The Choreography of Attention

Sep 10th - 24th, 2024

This course considers dance as a mind-body practice through which we can stretch, deepen, and grow our capacity for sustained attention. By practicing ways of moving, looking, and improvising, we call into focus our sense of time, space, and cooperative relational attention. Exercising these faculties–consciously, together–is a form of embodied attention activism. 

In each of the three sessions, participants will move through a guided physical practice grounded in contemporary dance, improvisation, and personal kinetic discovery. We will examine works by landmark choreographers such as Merce Cunningham, Pina Bausch, William Forsythe and others, explore introductory choreographic methods, and invent our own methods– those yet to be discovered. In our culminating session, participants will develop their own choreographic study through which to practice a specific facet of attention– physical, spatial, temporal, or relational.

Previous dance experience is welcome but certainly not necessary.

Taught by choreographer and dancer Eve Jacobs.