MOVEMENT WORKSHOPS
BIRD BRAIN offers two different types of workshops, the Introductory Workshop and the Dance Workshop.

Introductory Workshop
Each performance of BIRD BRAIN includes a brief introductory workshop on navigation and sensory perception that helps prepare the audience to experience the performance.

Workshop Description: Investigate dancing as a navigational/migrational process

"Migration is specialized behavior especially evolved for the displacement of the individual in space." (Entomologist Hugh Dingle)

This could easily be a definition of dancing. As dancer/improvisers, we tune and hone our skills of navigation in order to move through the moment of creation with acute sensitivity to our surroundings, cultivating our senses to be prepared for the unpredictable and unexpected.

How do we navigate? Touch, smell, hearing, sight. This workshop explores how our perceptions can take us into movement and vice a versa, and how movement choices can change how we perceive and navigate through the world. No experience is necessary to participate in this workshop.

Dance Workshop (For professional dancers)
Workshop Description: A workshop on navigation from the point of view of the body
Jennifer Monson and the BIRD BRAIN team lead movement workshops with local performers, focusing on navigational processes. The workshop participants are often integrated into local BIRD BRAIN performance events. These performance structures are influenced by each particular location and by the gathered local participants.

The workshop begins with a heightening of our own awareness of navigational strategies and senses. This includes exercises that cultivate our ability to localize sounds, sensitize our responses to light and our perception of shape, touch and direction, activate the desires of the eyes and our responses to environmental elements, temperature, wind, humidity. All these perceptions are then channeled into our own personal navigation of the imagination and how that guides our creative processes and forms our dances/performances.