Saturday, May 17, 2025. 7 to 9pm
Ottawa Dance Directive
$20 to $30, Sliding Scale
cash at the door or e-transfer to:
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All levels welcome. Come as a stand-alone event or join as part of the Ottawa CI Mini-Festival: Through the Looking Glass, hosted by Laurinda Cheng:
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Phosphorescence; the glow on the face of the dying; the deepening wisdom age brings; the crack of sunlight streaming through the broken place in the prison wall: in what ways does bright light find us, unexpectedly, in the places we least expect to find it? How do we bring levity to dark places? How do we harvest discovery in the midst of great loss? How do we source the invisible but palpable sunrise lurking in the night-time places? What good might we make of all the shadows that fall?
This dance improvisation class will build on the muscle developed when we keep turning to face the night. Exercises for solo, partner, and group dances.
Offered in conjunction with the Ottawa CI Mini-Festival:
Through the Looking Glass, this evening class is about seeing GREAT JOY as the surprising shadow-side of the things we often wish did not exist.
The first half of class offers structured exercises to hone the view towards the shining underbelly. The second half involves a structured group improvised performance, where we practice being both performer (the one who exposes) and witness (the one who holds the space of exposition).
No experience necessary - only a willingness to show up in reverence, to see a little past the frame.
About the Instructor:
Kristen Lewis engages dance as a fundamental metaphor and doorway into an expanded view of our life in time - its possibilities, its limitations, its sorrows and its as yet under-explored joys. She uses dance as a medium to explore wider capacities of the “human project,” with an ethic that values generosity, discipline, playfulness, warriorship, courage, and a kindness that comes when we touch the taproot of compassion that makes it possible to go on - and even to enjoy the show.
From 2010 to the present, Kristen has developed a teaching and performance practice focused on exposing the fundamental habits and possibilities of the self, past the frame of the normative conditioning that severely limits expressive possibility in a world narrated too narrowly by the norms of excessive digitization, widespread and unnecessary economic precarity, manufactured fear - and not enough bodily life.
Kristen’s training and major teachers include, in chronological order, from 1982 to the present: creative dance (Halifax Dance), gymnastics (Keiji Yamanaka), ballet (Clare Bader), competitive distance running (Clifford Mathews), yoga & meditation (Chogyum Trungpa), experimental theatre & performance art (Thomas Taylor, Performance Studies International, Rumen Rachev), Lakota-Cree Ceremonial tradition (David Westcott), Laban and Developmental Movement-based contemporary dance (Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Anne Green Gilbert), law (University of Victoria, Osgoode Hall Law School - Benjamin Berger), systema (Yuri Beskrovny) and contact improvisation as relational practice (Stu Phillips).
When not dancing, Kristen can be found gritting her teeth as she nurtures an emerging identity as a suburban divorce lawyer, to supplant her former calling as a security professional. This latest endeavour is made possible by a deepening meditation practice, a beginner’s study of martial arts - and good friends, the strength of whose example inspires her daily.
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