Ananya Dance Theatre and The Shawngrām Institute for Performance and Social Justice have yet another exciting pop-up class to announce!
Join us at The Shawngrām Institute on Thursday, August 25 from 11:00am-12:30pm with prolific teacher @mariabauman.mariabauman.
Pre-registration required. Register Here.
Maria Bauman is a prolific teacher, community organizer, and founder of MBDance (www.mbdance.net). Her dance class will focus on broadening dancers’ physical resources while remaining true to their current range and strengths – contemporary dance emphasizing powerful, spatial fluidity, floorwork, and connection. We will “sweat our truths,” flying into the floor safely and using our hands like feet!
For this class, Maria is drawing upon her twenty plus year practice of Capoeira, an African Brazilian martial art practiced in duos and emphasizing floor work; upon her years dancing Urban Bush Women’s repertory and teaching it; upon her graduate and undergraduate degrees in dance and upon her own particular aesthetic of rigorous physical empathy.
Maria’s classes are based on Western modern, Western post-modern, and American Black social dance techniques. They prepare dancers to share themselves with clarity and with control as well as with vulnerability and artistry. Maria uses a variety of strategies to help dancers hone their responsiveness to other dancers and to both traditional and unexpected performance environments.
The popular notion of a “neutral body,” often described in U.S. contemporary dance classes, does not exist in Maria’s class sessions. Rather, we honor and add to storied bodies, mythological bodies, bodies-in-creation, and bodies-as-manifestos. We recognize and tune in to our bodies as dancing testaments to survival, expressivity, inter-dependence, pleasure, and to defiance.