K.J. Holmes and Peter Kyle
Performing the Now
August 2-8, 2026
Celebrating Bearnstow’s 80-year anniversary, K.J. Holmes and Peter Kyle invite you to a weeklong exploration of combining systems for creative practice and composition.
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Drawing on decades of research in dance, improvisation, theatre, voice and somatics, this shared workshop offers artistic and geologic action as a frame for the current season of our lives. What innate tools can we access within ourselves to learn from each other in community, drawing inspiration from working in the studio as well as in the landscape of Bearnstow’s unique setting?
Two daily sessions, morning and afternoon, are led in alternation by Holmes and Kyle.
Kyle introduces Slow Tempo, a slow movement practice with an improvisational sensibility, developed by Japanese playwright/director, Shogo Ohta (1939-2007), who held that “speed has become the morality of our time” and, in extreme slowness “we find fresh expression to defamiliarize our daily experience—to look again.” This contemplative work asks us to draw upon deep quiet and renewed awareness of our actions to find clarity and unhurried resonance in performance. What happens when we look at the delicious nature of our moment-to-moment interaction with self, with others, with motion and object, memory, imagination? We will use these explorations to help us render new forms and narratives that are rich with possibility and individuality.
Holmes’ work at Bearnstow - “Combining Disciplines for Creative Performance” - will offer students the opportunity to discover the innate wisdom of the body as source and towards creative performance. Basic anatomy and physiology expand our range of choice and the qualities of movement and voice and enable us to make the invisible visible. Through improvisation and composition we will explore musicality and phrasing, how the senses influence and motivate our movement choices, and how we craft time and space with our embodied imaginations and our senses of time in the body/mind as a musicality and poetic rhyme. We will explore and work in all of Bearnstow—forest, lake, paths, cabins, weather, unfolding each participant’s memory and imagination and the shaping and crafting of it.
Each day there will be offered an early morning yoga class, group sessions and activity, and individual time for developing material, researching and relaxing, using the beautiful environment of Bearnstow as the landscape of the imagination. Throughout, participants are encouraged to synthesize their own approaches with the material presented by Holmes and Kyle each toward creating original compositions to be shared informally with one another on the Friday evening of the week.
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This workshop is ideal for anyone interested in movement, performance, physical presence, composition and theatrical narrative, regardless of age, experience or ability.
K.J. Holmes, independent dance artist, singer, poet, actor and teacher based in Brooklyn, N.Y., has helped to define, first as a student and now as a teacher and performer, many contemporary improvisational practices, studying Ideokinesis with Andre Bernard and collaborating with forerunners Simone Forti, Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson and Image Lab and Steve Paxton. K.J. is a student of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Body Mind Centering® since 1990, including the certification program 1995–99; a graduate of the William Esper Studio, Meisner acting with master teacher Terry Knickerbocker; a certified yoga teacher through Satya Yoga with Sondra Loring; and a certified Ayurvedic practitioner through Dr. Naina Marballi and Ayurveda’s World, NYC.
A sought-after teacher of improvisation and somatic approaches to dance, theater and voice, K.J. has traveled nationally and internationally teaching and performing at universities, festivals and venues that range from theaters to site-specific locations to living rooms. She is currently adjunct faculty at NYU/Experimental Theatre Wing (2001-present),teaches through Movement Research since 1986 (A.I.R 2012–14) and the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, as well as leading sessions and study groups in Yoga and Ayurveda remotely. She led Art as Experience events at MoMA 2019-20, and worked closely with Simone Forti in reconstructing her Dance Constructions there.
K.J. has performed in and collaborated in the works of filmmaker Matthew Barney, poet Julie Carr, drummer Jeremy Carlstedt, cellist Juan Ignacio Ferreras, trumpeter Roy Campbell, Jr., choreographers Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People and Xavier LeRoy, dance artist Karinne Keithley Seyers, among many others including being featured in music artist Mitski’s video Bug Like an Angel. She recently began a new process under the mentorship of composer/instrumentalist Henry Threadgill, Blu/print – directing and conducting an ensemble of dancers and musicians exploring origin and source, continuing her passion of avant jazz, dance, theater and poetics.
K.J. is committed to creating dance/theater as an attempt to find solace, artistic expression and sustainable life practices regarding climate change and the challenging political world. She believes her teaching is not separate from her art making, and brings all her practices together in an alchemy of experiential life and living.
Contact kjhlms@gmail.com for more information
Photo by Alexander Dololov
Peter Kyle is a dancer, choreographer, teacher, filmmaker, and Artistic Director of Peter Kyle Dance, based in Hartford, Connecticut, where he is Associate Professor in the Department of Theater and Dance at Trinity College. Early in his career, he toured the world with Nikolais and Murray Louis Dance and has also performed in the companies of Molissa Fenley, Mark Morris, Erick Hawkins, Gina Gibney, Laura Glenn, Dance Alloy and the theater company P3/east. Having shown his own work on three continents, he has received numerous grants and awards, including from American Music Center, US Embassies in China and Ukraine, Mertz Gilmore Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts, New England Foundation for the Arts, the Fulbright Specialist Program, as well as multiple grants from the Edward C. and Ann T. Roberts Foundation, and the Movement Research Global Practice Sharing program. He regularly works internationally, most recently in Lithuania. Together with P3/east in 2002 he met and worked with Shogo Ohta, the creator of Slow Tempo, in Kyoto, Japan. He has been integrating this work into his teaching ever since, and has taught the Slow Tempo workshop for eleven summers at Bearnstow beginning in 2009 where he served as Associate Director between 2017-2020. Peter eagerly looks forward to this collaboration with K.J. Holmes.