The Field

Join us for an eight-week session of Fieldwork!
Eight Sundays | October 7 through December 9 from 3-5 PM
with an informal showing on Sunday, December 9 open to all participants to show their work-in-progress

Fieldwork is a process that supports the development of new artistic works. At each session, a group of artists show works-in-progress and exchange feedback with their peers in a format designed for and by artists. Incisive and stimulating critiques are facilitated in an objective, non-directorial way with a regular group of peers that support one another over the course of this eight-week session.

Fieldwork creates a safe space for artists to take risks while also leaving room to fail. Artists are drawn to Fieldwork because the weekly meetings provide a structure for the creative process. Since the workshop brings together artists of all disciplines, participants learn how their work reads to a variety of perspectives and develop the language to discuss work across multiple genres. It is a profound experience for everyone.

It is open to artists working in multiple disciplines: writers, composers, spoken word artists, performance artists, solo theater artists, choreographers, improvisers, directors and others working in time-based and other modes.

Facilitated by Jane Jerardi
$60 for participation in all eight sessions
Participants are asked to try and attend all eight sessions.
Scholarships also available for those with financial need – please inquire and don’t let finances stop you from joining.

Made possible through the support of The Watering Can, ButohBody Chicago, and OuterSpace.
Sign up by cash or check through thewateringcandance@gmail.com
or to sign up with credit card use this ticket link to sign up for all the sessions: https://www.artful.ly/store/events/14245

Questions? Contact Jane at jane ‘at’ janejerardi ‘dot’ com

Find out more about The Field and Fieldwork:
https://www.thefield.org/

PAST WORKSHOPS

Body Tales – Jakob Maché

Based on the assumptions of various cultural traditions and neuroscience, this workshop aims at awakening old trans-generational memories buried in our bodies and let our bodies narrate it with its own gestures. Our focus lies hereby on our center, the enteric nervous system controlling our bowels, which acts like our brains autonomously. In order to deeply connect with ourselves and our dancing partners through our collective unconscious, we employ Katsugen Undo exercises, fundamental floor work from contact improvisation, atomic shakes and other techniques.

Friday, March 2 3-6pm
Saturday, March 3 12-3pm
@OuterSpace Studios, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave.

Early Bird Registration Rates until February 24. $32/day, or $60 for both days.
After Feb 24, tickets will be $38/day, $70 for both.

The workshop is open to anybody who is ready to explore the whole depth of our existence. Jakob will also be performing at a ONE NIGHT ONLY event March 3 at Elastic Arts, Chicago.

Jakob Maché was born in Vienna, visiting Chicago for the very first time. Since 2012, he has been teaching workshops in contact improvisation in Austria, France, Germany, Nigeria and Benin. He received his training from teachers like Adalisa Menghini, Jörg Hassmann, Nancy Stark Smith, Anzhelika Doni, Nita Little, Andrew Harwood, Frey Faust and in Butoh from Minako Seki, Yuko Kaseki, Imre Thormann, Yumiko Yoshioka, Natsu Nakajima, Masaki Iwana, Ken Mai et Yoshito Ohno. Recent collaborations involve Michael Schmacke (Fake Masters, Berlin), Lynda Ait Amer (Berlin) et Mex Schlüpfer at the Volksbühne Berlin and Illuminate Theatre (Lagos).

Theater Unspeakable Company Class

Theater Unspeakable (TU) is offering a six-week course where participants will explore modern clown. The course will build towards the creation of original modern clown pieces and numbers. Along the way, participants will learn about masks, physical characters, physical authenticity, vulnerability and ensemble devised theater. The weekly classes will culminate in a final presentation open to the public.

TU’s Artistic Director Marc Frost and frequent collaborator Thomas Wynne will lead the course. Both instructors studied with disciples of Jacques Lecoq at various programs in Europe and have been teaching physical theater at different levels in the Chicago area over the past several years.

Class size is limited to 14 participants.
Details:

March 7th – April 11th

Wednesdays

7:30 – 10:00 PM

Outer Space Studios, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave., Chicago, IL 60622

Cost: $150

More Info: https://www.facebook.com/events/203749210171685/

Registration:

Fill out this form: https://goo.gl/forms/IjRR0SNRA5xpZK1f2
Pay through PayPal: https://goo.gl/XzRG2m

Art and Core

Tuesdays, 10:00 am – 11:30 pm
December 5, 12, 19
By Donation ($5 Suggested)

This class will be offered as a three-session workshop leading up to the New Year.

This series is intended to be a workshop for artists + creatives of all types (writers, dancers, musicians, filmmakers, performers, etc.) with the purpose of finding core strength and connecting to a creative trajectory.

Each session will include Pilates exercises, guided meditation, cardio movement, writing prompts, personal goal setting, and community-building with a variety of other artists. We will examine where our blocks are in the mind and in the body, and how to break through to a healthy artistic practice.

In this three-part workshop leading up to the New Year, we will use a lens of new beginnings to shed old habits and stories that no longer serve us. Let’s charge into the New Year with the goods that feel good to us.

It is recommended, but not required, that participants attend all three sessions. RSVP to elana@cabinfeverliveart.com

*Please come to class with comfortable clothing, a notebook, and a pen

** If you cannot make it to this series of workshops, do not fret! We will be offering this class again in January and February – on a weekly basis – on Fridays from noon to 1:30PM (for a normal class price).

Mindful Vinyasa

Wednesdays, 10 – 12 pm
Oct 4, Oct 11, Oct 18, Oct 25
$20 Drop -In / $10 Frequent Flyer

Mindful Vinyasa is an eclectic teaching style focused on the “seeming basics”, that opens one to a deeper practice by sitting in some poses for extended periods of time and moving through other postures smoothly with deliberate attention on ‘placing ourselves’ in the pose, as opposed to habitual patterns and gravity running the show. A mindful practice is focused on bringing us to the edge of ‘experience’ to ‘witness’ the moment unfold and realize it is us who is the unfolding.

Athletics of Intimacy

Mondays, 7:45 – 9:30
Oct 9, Oct 16, Oct 23
$20 Drop-In / $10 Frequent Flyer

These classes are a laboratory in dance improvisation as practice and performance. They combine applications of Body-Mind Centering ®, skills and practices of Contact Improvisation, and tunings of improvisational approaches in solo, duet and ensemble dancing. These classes will bring forth skills, tools and practical experience of improvising to become more tuned to center and subtleties of touch, direction and intention. The classes will explore musicality and phrasing, the learning of specific rolls and lifts as well as how we craft time and space in spontaneous choreographies of solo, duet and ensembles.

HUMAN/ITY DANCE : CHICAGO

a workshop in embodiment and the imagination with K.J. Holmes

Thursday, Oct 12 6pm-10pm

Friday, Oct 13 6pm-10pm

Saturday, Oct 14 10am-5pm (informal showing at the END of the Saturday class)

COST: $175

We are the mediums between all the expressions we enter. This workshop will address the dancing human through exploring the collaboration between studies and research that connect us to a greater sense of self–and to the world– both as a personal sensation and from being alive in these contemporary times. In classes we will: look at systems and states of the body; challenge ourselves with direct contact as physical, psyche, emotion and dream; sound, sing, and use our voices as music, with found text and what we write. We will find a poetics through creating dance and theater to utilize what we know and reveal new strengths and tools for creating embodied performance.

Human/ity Dance comes from 30 years of personal research into somatics, theater, voice and eastern practices extended into performance. These forms include the Tuning Scores of Lisa Nelson, evolutionary and developmental studies of Body Mind Centering (r), Contact and Material for the Spine from Steve Paxton, the Sanford Meisner acting processes as learned from Terry Knickerbocker, Roy Hart voice work as learned from Richard Armstrong, Simone Forti’s animal studies and Moving the Telling, and Yoga and Ayurvedic practices. How do we resonate? How do we work with resistance? How do we know when we are more? How do we encounter the human dancing?

Contact: preciousfj@gmail.com to register

Body Ritual Movement with Diego Pinon

*EARLY BIRD PRICING UNTIL OCT 10*
Friday, Oct 27 6-10pm $50
Saturday, Oct 28 12pm-6:30pm $80
Sunday, October 29 12pm-6:30pm $80
*Early bird $200 for 17 hours of training (prices will go up after Oct 10, so wait not!!)

“Butoh, since it’s beginnings in 1959, has always confronted notions of tradition, legacy, culture, innovation and contemporary manifestation. From the beginning, the key to this path has been the relentless search for the essence of art, as a refuge to our humanity.”

BRM Trainings are both emotionally intense and physically challenging. Techniques that stimulate, expand and recapture energy from the body through the senses are used. The body is trained to awaken these sensitivities and vital energies in order to transform the limitations perceived in ourselves. A key foundation to the training is how it consciously uses a collective group experience to engage and expand this energy beyond the individual. It is from this enhanced opening that the creative and artistic work can begin to emerge. BRM proposes methods that stimulate sensory sensitivity, the imagination, and creativity to support the deep expression of each individual through movement.

BRM Training involves high-impact aerobic movement, active meditation, and guided improvisation; all embraced within a sense of communal ritual. The collective physical training consists of stretching, shaking, jumping, low-level groundwork, balancing, partnering, weight sharing, impulse exchange, bodywork, bioenergetics, breath expansion, and transpersonal communication.

Training for the spine, joints, and internal body spaces—our energetic centers—through focused breathing are used to regenerate and expand the currents of energetic exchange between our internal and external realities. Active meditation exercises are introduced to quiet the mind and awaken original, non-reactive impulses for organic movement. Guided improvisations then give participants the opportunity to integrate this newfound sensory awareness within their physical body, external environments, and the collective presence to reach new realms of creative potential.

Visit https://butohchicago.wordpress.com/ to Register

Embodying the Spirit: Butoh Training with Joan Laage
September 26 and 27, 2017
Experience training methods towards a supple body and mind, and investigate aesthetics common to Butoh through creative explorations. This workshop is a process of erasing and re-creating the body through guided improvisation largely inspired by nature imagery. ETS explores endless questions: What is life? What is the human condition? What is the body? How can we experience infinity within the body/mind? The workshop structure includes exercises and explorations of physical body, nature body, and transforming body. Group and partner work will facilitate participants’ individual and collective journeys. The workshop draws from her training with Butoh Masters Kazuo Ohno and Yoko Ashikawa and her background as a Tai Chi practitioner and professional gardener.

ConSensual: Contact Improv & The Art of Consent with Moti Zemelman
September 16, 2017
At the core of CI is the constant dance of consent. In this workshop we will be practicing this dance of saying and hearing “No” & “Yes” both verbally and non-verbally. This act of trust brings us into deeper intimacy when we hold ourselves and partners with respect. This listening practice guides our dances toward greater empathy and presence. By incorporating Non-Violent Communication, Betty Martin’s “Wheel of Consent”, Tantra-inspired exercises, stillness, eye-contact, and energetic awareness, we’ll explore being more deeply sensual, consensual, and present with each other.