VELOCITY X RITUALS
The Velocity x Rituals Pop Up Class Series was founded in 2025 by Velocity Dance Center and Rituals. This program facilitates a local and national exchange between artists in the dance field by offering classes and workshops in the Seattle area. Velocity and Rituals are excited to invest in this partnership, founded on intentional community building, process over product, and physical research through the tender magic of class taking.
Current programmatic partners include On the Boards.
Click the link to sign up for class, or scroll down to lear more about each offering.
CLASS OFFERINGS
MAIA MELENE D'URFÉ | SEP 30 | 9:30 - 11:30 AM // NOD Theater
Improvisational Practices – Expanding our Range of Possabilities
REGISTER | We will explore how we can change our range of possibilities in our bodies by conceptualizing new pathways and attempting (sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully) to accomplish the abstract idea or image we have in our minds. This class is primarily structured improvisation derived from a range of methodologies that help to create the physical and mental parameters to allow dancers to experience their bodies, space, movement, and their imagination in new ways.
BIO:
maia melene d’urfé is a dancer and choreographer who creates movement as a genuine expression of their sensations, convictions, and fears. They dance with Seattle contemporary dance and House communities; their choreography has been presented internationally at FIDCDMX and Quinzena Internacional de Dança de Almada, nationally in New York City, North Carolina, Maine and in Seattle WA through Velocity Dance Center, Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, Seattle International Dance Festival, and their own independent productions. They find their voice through quality of movement, their language through physical facility, and flow through melody and rhythm, all to investigate facets of the human condition and how we respond to change within the self, our relationships, and wider culture.
*Photo by Jim Coleman
REGISTER | This class is structured as a standard dance class for intermediate and advanced contemporary dancers. It begins with a warm-up, focusing on strengthening and mobility, while finding groove and accessing varying movement qualities and textures. We use metaphors, images, and auditory cues as tools to find sensations in the body that ideally inspire us to move.
The second part is choreography and composition, where dancers learn a series of movements with a focus on clarity, expansiveness, efficiency, and spirituality—while applying ideas previously explored in the warm-up.
By spirituality, I mean dancing with intentionality—connecting to something larger than ourselves and the space we’re in. It’s about tuning into instinct, accessing groove, and moving from a place of presence and depth.
BIO:
Jobel Medina (b. 1990, Pasig City, Philippines) is a Filipino-American dancer and choreographer based in Los Angeles.
His choreographic practice engages with the inherent contradictions between commercial and experimental modes of performance, negotiating a dynamic space where spectacle intersects with subtlety. His work explores the productive tension between explosive physicality and nuanced restraint, positioning contradiction as a generative force within his creative process.
Medina’s work spans the United States and France, and he has collaborated with renowned artists such as Tino Sehgal, Benjamin Millepied, Dimitri Chamblas, Alex Prager, Kim Gordon, Simon McBurney, Shahar Binyamini, Danielle Agami, and Tom Weinberger.
His choreography has been presented at leading institutions including the Philharmonie de Paris (with Los Angeles Dance Project), The Broad Museum (Los Angeles), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Musée d’Orsay (Paris), and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles).
He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts and has taught at various universities across the United States.
REGISTER | Conducted by Vanessa Goodman and Simona Deaconescu, this workshop explores the shifting boundaries between the real and the imagined body. Starting with grounding practices of guided self-TLC, we move into folding, softening, sliding bones, expanding, and compressing—working through structural organization while opening space for new vocabulary. Participants are invited to explore decentralized and chimeric embodiments, moving beyond fixed notions of anatomy, control, and identity.
Drawing inspiration from natural and technological systems, we explore how the body can continuously morph and adapt to different environments—from the fluid intelligence of an octopus to the invisible networks of bacteria within us. Guided tasks in breath, volumetric movement, speed, and tensegrity support this exploration, encouraging participants to distort, fold, and extend their bodies beyond pattern. The goal is to develop a performative body attuned to atmospheric states, capable of generating layered compositions where meaning emerges both from what is visible and from what is imagined.
BIOS
Vanessa loves to exchange with people through facilitating workshops and classes. She has taught professional, pre-professional and community classes locally, nationally and internationally. She has recently taught at Simon Fraser University, Modus Operandi, The Vancouver Training Society and Lamon Dance. She has also facilitated for the Roundhouse Community Dancers, Trinity Laban’s Co-Lab (UK) and been on faculty at The Banff Centre for the Arts (Alberta).
Simona has built one of Bucharest’s most active contemporary dance training programs for non-professionals, engaging thousands of participants over the years, alongside workshops in technique and composition for professionals. She teaches regularly at the Academy of Dance and Performance within the National Centre for Dance Bucharest and has led workshops internationally.
*Photo by Adi Bulbboaca
Accessibility Notes
- This workshop includes auditive guidance.
Jodan Macintosh-Hougham | OCT 11 | 12 - 2 PM // 12T
How do I make myself a body?
REGISTER | You have everything you need already. Tap into the matrices of your programming. There are endless choices, and there is also only one. We will explore what is natural and what is artificial and there might not actually be a difference. You might hallucinate. You might let go. You might channel something larger than your Self. You might just take a silly little dance class.
This class is a guided improvisation-based movement experience open to all levels of experience and anyone who inhabits a body. Though we will be in space together and will relate to one another, we will primarily be on our own movement journeys. We may occasionally partner up to experience a hands-on idea, but this is always optional and alternatives will be provided.
BIO
Jordan MacIntosh-Hougham (they/them) holds a BA from Bennington College, and is currently based in Seattle. Jordan has performed for artists such as Kota Yamazaki, Dana Reitz, Heather Kravas, Morgan Thorson, Drama Tops, and Alice Gosti. They have participated in artist residencies at EMPAC, Velocity Dance Center and Studio Current, and had their work curated by On the Boards, Velocity Dance Center, WHYTEBERG, and Shaun Keylock Company. Under the mentorship of Stephanie Skura, they are a certified teacher of Open Source Forms: a somatic method and creative modality that offers specific tools to access depth, courage, integration, presence, and freedom. Jordan creates performance works that amplify video and telecommunication mediums as queer, transhuman collaborators.
REGISTER | Class will start with a ballet barre and segue into prompt-driven improvisatory scores—both of these entrances into/conversations with movement can offer us, as practitioners of diverse levels and
training, a landscape of generative play and imaginative rigor. we will shape-shift and risk-take;
challenge self-conceived limits of our generosity and curiosity; fortify our creative, investigative, and
physical stamina; plummet into joy, failure, and the exquisite messiness of having a body; and dare to
care deeply.
BIO:
Maurya Kerr (she/her) is a bay area-based artist and the artistic director of tinypistol. Much of her
work—across the disciplines of movement, film, writing, education, and curation—is focused on
black and brown people reclaiming their birthright to both wonderment and the quotidian. Maurya
was a member of Alonzo King LINES Ballet for twelve years, an ODC artist-in-residence from
2015 to 2018, and holds an MFA in dance from Hollins University. After co-curating ODC
Theater’s 2023/24 season, she was appointed as Resident Curator for their 2024/25 season, where
her curatorial stance was decisively anti-racist. Maurya’s sophomore film, Saint Leroi, was described
in the Village Voice as “a surreal meditation on Black history, violence, and American decay and a
powerful indictment of racism.” Maurya is a 2025 NEA Creative Writing Fellow, and her poetry has
been nominated for two Pushcart prizes, was a Best of the Net finalist, and appears in multiple
journals. Other recent honors include winning Rhino Poetry's 2024 Editor's Prize, second place in
Palette Poetry's 2023 Resistance & Resilience Prize, and first place in the 2022 Tom
Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contest. She is author of the chapbooks MUTTOLOGY and tommy
noun. (winner of the 2022 C&R Press Winter Soup Bowl Chapbook Award).
www.tinypistol.com
Bebe Miller | DEC 19 | 9:30 - 11:30 // NOD THEATER
Workshop with Bebe Miller
REGISTER | Description to come!
improvisational practices – expanding our range of possibilities
We will explore how we can change our range of possibilities in our bodies by conceptualizing new pathways and attempting (sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully) to accomplish the abstract idea or image we have in our minds. This class is primarily structured improvisation derived from a range of methodologies that help to create the physical and mental parameters to allow dancers to experience their bodies, space, movement, and their imagination in new ways.
BIO:
maia melene d’urfé is a dancer and choreographer who creates movement as a genuine expression of their sensations, convictions, and fears. They dance with Seattle contemporary dance and House communities; their choreography has been presented internationally at FIDCDMX and Quinzena Internacional de Dança de Almada, nationally in New York City, North Carolina, Maine and in Seattle WA through Velocity Dance Center, Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, Seattle International Dance Festival, and their own independent productions. They find their voice through quality of movement, their language through physical facility, and flow through melody and rhythm, all to investigate facets of the human condition and how we respond to change within the self, our relationships, and wider culture.
*Photo by Jim Coleman
WORKSHOP WITH JOBEL MEDINA
This class is structured as a standard dance class for intermediate and advanced contemporary dancers. It begins with a warm-up, focusing on strengthening and mobility, while finding groove and accessing varying movement qualities and textures. We use metaphors, images, and auditory cues as tools to find sensations in the body that ideally inspire us to move.
The second part is choreography and composition, where dancers learn a series of movements with a focus on clarity, expansiveness, efficiency, and spirituality—while applying ideas previously explored in the warm-up.
By spirituality, I mean dancing with intentionality—connecting to something larger than ourselves and the space we’re in. It’s about tuning into instinct, accessing groove, and moving from a place of presence and depth.
BIO:
Jobel Medina (b. 1990, Pasig City, Philippines) is a Filipino-American dancer and choreographer based in Los Angeles.
His choreographic practice engages with the inherent contradictions between commercial and experimental modes of performance, negotiating a dynamic space where spectacle intersects with subtlety. His work explores the productive tension between explosive physicality and nuanced restraint, positioning contradiction as a generative force within his creative process.
Medina’s work spans the United States and France, and he has collaborated with renowned artists such as Tino Sehgal, Benjamin Millepied, Dimitri Chamblas, Alex Prager, Kim Gordon, Simon McBurney, Shahar Binyamini, Danielle Agami, and Tom Weinberger.
His choreography has been presented at leading institutions including the Philharmonie de Paris (with Los Angeles Dance Project), The Broad Museum (Los Angeles), the Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Musée d’Orsay (Paris), and the Institute of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles).
He holds a Master of Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts and has taught at various universities across the United States.
improvisational practices – expanding our range of possibilities
We will explore how we can change our range of possibilities in our bodies by conceptualizing new pathways and attempting (sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully) to accomplish the abstract idea or image we have in our minds. This class is primarily structured improvisation derived from a range of methodologies that help to create the physical and mental parameters to allow dancers to experience their bodies, space, movement, and their imagination in new ways.
BIO:
maia melene d’urfé is a dancer and choreographer who creates movement as a genuine expression of their sensations, convictions, and fears. They dance with Seattle contemporary dance and House communities; their choreography has been presented internationally at FIDCDMX and Quinzena Internacional de Dança de Almada, nationally in New York City, North Carolina, Maine and in Seattle WA through Velocity Dance Center, Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, Seattle International Dance Festival, and their own independent productions. They find their voice through quality of movement, their language through physical facility, and flow through melody and rhythm, all to investigate facets of the human condition and how we respond to change within the self, our relationships, and wider culture.
*Photo by Jim Coleman
WORKSHOP WITH EIKO OTAKE
ABOUT:
BIO:
improvisational practices – expanding our range of possibilities
We will explore how we can change our range of possibilities in our bodies by conceptualizing new pathways and attempting (sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully) to accomplish the abstract idea or image we have in our minds. This class is primarily structured improvisation derived from a range of methodologies that help to create the physical and mental parameters to allow dancers to experience their bodies, space, movement, and their imagination in new ways.
BIO:
maia melene d’urfé is a dancer and choreographer who creates movement as a genuine expression of their sensations, convictions, and fears. They dance with Seattle contemporary dance and House communities; their choreography has been presented internationally at FIDCDMX and Quinzena Internacional de Dança de Almada, nationally in New York City, North Carolina, Maine and in Seattle WA through Velocity Dance Center, Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, Seattle International Dance Festival, and their own independent productions. They find their voice through quality of movement, their language through physical facility, and flow through melody and rhythm, all to investigate facets of the human condition and how we respond to change within the self, our relationships, and wider culture.
*Photo by Jim Coleman
improvisational practices – expanding our range of possibilities
We will explore how we can change our range of possibilities in our bodies by conceptualizing new pathways and attempting (sometimes successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully) to accomplish the abstract idea or image we have in our minds. This class is primarily structured improvisation derived from a range of methodologies that help to create the physical and mental parameters to allow dancers to experience their bodies, space, movement, and their imagination in new ways.
BIO:
maia melene d’urfé is a dancer and choreographer who creates movement as a genuine expression of their sensations, convictions, and fears. They dance with Seattle contemporary dance and House communities; their choreography has been presented internationally at FIDCDMX and Quinzena Internacional de Dança de Almada, nationally in New York City, North Carolina, Maine and in Seattle WA through Velocity Dance Center, Amy O’Neal, eXit Space, Seattle International Dance Festival, and their own independent productions. They find their voice through quality of movement, their language through physical facility, and flow through melody and rhythm, all to investigate facets of the human condition and how we respond to change within the self, our relationships, and wider culture.
*Photo by Jim Coleman