Mary Armentrout Teaches
Beginning Adult Ballet
This ongoing class/lab is a fun, relaxed, but very serious exploration of ballet based on my understanding of the Corvino method. In small classes with a relaxed learning atmosphere and personal attention, I work on the fundamentals of ballet, alignment, and the principles of movement, with an emphasis on clarity and ease, so that my students experience the joy of movement and the satisfaction of understanding the principles governing it.
7:00-8:30 pm Wednesdays
10:30-12 am Sundays
drop-in $12/class
at Danspace
473 Hudson St., Oakland
510 420 0920
Awareness and Alignment
This class is an exploration of how bodies in motion and at rest work. Learn to truly experience - from the inside - how different parts of your body move and work together. Discover how very subtle changes can fundamentally alter and improve all the movements you do - from sitting at your desk, to carrying groceries, to double pirouettes, to standing on your head - and can release inefficient patterning, tension and pain, and increase flow. All with the very real goal of making living in your body more fun, easy, and pleasurable!
1st Monday of the month, ongoing
7-8 pm
please call 510 845 8604 for exact location
Dreaming Out Loud: A Composition Intensive
During this week-long intensive, we will explore:
Techniques for opening the body and letting its stories spill out; techniques for appropriating the "real" outside world to create your inner world; techniques for collaging different media together at most accurately embody your ideas. We will start with the body, exploring many different ways to access its rich wealth of material, and move out into playing with its relationship to the outside world, building up different strategies for connecting (and disconnecting) the two. We will spend some time working with the idea of collage, creating different approaches to layering, so that moving between media becomes a fluid, easy option. We will incorporate any media that seems central to our ideas: movement, text, images (created through visual art media and video), objects, set elements, sites, and sounds, and learn how to combine them to create a seamless whole.
Upcoming: one week in winter 2007-08 tba
Feel free to call 510 845 8604 or email if you are interested in details.
The Field East Bay
I am committed to facilitating another round of fieldwork at Shawl-Anderson Dance Center next spring (probably February-April 2008). It will be a ten week workshop with a showing at the end. Fieldwork is a wonderful process-based method of giving feedback on new work and is open to all artists working in dance, theater, music, film/video, new genres. Look at
thefieldsf.org for more information.
