Christina Svane’s Workshops
Song, Story and Dance
Classes for Children – Infants (with guardian) to age 10
These classes offer children structures through which to engage their whole, natural, physical, imaginative selves. Sparked by stories or simple movement games and improvisation structures, the children invent movement, recognize movement qualities and use them in embodying weather, animals, landscapes and characters in stories I bring in or we make up together.
These activities also develop skills such as balance, coordination, self-awareness, spatial relationships, time division (rhythm and pattern). The children also develop the ability to make creative choices about levels and qualities of energy and the feeling states they are connected to. But even more important than the skills they develop, is the fun they have discovering the joy of movement.
In these classes, I am cultivating “Respondability.” My aim is to develop in the child a confidence in their spontaneous ability to respond to images, ideas, and music with movement. This is not a class in which I demand that they perform certain movements, or where there is a right and wrong way to move. In our discussions, we will talk about how inventive and intelligent, sensitive, funny and amazing the body is. And how unique each of their imaginations is!
We also integrate this process with music, sometimes recorded, sometimes sung. With the singing, we use call and response, and when we all know the song, we sing it altogether as we dance it out. The music expands our movement vocabulary as well, highlighting shifts in dynamics, rhythm, and melody.
Infants enjoy these classes held in their guardian’s arms, lap, or on the floor. The songs and stories can then be done at home, too, adding to your repertoire of shared play and movement development.
As children develop more self-awareness of their movement, we get more creative with dance-making together, putting together movement phrases built from several people’s movement, making group decisions about how the dance will move through the space and time.
Classes usually culminate with an appreciation circle, sharing what we enjoyed, either in movement or just words.
MOVEMENT INVENTIONS: RECOGNIZING A PERSONAL LANGUAGE
This is a course in composition and feedback which I developed with Gale Turner in the fall of 2009. Gale is an extraordinary performer who worked for 18 years with Meredith Monk/The House as actor, dancer and Assistant Director. We wanted to create a simple structure for highlighting elements of personal style, something it is often hard to perceive in one’s own work. We used our personal dialogue as a distilling process arriving at core themes that could function as starting points for composition. Each session, the participants make short (2, 3, 4 minutes) pieces, while in the space together, then show them.
We experimented with various ways of structuring the feedback, and over the course of the course, of course we made changes. Props, lighting, sound, other movers, outside spaces, text, and audience location and participation all played a part.
This class is not currently being offered.
Embodied Awareness and The Crystal – integrating creativity and spiritual intuition
In my Embodied Awareness workshops, we begin with guided visualization into deep relaxation. We work with the assumption – proven through our own experience – that we have an indwelling intuition that knows where we are in our life’s journey, and what we need to focus on to continue growing into our realized self. This meditation opens a receptive state in which our vocalizing, movement and imagery are experienced as gifts. It is not important for us to use the same terminology about where these gifts come from: imagination, the subconscious, spirit guides, the muse, the goddess, the soul – what matters is that we open the message, and it opens us.
Vocalization is a crucial tool in the process, and though our focus is on our individual experience in the moment, the moment is in the room, and the room fills with our music. What arises usually begins as open toning, long sounded sighs and exhalations, and evolves into melodic fragments that function like keys to unnamed memories. Our singing sometimes seems like bait that lures sensations and locations to us from the forests of forgotten experience. We are in duet with ourselves, moving, singing, feeling, evoking, following.
After an hour, there is time given to write, while it is fresh. Part two requires we redesign the room. From the individual we transition to the group. The second half works inside The Crystal, a structure addressing the four cardinal directions, placing a single mover in the center, supported by reflecting witnesses. We view the dancer as oracle, as silent poet, as our own dream. We sing back to her our reading of her, with words, without words, embracing her as deliverer of messages. We bow, savor, and rotate, with another in the center. There is often a sense of going back in time, together. We part, promising to email what we wrote for each other that night. Mysteriously, this seldom happens, and I have a hunch it is due to the fact the words were found in the place we journeyed to together, and they are wary of being seen as souvenirs.
Photo of Christina Svane in “Every Grain of Sand” by Leonie Ravestein
If you are interested, here is a pencil sketch of my dancing life:
I was born in San Francisco and began dance improvisation study at age 4, at the San Francisco Ballet. Later, I discovered modern dance, barefoot! with Ann Woodhead, and knew this was what I wanted. I co-founded a dance company in high school, and chose Bennington College because it was one of the very few colleges in the 70′s where you could major in Dance. There I studied with Steve Paxton, Martha Wittman, Judith Dunn, Jack Moore, Anthony La Giglia, Remy Charlip, and the wonderful composers Bill Dixon and Milford Graves.
When I graduated, I moved to NYC with Daniel Lepkoff and discovered a warm community of dancers sharing new techniques such as Somatics, Release Technique, Body Mind Centering, and contact improvisation, which I had learned from its founder, Steve Paxton. I created video dance pieces with Lisa Nelson, and large group pieces that I showed at Danspace/St.Marks, with Stephen Petronio, Valda Setterfield, Cynthia Hedstrom, Tony Carruthers, and others.
At this time a group of us, instigated by Mary Overlie, created Movement Research, which is now in its 31st year. I danced in David Gordon’s company for a few seasons, and then toured Europe with Freelance, a collective of Steve Paxton, Daniel Lepkoff, Nancy Stark Smith, Lisa Nelson and myself. We had a month long residency at the Theatreschool in Amsterdam, thanks to Pauline de Groot, a Dutch dancer who had been in Martha Graham’s company before discovering “soft work” as she called it.
In 1986 the Theatreschool asked me to return and join their faculty, which was like being in Grand Central Station watching dancers from all over the world coming to study, teach or perform. A great privilege to be part of it. I stayed in Amsterdam 10 years, with my husband, guitarist Bill O’Haire. I made an opera to Inanna, did a lot of one-woman shows, and started IDEA (Int’l Dance Exchange of Amsterdam) where the audience wrote spontaneous reflections immediately after seeing short performances, then everyone read their writings in the closing circle. This structure was distilled from the moving/singing/writing forms we were experimenting with in my “Moving Words” workshops.
With our daughters Bridget and Madeleine, we moved to Clonakilty Ireland in 1996. I taught classes in elementary schools combining imagination excercises with movement and writing, and performed as a dancer as well as a storyteller. I also organized storytelling festivals and puppetry workshops.
After 2 years, we moved home to California, where I taught children poetry with movement in the public schools, and movement classes in after school programs. Billy and I also taught American folk songs through Young Audiences. I had the chance to perform with my first teacher, Ann Woodhead, as well.
Now in West Hatfield, since 2001, we work out of The Blue Guitar Dance Studio. I teach classes for children and adults, and Billy teaches guitar lessons. We also host dance performances, music concerts, and benefits for Partners in Health, working in Haiti. (We are the representatives for Western Mass.)