HMD's 2020 Bridge Project POWER SHIFT: Improvisation, Activism, and Community presents 

Space Carcasses, a two-day workshop with Onye Ozuzu for movers who love to improvise and/or want to expand their practice through in-depth study. 

Saturday OCTOBER 31, 2020 & Sunday NOVEMBER 1, 2020, 9 AM - 4 PM (PDT)

TICKETS: $150. For financial assistance, email admin@hopemohr.org

This is an online event taking place on Zoom.  You will receive a Zoom link via email one day prior to the event.

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WORKSHOP SCHEDULE:  Participants will engage actively in online whole group sessions and with partners for  4 hours on both workshop days. The remaining time will be decidated to off-line, independent practice.

DAY ONE - 

9 AM - 11 AM: Introductions & Physical Practice

11 AM - 2 PM: Break, Independent Solo or Partner Practice/Recordings/Dialogue, 

2 PM - 3 PM: Score #2: Movement, Witnessing, Feedback & Discussion

3 PM - 4 PM: Score #2: Movement, Witnessing, Feedback & Discussion

DAY TWO - 

9AM - 10:30 AM: Draft video viewing, group feedback

10:30 AM - 1:30 PM: Break, Independent Solo or Partner Work/Dialogue

1:30 PM - 2 PM: Group Physical Practice

2 PM - 2:45 PM: Partner Score #1

2:45 PM - 3 PM: Group Feedback

3 PM - 3:45 PM: Partner Score #2

3:45 PM - 4 PM: Group Feedback

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ABOUT SPACE CARCASSES  |   The Space Carcasses workshop will invite participants to explore psychosomatic shifts experienced in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic and the national reckoning over racial injustice. How do the spaces in our present day-to-day activities “become the carcasses of our earlier lives…places to visit versions of ourselves that once were?” 

Participants will be asked to engage their body as a reference point for the experience of space as defined by architecture, by the objects and the utilizations that they share that space with, and by their intentional connections to one another, across distances and through the medium of video and online communication. The current moment, one that has so dramatically removed us from, or re configured our occupancy of our habitual spaces, has raised our awareness of the power of our relationship to our built environment. It has made carcasses of sorts, of the places and spaces that our lives so recently used to occupy.

Embodied improvised practice will be used to explore that awareness; explore, expand and utilize its options. Workshop discussions and collaborations will investigate our capacity to fold distance through intentional action and coordinated place making. This is a dynamic and experimental workshop, designed to engage our available technologies and capacity to define our sense of self-- to reimagine what it means to be in “place”. 

Before day one, participants will receive a care package with workshop essentials. Day one they will be paired with another dancer and begin initial discussions on how to use cellphones to record your movement research. We will engage actively in online whole group sessions and with partners for around 4 hours each of the two days. Sessions will be in two units with a significant break between to explore supporting reference materials, rest, take care of individual needs, and prepare for the upcoming session. At the end of the workshop participants will have access to a follow up site where edited video amalgamations of their movement research. Will be made viewable and final discussions, sharings, and feedback may happen online and on a flexible timeline.

ABOUT ONYE OZUZU   |   Onye Ozuzu is a dance administrator, performing artist, choreographer, educator, and researcher currently serving as Dean of the University of Florida College of the Arts in Gainesville, FL. Actively presenting work since 1997, Ozuzu has presented work nationally and internationally at The Joyce Soho (Manhattan, NY), Kaay Fecc Festival Des Tous les Danses (Dakar, Senegal), La Festival del Caribe (Santiago, Cuba), Lisner Auditorium (Washington, DC), and McKenna Museum of African American Art (New Orleans, LA). She has performed locally in Chicago at Hamlin Park Summer Sampler, with Red Clay Dance in La Femme, and in the Afro-Latin@ Summer Dance Intensive at Columbia College Chicago. Ozuzu has been Artist in Residence at Dorchester Art + Housing Collaborative of the Rebuild Foundation, EarthDance Workshop and Retreat Center, Bates Dance Festival, Chulitna Wilderness Lodge and Retreat, and Lagos danceGATHERING in Lagos, Nigeria.

Her collaboration with jazz composer Greg Ward, Touch My Beloved’s Thought, premiered at the Pritzker Pavilion at Millennium Park (Chicago, IL)—a live dance and music performance in honor of Charles Mingus and commissioned by Links Hall and Constellation. Her recent project, Project Tool, which explored the relationship between mind, body and tool, was a 2018 Joyce award and a 2016 Chicago Dancemakers Forum Lab Artist recipient as well as a National Performance Network (NPN) Creation Fund Project co-commissioned by Links Hall in partnership with Dancing Grounds and NPN. 

ABOUT POWER SHIFT   |  POWER SHIFT: Improvisation, Activism, and Community invites artists and activists to share the practice and performance of improvisation. Co-curated by Cherie Hill, Hope Mohr, and Karla Quintero, POWER SHIFT brings you inside the improvisational practices of Black/African American, Latinx/Latin American, Asian American, female-identifying and queer improvisers and social justice activists. The program highlights voices from African dance, jazz aesthetics, social and street dance, contemporary forms, and Capoeira.

POWER SHIFT is about more than performance. A wide array of intensives and workshops at the intersection of dance and social action offer opportunities to build and share tools for the creative process. In these spaces, we will move and imagine together. We will cultivate power and resilience in the face of shifting and uncertain landscapes. 

For more information on the entire Power Shift line up visit bridgeproject.art/powershift.