Taste & Smell is an approach to dance. Hip Hop & West African dance languages inform the way B&A energetically confront contemporary dance and theater; however, this is not a Hip Hop or West African dance class.

Hearing, sight, and touch are always present in dance training.  Our class asks dancers to connect more actively to their taste and smell, using those senses as a literal and metaphorical reference point to engage with movement. Let’s activate all 5 senses to enlarge the experience of performance, to expand beyond practical execution of movement, to give nuance and idiosyncratic presence to each dancer.  Let's step outside the internal and into an externalized experience with rigor and curiosity. Let's attack the warmup, technical exercises, and phrase work with hungry mouths and greedy nostrils:

• We’ll research how sensory awareness effects pedestrian and virtuosic movement

• We’ll investigate improvisational scores that build awareness of detail and creative decision making

• We’ll sharpen our performance techniques and externalize our experience with our eyes, using an active focus to create a dialogue with our environment that invites the possibility of character and narrative

• We’ll play with rhythm to understand its relationship to muscular tension and effort in the body

• We’ll challenge the idea that dance should look and feel effortless

• We’ll create an empathetic space to tackle phrases with physical courage 

Class is sweaty. Everyone is welcome.

Baye & Asa is a dance company creating movement art projects directed by Amadi ‘Baye’ Washington & Sam ‘Asa’ Pratt. Hip Hop and African dance languages are the foundation of their technique and the rhythms of these techniques inform the way they energetically confront contemporary dance and theatre.

SATURDAY, MAY 13TH

10AM - 11:45AM

THE LAUNCHPAD, 76 S 4TH ST CARBONDALE, CO

$20