CONTACT AND THE UNDERSCORE A "CONTINUING" workshop with Nancy Stark Smith and Mike Vargas June 19-29th, 2003

The "continuing" is a workshop dedicated to dancers who have already worked with Nancy in the past. Please send a motivation letter writing:

· When/where you met Nancy, in which intensive workshop.

· Why you want to continue.

· Your background in contact improvisation.

All applications will be reviewed before final confirmation is sent.

Contact and the underscore.

In a desire to go further with our dance practice and research in Contact Improvisation, States, Performance, and Scores, this "continuing" workshop is specially designed for people who have taken other intensive courses with Nancy. Using the particular physical and conceptual principles and vocabularies we have shared previously as a foundation, we will extend our perspectives and practices, including a more deliberate focus on the Underscore, a framework for Contact and improvisation practice. The week will include regular practice of the Underscore, physical/Contact training, discussion, repeated sets of dancing within a given improvisational score, performance and composition studies, and various opportunities for personal feedback. Composer Mike Vargas will regularly play music and lead investigations offering practical experience in detailed listening, perceiving composition, and working with specific relationships between movement and music. Frequent practice of the Underscore will afford us the opportunity to adjust the proportions and emphasis of different factors within a given run, for instance: ensemble size, relationship to music, intention, length of open score, etc. In this way we will be able to study how these adjustments affect the dancing--both from the dancers' and the observers' point of view. Alone, in duet, in groups, with music and in silence, we will move toward greater physical, experiential, and compositional depth and detail in our dancing and watching.

NANCY STARK SMITH first trained as an athlete and gymnast, leading her to dance in the early 1970s, greatly influenced by the breakthroughs of the Judson Dance Theater in NYC in the 1960s. She danced in the first performances of Contact Improvisation in 1972 and has since been central in its development as dancer, performer, teacher, writer/publisher, and organizer. She travels throughout the world teaching and performing Contact and other dance improvisation, working with many favorite partners and performance makers over the years, including Steve Paxton, Julyen Hamilton, Karen Nelson, and most recently, musician Mike Vargas. In 1975 she cofounded Contact Quarterly, an international dance journal, which she continues to coedit and produce.

MIKE VARGAS began playing music in 1959. He was classically trained for ten years and has since been learning and playing by ear. His curiosity has led him through many contexts and cultures, from cocktail lounges in Indonesia, to underground clubs in New York's East Side, from the Kennedy Center to nursing homes, from Grimm's Fairy Tales to Playback Theater. Since 1980 he has been improvising and composing, performing nationally and internationally, teaching music and improvisation, creating close to 100 commissioned dance scores, and presenting solo and ensemble concerts of his music. He has taught at universities across the U.S.A. and has participated regularly at numerous festivals such as the Bates Dance Festival and Tanzsommer Innsbruck. For the last four years he has been teaching and performing around the globe with dancer Nancy Stark Smith and is currently freelancing in Massachusetts.