Megan Bridge: Widening the Circle
A Movement Improvisation and Somatics Workshop
July 8-12, 2024
A Weeklong Intensive Movement Workshop with Megan Bridge
This week-long intensive workshop is an invitation into movement, mindfulness, and presence. Choreographer and performer Megan Bridge’s performance, teaching, and research centers around consciousness & attention in the embodied, moving self. This class will guide students to heighten perception and use all their senses, accessing their own phenomenological experience and using it as the very material of their own performance. Formal dance training is not required, but participants should be comfortable in their bodies and, ideally, have some kind of regular physical practice.
In the morning we will start with a slow warm up using breath, stillness, and quiet, beginning to allow a multitude of signals into our experience with each passing moment. Partnered as well as solo bodywork exercises will be introduced, using touch, weight sharing, massage, and meditative stretching to wake into the body. In the afternoon, we will continue to tune our embodied perception: picking up communication, we move and dance in deep physical resonance with our space, with sound, and with each other. We will progress to dancing in groups and performing for each other, collectively devising movement scores for group improvisation.
In Widening the Circle: Movement Improvisation and Somatics, Megan Bridge’s teaching draws on her own decades-long investigations into bodywork, somatics, dancing improvisationally, and her intensive study with masters of improvised dance such as Brigitta Herrmann, Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Manfred Fischbeck, and Merian Soto.
Schedule
Classes run daily July 8th -12th from 9:30am to 3:30pm
Daily Schedule:
9:30am – 10:30am – Warm Up
10:30am – 12:30pm – Body work, somatics, stretching
12:30pm – 1:30pm – Lunch
1:30pm – 3:30pm – Movement Improvisation and cool down
Pricing + Registrations
Full Week Tuition: $300
Full Week FringeArts Member Tuition: $270
Single Day Tuition: $70 per class
To request financial aid for this course, please reach out to programming@fringearts.com.
About the Artist
Megan Bridge is a performer, choreographer, educator and writer based in Philadelphia. Her most recent performances and choreographies premiered at The Philadelphia Museum of Art (The Bach Cello Suites Project, 2023 and enclosure…wellspring…
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Bridge holds a BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase, and an MFA in dance from Temple University. She teaches in the dance department at Temple, guest teaches and choreographs at other Philadelphia-area Universities, and has taught recently on tour in Poland, France, Bulgaria, Macedonia, and in Tbilisi, Georgia. Her teaching practice is focused on improvisation and contemporary dance technique, and she is particularly interested in the historical lineages and discursive frameworks that situate her work. Recently her creative and teaching practices have been in conversation with philosopher Erin Manning, affect theory, concepts of presence, and altered states of consciousness.
She has studied with Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Merian Soto, Manfred Fischbeck, Brigitta Herrmann, Rennie Harris, and Neil Greenberg, and has performed in works by choreographers Jerome Bel, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, Susan Rethorst, Willi Dorner, and with Group Motion Dance Company and Headlong Dance Theater in Philadelphia. She has received funding support from USArtists International, The Network of Ensemble Theaters, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, American Dance Abroad, and more.
