• Saturday, January 25

• 10:30 AM - 12:00 PM

• Casco Bay Movers

Intermediate Contemporary Workshop with Jessie Laurita-Spanglet

Saturday, 1/25/20 | 10:30-Noon | $17 or a card punch, $14 college students & seniors
Open to experienced teens and adults

Class Description:
Armed with curiosity and a hunger for movement, students in this class will find opportunities to engage in playful exploration of improvisational structures and movement patterns. We will warm up our bodies and creative spirits, find connections with each other through duet and group structures, and dig into set movement material and phrase work.
Bio:
Jessie Laurita-Spanglet is an active teacher-artist-scholar and a Research Associate in Dance at Bowdoin College. For the past four years, Jessie has worked as a Teaching Fellow and Research Assistant Professor at Wake Forest University, where in addition to her more tradition teaching and creative work, Jessie engaged her local community through teaching IMPROVment—a method of teaching improvisation to movers of all kinds that was developed by Wake Forest Associate Professor Christina Soriano. Jessie's focus on Arts in Health and Creative Aging have led her to work closely with the Dance Exchange in Takoma Park, MD, to teach movement classes to older adults, adults with neurodegenerative diseases, and adults who are blind or visually impaired, and more recently, to serve as an interventionist on the NIH-funded iMOVE study which uses the IMPROVment method to test the effects of improvisational movement on people living with mild cognitive impairment.

Jessie has had teaching and creative engagements at the University of the North Carolina School of the Arts, the University of Virginia, Davis and Elkins College, the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and Dance Exchange, among others. From 2015-2017, Jessie was an organizing artist for On Site/In Sight, a site-situated dance festival that brought artists to Winston-Salem NC, to dance in parks, on rooftops, and in the streets. Jessie’s latest choreographic work, Scale Models, was a site-specific investigation of the landscape and architecture in and around the Scales Fine Arts Center on the campus of Wake Forest University. During the fall of 2018, and with a grant from Wake Forest's interdisciplinary initiatives center (IPLACe), Jessie collaborated with two architecture professors to create a new course on site-specific dance and choreography.

Since graduating with an MFA in dance from the University of Maryland, College Park in 2014, Jessie has had the pleasure of dancing for Alexandra Beller, Maree ReMalia/merrygogo, Dance Exchange, Mansurdance, Heart Stück Bernie, and PEARSONWIDRIG DANCETHEATRE. Jessie is a Stott-certified Pilates teacher through Balance Pilates in Richmond VA, and holds a BFA in modern dance from the North Carolina School of the Arts.