Dancing With: Responding to our Environments,
Each other, and Ourselves
June 12-18, 2024
With Maria Bauman, participants will explore the relational nature of dancing. We will be dancing with our environments, with each other, with our own spirits, and with our guides and ancestors.
Maria will lead daily techniques classes in the morning, indoors and outdoors, featuring a good juicy warm up. After lunch and break, Afternoon sessions will include both shared sessions, where Maria will offer insights and practices in partnering and site-responsive dancing, and exploratory lab time when participants work on their own inside and/or outside around the grounds, using techniques we practice in the shared sessions.
Come dance on and with the beautiful lake-nestled land at Bearnstow and enjoy daily communal meals prepared by Bearnstow’s chef and team!
Maria Bauman (she) is a dance artist, writer and community organizer from the ancestral homelands of the Miccosukee and Seminole people of Florida, living in Lenapehoking/Brooklyn, NY. She is an alchemist, working with rigor and magic as her tools to create dance, to create texts, to co-create healing learning spaces. In her community organizing and in her artmaking, Maria’s primary question is “How can WE BE Together, better?” Maria’s a co-founder of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity) and the founder of MBDance (www.mbdance.net). She recently came back from Atlantic Center for the Arts where she was in a residency with an amazing cohort of other queer, trans and non-binary artists under the tutelage of Sharon Bridgforth. Maria is currently laboring a multi-dimensional outdoor performance-ritual and textual phenomenon called “These are the bodies that have not borne.”
PC: Felicita Felli Maynard
Maria Bauman creates bold and honest artworks based on physical and emotional power, insistence on equity, and experiments with intimacy. Organizing to undo racism informs her art-making and the two are folded together within her practice. She draws on her studies of English literature, Capoeira, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, improvisation, dancing in living rooms and nightclubs, as well as concert dance training to embody interconnectedness, joy and tenacity.
After being a long-term company member, serving as Director of Education Community Engagement and later, Associate Artistic Director for Urban Bush Women, Bauman founded MBDance in 2009. Maria Bauman has been honored with two Bessie Awards, one for her work with The Skeleton Architecture (2017) and another for her choreography as part of The Motherboard Suite directed by Saul Williams and Bill T. Jones (2021). She’s proud to be a recent alum of the Ailey New Directions Choreographic Lab and she is a current fellow with the Urban Bush Women Choreographic Center (2021-23) as well as being a Drexel University Rankin Artist Scholar. In what is now an annual community engagement through public workshops and festival, Bauman and collaborators welcome QTPOC and allies in Brooklyn and beyond to build community with each other, affirm a sense of their own power through performance practice, and amplify the legacies and technologies of queer makers of color.
Questions? Concerns? Contact
maria@mbdance.net (About the workshop)
Molly@bearnstow.org (About registration, housing or other logisitics)
IG @mbdancesweatyourtruth