Train and Create

Modern Connections with Jenny Oliver

Modern Connections is a Horton based modern dance technique class taught at a pace designed for the students in the room. Class begins with sequential and consistent warm-up, continues with center phrases that are designed to promote competence and growth of proper technique. Students build the necessary vocabulary and body awareness required for Flat Back, Lateral T, and Fortifications through proper corrections focused on alignment and detailed explanations of the initiation of movements.

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A multifaceted artist based in Greater Boston, Jenny Oliver, serves as an educator, performer, choreographer, and arts advocate. Rooted in trauma-informed culturally responsive approaches, she weaves kinetic storytelling with dance and collective collaboration to create meaningful experiences. She believes that movement is the first form of communication, and has worked with an array of organizations including the Boston Center for the Arts, City of Boston, WBUR CitySpace, the Design Studio for Social Intervention, Castle of Our Skins, Museum of Science, MFA Boston, Peabody Essex Museum, and Masary Studios on projects that invite the public into creative placemaking. In addition to her art making practice she is the Head of Dance Performance at Tufts University, teaches weekly open adult modern dance technique classes in Cambridge and Somerville and recently became a Jacob’s Pillow Curriculum in Motion Practitioner.

Contemporary Dance Technique with Jenna Riegel

As a former company member and student of choreographers David Dorfman and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane, my class draws on and references a rich movement lineage spanning many forms including classical modern, postmodern, jazz, hip hop, ballet, improvisational practices, and everyday, pedestrian movement. Class begins with Bartenieff inspired floor work, yoga, and Pilates to ease us into motion and help us arrive more fully present in our bodies. Introductions to one another are made through a name circle or interactive warm-up exercises to cultivate trust and build community together. Across the floor phrase-work oscillates between imagery and task-based improvisational scores and rigorous locomotion, athletic inversions, and ambitious lofting. A culminating phrase challenges the polarities of movement and investigates both off-balance and centered, bound and released, sustained and staccato, momentum driven and spatially controlled, on the floor and in the air, and sensation-based and shape-based movement. An uplifting and non-judgmental class culture is attended to by both honoring individualism and honing the ability to replicate outside material and dance in relation to one another. Enjoyment and joviality are key to our learning!

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Jenna Riegel, originally from Fairfield, IA, is a dance artist and educator. Jenna holds an M.F.A. in Dance Performance from the University of Iowa and a B.A. in Theatre Arts from Maharishi International University. During her eleven-year performing career in NYC, Jenna toured and performed nationally and internationally as a company member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company, David Dorfman Dance, Alexandra Beller/ Dances and Bill Young/ Colleen Thomas & Company. She also danced with Daara Dance (choreographer Michel Kouakou), Carolyn Dorfman Dance Company, Shaneeka Harrell, Tania Isaac Dance, and johannes weiland. Jenna taught classes in contemporary technique in New York City at Gina Gibney Dance Center, New York Live Arts, Mark Morris Dance Center, and 100 Grand Dance. She has been on faculty in the dance departments of Barnard College, The Juilliard School, and Virginia Commonwealth University. In addition, she has taught master classes at The Joffrey Ballet School, Columbia College, NYU, The New School, The Ohio State University, SUNY Purchase, Bard College, Connecticut College, Hollins University, Dartmouth College, Williams College, Skidmore College, University of Maryland, University of California-Berkeley, the Bates Dance Festival, the New Look Festival in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Dance Isadora Festival in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Jenna is currently an Assistant Professor of Theater and Dance at Amherst College.

What to Do When You’re Stuck with David Dorfman

This workshop will explore strategies and tactics to get “un-stuck” in a choreographic process. We’ve all been there – how do we get out, move through, dig in, go deep? Whether you’ve been at it for decades or ten minutes, we’ll find ways to go forward, honoring your past work and your unknown future – and – we will have fun!

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Choreographer and Dance Activist David Dorfman has been making movement-based dance theater since graduating with an MFA in Dance from Connecticut College in 1981. In 1987 he founded David Dorfman Dance in NYC with the intention of creating politically and socially relevant work. DDD has toured the world from Tajikistan to El Salvador, and recently premiered “truce songs”, about healing and the possible reincarnation of trust, at The Space at Irondale in Brooklyn in January, and will bring the evening to the ICA May 16, 17 – see you there! A life-long educator, David has been a professor at Connecticut College since 2004 where DDD is Company-in-Residence. David choreographed Broadway’s “Indecent,” for which he was given a Lortel for its Off-Broadway run, and has also received a 2019 USA Fellowship in Dance, a Guggenheim, 4 NEA fellowships and a Bessie.

In his copious spare time, he has co-created and toured internationally a body of tragi-comic physical theater with dear friend Dan Froot, entitled “Live Sax Acts” – and he continues to dance profusely with wife Lisa Race and son Samson Race Dorfman. David first served as faculty at BDF in the 90’s and gleefully considers BDF the longest running support/growth system for his life/artistry and company.