. Drawing on the wisdom of authors like Resmaa Menakem (My Grandmother’s Hands) and adrienne marie brown (Pleasure Activism), participants will be guided through rest experiences, play with ways to care for their nervous systems, and set mindful boundaries to assert their value and their needs. 

White Working Group led by Sarah Ashkin: This working group works to enliven our awareness of race and racism as it lives in our bodies, relationships, and communities. Our embodied work together will focus on moving our whiteness.   We will use movement, mindfulness, drawing, writing, reading, and conversation to actively practice anti-racisting. There will be readings, writings, and home practices given after each session, which can deepen our learning.  

2. Pedagogy For Change: Deep Teaching (12:30-2p PST) 
Designed for body-based educators of all levels, these sessions will look at tangible ways to shift the studio or the syllabus away from the busy work and into the deep work.  Single-class drop-ins welcome. This stream is held by Hazelwood and Ashkin and our guest artist teaching team. 

3. Creating Worlds: Entering/ Being / Sharing The Well (2:00p-4:00p PST)
How are we committing to world-building in our creative practices? How can art and artists implicate themselves in the healing we all need now? Using radical care and inquiries against productivity, we will open ourselves to different approaches to UNtensive making. We will dig into our creative processes beginning Thursday and share what we’ve found in “the well” on Sunday. Friday’s workshop will be asynchronous.  Single Class drop-in welcome, but registration for the full 4 day workshop is encouraged.  This steam is held by our team of guest artists.  

SUGGESTED INVESTMENT: $35–$350

VENMO (@ARCOSdance) or PayPal

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Kai Hazelwood (she/her) is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, event producer, and public speaker raising the profile of bi+/queer and BIPOC community issues through art projects, community events, and public speaking. She has appeared in BuzzFeed videos and speaks at community events, high schools and colleges about bi+ and BIPOC community issues. Kai is currently an adjunct professor in dance department at Chapman University teaching Modern technique through an anti-racist framework. Kai is also the founder and artistic director of Good Trouble Makers, a practice driven arts collaborative celebrating plural-sexual/bi+ identities and centering BIPOC. Good Trouble Makers are dedicated to making. Making art, making room, making change, making good trouble. Kai is also co-founder of Practice Progress.
Sarah Ashkin’s (she/her) work tarries at the intersection of critical whiteness studies, site specific performance, and reparations pedagogies.  She is the co-director of GROUND SERIES dance and social justice collective and a co-founder of Practice Progress, a body-based anti-racism facilitation platform.  As a dedicated dance maker, educator, and organizer, Sarah uses dance as a multipurpose tool to dismantle and build our world for the better. Sarah holds a Masters in Dance, Politics and Sociology from the University of Roehampton, London and is a current doctoral student in Performance Studies at University of California, Davis.