August 13 – 19, 2023
Garments designed and made in collaboration with Athena Kokoronis
Angie Pittman’s practice centers on experimentation, Black womanism, improvisation, and narrative as impetus for movement. She draws from Umfundalai, a contemporary technique derived from dance traditions throughout the African diaspora, and guides you through movements that will leave you with a greater awareness of your physical body and the way your feet impact the ground you walk on. She often works with the imagery and organizing principles of Umfundalai, Soul Line Dance, improvisation, and Bartenieff Fundamentals. Navigating that material through floorwork, breath, self-massage, set phrase work and improvisational scores. All while letting the backspace be responsive, mobile, and listening.
Jasmine’s commitment to dance is an expansive practice that includes dance, embodied sound, design cooking, and the archiving of matrilineal memory. Their embodied practice is rooted in a layering of dance, somatic, design, and vocal traditions greatly influenced by teachers and mentors, Claudette Nickens Johnson, Byronné J Hearn, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Marlies Yearby, Staycee Pearl, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar, Urban Bush Women, Bennalldre Williams, Charmaine Warren, Marýa Wethers, jhon r. stronks, Kendra Portier, Barbara Mahler, Pamela Pietro, Sherie van den Wijngaard, Joy KMT, Alisha B. Wormsley, Samita Sinha, and Li Harris.
WORKSHOP
Angie and Jasmine will alternate in teaching the morning embodiment practice sessions and guiding the afternoon creative process sessions.
Mornings
Attunement
We want to be warm
We want to be in bodies and voices
Where you are is ready
Listening to stories and poetics
Responding.
Afternoons
Learning old and new songs
Listening to your/my part of the song
Dancing together and dancing a part
Locating collective
We are interested in this particular container together and a part.
Friday
Our shape will shift from circle to semi-circle.
We will ask you to take care of yourself.
You will be asked to move.
STAY TUNED FOR INFO FOR 2024 WORKSHOPS!
Angie Pittman is a New York-based dancer-choreographer whose works sits in the Black Radical Tradition. Her choreographic work uses dance, text, and sound to illuminate nuanced and experimental portrayal of Black dance. Angie has had the pleasure of being able to create collaboratively with A Sef, Jasmine Hearn, Jonathan Gonzalez, Athena Kokoronis, and Anita Mullin. She holds a MFA in Dance and Choreography from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign with a graduate minor in African American Studies and is a certified Professional teacher of the Umfundalai technique. As a dancer, she has danced in work by Larissa Valez-Jackson, MBDance, Ralph Lemon, Tere O’Connor, Cynthia Oliver, Anna Sperber, Donna Uchizono Company, Jennifer Monson, Kim Brandt, Tess Dworman, Antonio Ramos, C Kemal Nance and many others. As an educator, she has taught at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Movement Research, MoMA, Sarah Lawrence College, Marymount Manhattan College, and is currently an Assistant Arts Professor of Dance at NYU: Tisch School of the Arts.
Photo by Whitney Browne
Jasmine Hearn was born and raised on occupied lands now known as Houston, TX. They studied dance with a multitude of teachers including their sister, cousins, aunties, instructors and friends at family events, church, and at the Houston Metropolitan Dance Center Jasmine is an internationally touring interdisciplinary artist, director, choreographer, organizer, doula, performer, director of Memory Fleet, and a Rome Prize Fellow with Athena Kokoronis at the American Academy in Rome. Jasmine has also been awarded three Bessie Awards for Outstanding Performance (2017) with skeleton architecture, Outstanding Performance (2021), and Outstanding Production (2021) with the cast and crew of The Motherboard Suite.
Jasmine has creatively collaborated with artists, Solange Knowles, Alisha B. Wormsley, Vanessa German, Marjani Forté-Saunders, Maria Bauman, Lovie Olivia, Ayanah Moor, Staycee Pearl, Holly Bass, Li Harris, and companies, Urban Bush Women, David Dorfman Dance, and Helen Simoneau Danse, which have produced solo and collective dance choreography for performances at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York Live Arts, the Guggenheim Museum, the Getty Center, the 2019 Venice Biennale, the Ford Foundation, Danspace Project, BAAD!, Kelly Strayhorn Theater, and other internationally acclaimed art spaces such as the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Their commitment to performance is an expansive practice that includes dance, embodied sound, garment design, painting, and the archiving of matrilineal memory. Jasmine gives gratitude to Spirit, thier mothers, and all the mothering Black people, who have supported their dreaming dancing moving remembering body.
Photo: Jay War, MATCH 2022
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