From Feldenkrais to GoPro

Choreographer Mary Armentrout was in residence to develop a new performance with media artist Ian Winters, composer Evelyn Ficarra, and performer Chris Evans. Together, the collaborators led a workshop in which participants explored the intersections of bodily experience and technology. The workshop began with an awareness-through-movement sequence based on the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. It consisted of a series of gentle movement exercises that bring individual attention to the bodily experience, thus cultivating embodied awareness. The artists then led participants in compositional exercises using technology such as GoPro cameras to explore electronic mediation from a consciously embodied state. 

Mary Armentrout is a San Francisco-based choreographer and performance artist, and director of Mary Armentrout Dance Theater. She is the winner of an Isadora Duncan Dance Award, one of the most prestigious honors for Bay-area choreographers. She has long collaborated on her site-specific and staged works with Ian Winters and Evelyn Ficarra. Winters develops visual and acoustic media environments for stage. Together, Armentrout and Winters run their studio The Milkbar in Richmond, CA. Ficarra is lecturer in the music department at the University of Sussex, where she is also the Assistant Director of the Centre for Research in Opera and Music Theater. Armentrout brings her years-long collaborations with Winters and Ficarra to new work with music and dance artist Chris Evans, who participates in the House Full of Black Women Project, Bandelion Dance Theater, and Black and White Projects art collective in Oakland, CA.