The Young Dancers Intensive offers five courses each day, with study in Modern, Ballet, Afro-Modern, Improvisation, Street Styles, Composition and various somatic practices.

To ensure rigor and safety in all classes, students must have a minimum of three years of current and continuous dance training. All dancers take Somatics, Street Styles and Modern Dance Technique, and can design their afternoon schedule from week to week. Students may participate in Ballet, Composition, Contact Improvisation, or different Repertory experiences with visiting artists. Dancers can swap their afternoon courses from week-to-week, creating a diverse and well-rounded experience!

Morning Courses

Somatics – Tristan Koepke

In this morning practice, we will explore foundational concepts of embodiment, alignment, rhythm, community and sustainability as preparation and education for rigorous dancing. We will warm up for the day with a focus on line, flexibility, extension, and strength. This class combines yoga, ballet, breath work, martial arts, contact improvisation, and movement integration.  Additionally, we will learn tools for recovery and injury prevention, and most importantly, wake up to the vast potential our dancing bodies hold. 

Contemporary Practice – Alfonso Cervera

Poc-Chuc Danza Contemporanea: A Mexican American hybrid movement dance form that exchanges knowledge between Ballet Folklorico, Afro-Latine social dances, and release technique, to experiment with the possibilities of how these forms intersect, challenge, and collaborate with one another. The practice of Poc-Chuc intentionally works to offer new choreographic methods, techniques, and perspectives in theory and physical embodiment. This class will be a fusion of these various techniques that will ask us to learn various diasporic sequences, rhythms, and intentionality’s of how and why we dance these forms. Be ready to sweat and to offer your full self to the community that is embodying this practice.

Contemporary Practice – Kristin O’Neal

Considering the weight of our bones to activate deep core muscles, we will invite ease and efficiency into our movement while conditioning thoughtfully and readying the body for the myriad physical relationships that contemporary modern dance asks of us.  We will sense all surfaces of our bodies in contact with the floor, noticing anchor points of stability to find freedom of movement in our joints and in space with others, while sliding, swinging, suspending, falling, pouring, gliding and all the things that inspire us along the way.

Street Styles – Brandon Allen Juezan-Williams, Allie James

Street Dance is a cultural art form with a rich history. In this class, students will learn the vocabulary techniques of various street styles including Hip Hop, House, and Krump along with their associated historical contexts. Additionally, students will explore street dance composition through choreography, as well as express their individuality and creative freedom through the art of freestyle dance.

Afternoon Courses

Ballet – Martha Tornay

This class will begin with a gentle and thorough barre and escalate to more physically challenging
movements in the center. By staying present to the moment, and honing into the needs of the
participants, students will gain something to take out of the studio with them, thus allowing ballet to
be a functional addition to their physical practice. This class is suitable for advanced beginners as
well as more advanced dancers who want to revisit ballet basics.

Composition  – Laquimah VanDunk

Dance Composition through PLAY!

Class strives to build community, push movement invention and experience making, as a participant and an observer. We will work in tandem to develop skills in observing dance and learning how to articulate responses to what we see both verbally and in writing.

We will challenge our physical and creative endurance, while striving to create an open and honest environment that motivates hard work and individual research in finding the quality of the performance the movement demands.

This class relies heavily on game play, improvisation, collaboration and various art mediums as choreographic devices.

Repertory – Junichi Fukuda

Week 1

This repertory course provides a studio-based practice focusing on developing technical expertise, expressive range, and stylistic clarity from the choreographer’s lens. Students will learn and perform a short dance work encouraging rich, subtle, and stylistically accurate renditions of choreography while engaging students in collaborative learning.

Repertory – Laura Osterhaus

Week 2

This repertory course will consist of the remounting of CUSP, an original work premiered in 2022. CUSP uses both set choreography and improvisation to explore the notion of being on the verge of great change. This creative process will give dancers the opportunity to find themselves and their artistry within the structure of a previously set work that involves slowness, hyper-musicality, active listening, and sense of groove to bring the performer’s attention to the possibility of the present moment. CUSP is a contemporary dance piece with heavy influence of Hip-Hop, House, and authentic jazz vocabulary and values.