Synaptic Sessions are fertile gathering grounds where you will experience the power of dancing in community alongside experiments in co-teaching movement. Each synaptic session will pair two artists to co-teach a 2 hour movement workshop, followed by a half hour discussion facilitated by B.L.A. Co-Director, jose e. abad. 

Teaching artists will not be new to collaboration or co-teaching, but they will be new to each other as co-teachers. The intention of these collaborations is to practice and explore hybridizing their pedagogical methodologies and discover new ways to dive deeper into each artist's research questions.

Synaptic Sessions will highlight diverse dance and movement traditions, while at times drawing from shared practices in visual art and music, among other genres. In this way, B.L.A. continues its work to uplift interdisciplinary art practice rooted in the wisdom of the moving body.

SYNAPTIC SESSIONS SCHEDULE

All Synaptic Session co-taught movement workshops are each two hours long, followed by a half hour discussion facilitated by B.L.A. Co-Director jose e. abad. This series includes offerings from:

Friday December 5th 12 - 2:30 PM: Karla Quintero & Chinchin Hsu

Exploring concepts of improvisation & the integration of dance in everyday life. How do we understand dance as a mode of being and a tool for inviting our communities deeper into their understanding of the self and each other? How does our relationship to dance change as our roles in life change? What are the uses of dance as a practice of sharing oneself in both public and private spaces? 

Saturday December 6th, 11 AM - 1:30PM: jose e. abad & Audrey Johnson

Investigating improvisation as a tool of Black fugitive forms. How does improvisation live as a liberatory practice and a refusal of colonial time and space? What are the ways in which being together in improvisational practice gives glimpses into alternative ways of being together collectively? How do we bring these moments of freedom out of the studio and into the streets? 

Sunday December 7th, 11AM - 1:30 PM: Preethi Ramaprasad & Alice Hur

Paying homage to the histories of waacking and Bharatanatyam, Alice and Preethi share choreographic techniques and expression through both forms. They build on gestures, isolation, and storytelling to guide the session.  Join in for an afternoon of exploration ending with a fun cipher! This session will be followed by a discussion led by jose e. abad.   

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

jose e. abad is a multidisciplinary social practice artist, DJ, and curatorial arts administrator based in unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Territory. They are a Black Filipino artist exploring the complexities of intersectional identities and collective relationality through embodied practice. Utilizing dance, theater, experimental video, and sound, they unearth lost histories that reside in the body, that the mind has forgotten, and that dominant culture has erased. Their choreography is rooted in collaboration and improvisation as tools of resistance and liberation.

Chinchin Hsu was born and raised in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. moved to the U.S. in 2004 and now resides on Ramaytush lands; a southeast asian immigrant, a teaching artist, now a dance mama of two little humans. She has trained in tai-chi, Chinese martial art, Chinese ballet, western ballet, various modern techniques, improvisation and composition. 2 births later, Chinchin is curious how imaginations and motherhood combine themselves in the process of creativity and how they will manifest a movement sharing experience.

Alice Hur is a practitioner of a street dance style called “waacking” (originally called “punking”), which was created in Los Angeles underground clubs by gay men of color during the 1970s. She has been performing, competing, and teaching within this art form for over a decade. Her accomplishments include winning multiple Bay Area waacking titles, as well as placing in all-styles battles in San Diego, Seattle, Chicago, and Toronto. She has taught waacking throughout NorCal and has also led workshops in Honolulu, Detroit, and Nashville.

Audrey Johnson is a dance artist working in choreography, performance, teaching, and herbalism based in Oakland, CA|Ohlone land with roots from Detroit, MI|Anishinaabe land. Audrey’s creative work experiments with the form of improvisation in the refusal of colonized time and space. Audrey has performed and collaborated with the companies and projects of artists Gerald Casel, Jennifer Harge, Biba Bell, Detour Productions, Stephanie Hewett, among others. She holds a BFA in Dance from Wayne State University, and was a co-founder of Collective Sweat Detroit. She has taught at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center, the LINES/Dominican BFA program, Collective Sweat, and various studios in the Bay Area and Southeast Michigan. Her teaching practice draws from lineages of queer Black feminist study, somatics, post-modern dance, floorwork techniques, improvisation in performance and choreography, yoga and plant medicine.

Karla Quintero’s cross-genre improvisation practice draws from contemporary, club, and partner dance, somatics, and a love of genre (horror, telenovelas). She works from a deep faith in the doing, the ongoing practicing of dance, and in what that steady return offers to her community and immediate family. Her practice foregrounds relation and persistence over production, inviting community to emerge through the act of dancing itself. For more than 15 years, Karla has performed in works by Gerald Casel, Hope Mohr, Catherine Galasso, Robert Moses, Alma Esperanza Cunningham, Aura Fischbeck, and others. She actively collaborates with movement artists Belinda He as ALLOYED METTLES and with Shareen DeRyan as GRUMN, and is developing STAR LIGHT, an improvised evening-length work that follows her attempt to cut ties with pop influences that have distorted her sense of self. Karla is based in Huichin/Oakland.

Preethi Ramaprasad is a dancer, curator, musician, and researcher. Ramaprasad has a doctorate in Critical Dance Studies from UC Riverside. Her research focuses on representation and the performance of myth among transnational Bharatanatyam practitioners. Her journey teaching and performing Bharatanatyam has led to artistic community-building endeavors across India, Europe, and the United States. Ramaprasad’s choreography seeks to ask how Bharatanatyam can address contemporary politics especially through theatrical and expressive techniques of the form.  She co-runs the Varnam Salon, When Eyes Speak Choreography Festival, and Performing Voices of Bhakti, which aim to create safe spaces to share South Asian expression in the diaspora.  

FINANCIAL TRANSPARENCY:

We need you!  Bridge Live Arts is currently running a major individual giving campaign. We believe all our events should be free or sliding scale; all funds go directly towards fair pay for the incredible artists that we partner with and present. If you can pay a higher rate for this workshop, we welcome your contribution. If the pre-selected rates don't match what you are able to contribute, please consider donating the appropriate amount. Thank you for being the visionaries and foundations of this work.