Movement Practice: Activating the Animal Body (DAN4335.01) (cancelled)

Maura Gahan, MFA Teaching Fellow

This class cultivates a movement ritual to engage the mind in accessing the strong, animal body. Each class actively engages three avenues for dancing:

1) Movement Patterns – by employing precise, sensorial exercises that lead through developmental movement patterns to observe habits, test new pathways, and re-organize coordination. These are based on Bartenieff fundamentals, Body-Mind Centering and Material For the Spine.

2) Activated Dancing – by using music, space and distanced partnering to get the body sweating, the subconscious streaming, and the imagination freed. This chapter integrates developmental patterns by straight up dancing.

3) Animal Body – by creating physical environments with objects, body architecture (forming tunnels, walls and rocks with bodies safely distanced), and “puzzle” scenarios, to solve and survive, using reflexes of the Animal Body. As with cats playing, deer scavenging, foxes hunting and birds protecting, every movement has a purpose.

Thoughts are emptied. Everything and everyone is attuned to the moment.


Learning Outcomes:



Delivery Method: Hybrid in-person and remote, with faculty in-person
Prerequisites:Permission of instructor.
Corequisites: Dance or Drama Lab Assignment if students are registered for 4 or more credits in Dance.
Course Level: 4000-level
Credits: 2
T/F 8:30AM - 10:20AM (Full-term)
Maximum Enrollment: 16
Course Frequency: One time only

Categories: All courses , Dance , Hybrid In-Person and Remote , Updates
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