For movers and adventurers who want to go deeply into physical training, personal awareness practice and image based movement using form and open laboratory. I'm interested in running a course that includes rigorous physical training as well as explorative work. This is means people who take this workshop must be willing-and-able to take the leap, commit to their work and go beyond what they think they can do both in meditative and dynamic movement practice. Dancers must also have the body awareness and practice skills to know when to take care of themselves and when to try more. It is for people who are self motivated as well as for those who want to discover something about themselves and others in a structured format. This is an ongoing movement laboratory running in 8 week sessions,  focusing on ourselves and in relationship to each other, time, space, structure etc.  From the smallest impulse to the grand gesture, we dance our inner poetry, clashing imagery and exposing something new.  Butoh is often described as "Surrealism of the Flesh". We move from metaphors, dancing the imagery of life and emptiness.  To dance Butoh is to strip away our " habitual performative" selves" to find another, deeper being. Butoh is a performing art which started as a rebellious dance form in the 1960s in Japan. Dancer Tatsumi Hijikata was the leading figure in this movement, which he called Ankoku Butoh or the dance of utter darkness. Darkness is a primal place; unknown and open to change. It is to find a place of no ego, emptiness.  It is also a place of reshaping. Nothing is ever as we think it is. We may move from water flowing though your system to lightening coursing through your veins; a fish in your stomach to clouds underfoot. This dance is a dynamic interplay between tension and release; a creative conflict from which we begin our dance.  Other influences we will draw from in this series are Suzuki training, Viewpoints, Shintaido, Meditation, BMC® principles and your personal movement history.

"...Butoh attempts to affirm the dance which lies within the body--the body is, in itself, contemplated as a small universe..."
    -Goda Nario, "On Ankoku Butoh"

Jennifer Hicks has been teaching movement, lecturing, creating original theatre for over 25 years. She received her MFA from Naropa University in Contemporary Performance, where she studied Viewpoints and Suzuki, Roy Hart Vocal work and BMC® principles. Her BFA is from Tufts University as a Theater Design Major and Degree in Fine Arts from The School of the Museum of Fine Arts, in Boston and where she was also a winner of the prestigious Traveling Scholars Award. She is a certified Yoga Instructor with the National Yoga Alliance, Shintaido Instructor and TranceDance Facilitator. She has been studying Butoh since the early 1990's and is a regular dancer with Katsura Kans International Dance Company. Ms. Hicks is also director of CHIMERAlab Dance Theatre and a member of Mobius Artist Collective in Boston. For more information and full bio www.jenniferhicks.org
Love to see you there!

CHIMERAlab Dance Theatre, Jennifer Hicks director