How do tension and difference bring us into togetherness?
Can group negotiation and conflict facilitate dynamic choreography?
How does dancing expand notions of collectivity and collective action?

In this workshop, we will address these questions through movement practices and improvisation scores that operate on consent, consensus, and interdependency as well as others in which the roles of “leader” and “follower” shift frequently. The methods for improvisation and dance making that I will be sharing in this workshop make reference to contact improvisation and partnering practices, but no prior experience is required.

Also, we will warm up hard and sweaty to pop music. 

Bio
Lailye Weidman is a choreographer, dancer, and writer based in Massachusetts. Her recent projects include Showman , an homage to the resonance of hardcore music; Social Animal Please Tame Me (2016), an ensemble dance theater work investigating consent and consensus; birthing room (2015), a solo tracing textures of place and displacement; and Dike Dance (2014), a site-specific performance and community dialogue in collaboration with scientists from the National Seashore. She is part of Femmelab, a queer research and movement collective; and she collaborates with the Movement Party to produce Fleet Moves, an annual site-based dance festival on Cape Cod.

Lailye received a BA in dance from UCLA and an MFA in dance from the University of Illinois, Urbana Champaign. Her work has been shown at venues on both coasts and the midwest including the Domestic Performance Agency, Movement Research at the Judson Church, and the New School in New York City, Anatomy Riot and Pieter PASD in Los Angeles, CounterPulse and the Joe Goode Annex in San Francisco, Green Street Studios and the Aviary Gallery in Boston, and the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Champaign, IL. She has been an artist-in-residence with the Interdisciplinary Laboratory for Art, Nature, and Dance (iLAND), at Hothouse UCLA, and the SEEDS Festival at Earthdance. She teaches improvisation and dance studies in academic and community settings, and is an Associate Editor of Contact Quarterly, a vehicle for moving ideas. Along with Meredith Bove, Lailye is co-recipient of a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts’ New England Dance Fund to support their upcoming collaborative apprenticeship with one another expanding their skills in the art of dance dramaturgy.