VELOCITY X RITUALS

REGISTER | Brooklyn based choreographer Ogemdi Ude leads a workshop focused on the fundamentals of majorette dance technique, and the contemporary experiments and transformations she couples it with in her performance work MAJOR. This class will include a high energy warm up, improv games and prompts, and set choreography. You will engage the roots of majorette dance: finding a collective body while remaining empowered in your individual approach as a dancer.

BIO:  Ogemdi Ude is a dance and interdisciplinary artist and educator based in Brooklyn. Her performance work focuses on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. Her work has been presented at Kampnagel, New York Live Arts, The Kitchen, Gibney, Harlem Stage, Danspace Project, Abrons Arts Center, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, and more. She is a 2025-2028 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and a 2025 Princess Grace Honoraria.

*Photo Jailyn Phillips-Wiley

REGISTER | This 2-hour movement class centers the development of groove, rhythm, and isolation skills and their application through phrasework crafted in real-time, both internalized and performative, and in conversation with peers. Rooted in Hip Hop, street, and jazz funk dance frameworks and set to R&B and funk rhythms, dancers will build an embodied foundation through focused groove and isolation studies before applying these textures, rhythms, and movement ideas into structured phrasework. Emphasis is placed on musical interpretation, spatial awareness, and adaptability, encouraging dancers to explore versatility in expression, orientation, and relationship to others in the space. The class supports dancers in further strengthening coordination in the body, retention, execution, and embodied musicality within a collaborative, process-driven learning environment. Level of Touch: This class will not require physical touch

BIO:

Annie Franklin (she/her) is a hybrid dance artist, educator, scholar, and Assistant Professor in the Department of Dance at Slippery Rock University. Her work bridges Hip Hop culture, street dance and contemporary concert dance through movement-based cultural discourse, identity exploration, and community-centered practice. Rooted in over 15 years of experience in Chicago’s Hip Hop and street dance scene, she also holds a BFA from Western Michigan University and an MFA from the University of Washington. Her teaching and creative work integrate Hip Hop and street dance aesthetics with contemporary dance, engaging with freestyle and improvisation and artistic creation as distinct yet overlapping frameworks. She has shared her work through the American College Dance Association, National Dance Education Organization, World of Dance, and the World Championships of Hip Hop, among others. Currently, she investigates Bruk Up, a Jamaican-rooted, Brooklyn-evolved street dance culture, with particular focus on its metaphysical approach to technique. Her forthcoming publication, Freeform Bruk Up: A State of Being, will appear in Peer Reviewed, Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies in its special issue, The Caribbean as a Pole for the African Diaspora in Winter 2025.

REGISTER |  Omega Flow Floorwork is a class that dives into the world of hip hop and club style Floorwork. It is open to all styles and levels, building on floor foundation, understanding weight shifts between upper and lower body, exploring creativity and building strength to expand your possibilities on the floor! Class structure is a warm up, building blocks to upperbody centered moves, exercises for priming the necessary muscle groups, across the floors and ending with creative time to explore.

REGISTER | In this workshop, we will dance guided by a series of simple structures that catapult us into a dialog with the environment around us and the terrain of our imaginations. This is not a technique class, but rather, a place where we will move with and for one another. It is designed for dancers who are searching for strategies to amplify their specificity and autonomy within choreographies. It is for choreographers who are interested in loosening their control over meaning and form in favor of something that approaches a conversation.

BIO

Since 1995, Heather Kravas has investigated choreographic, improvisation and collaborative practices in contemporary dance to explore the edges of performance.

REGISTER |

This one-time, two-hour improvisational-technique class examines the eye as part of the body, as expressive tool, and maybe even the window to the soul (really, the soul?).

Informed by my dance-based, drag-informed performance practice and research for my new work, How Do I Look? (onstage at On the Boards May 7-9), I delve into what we do with our eyes when we perform. What are our habits, and how do we make conscious choices? When is dance a visual art form and when is it sensation-based?

When I was young, I emerged into a dance world that immersed itself in the anti-spectacle aesthetic of the Judson Church school. At the time, a soft focus of the performer’s eye was de rigueur and I was often told to tone down my expressivity. I understood why. We were still busy undermining the fake showiness of other forms, and the dance was the star, not the dancer. But I questioned it. And then I became a drag queen.

We will move and dance. We will also introspect, reflect, write and watch.

BIO:

“I am an artist, performer, choreographer and writer. I made herstory as the first cis-woman to win a major drag queen pageant and subsequently my solo performance works have toured nationally and internationally in wide-ranging contexts from nightclubs to theaters to museums — from Joe’s Pub, New Museum and the historic Stonewall in New York City, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, ODC Theater, The Stud, CounterPulse and de Young Museum in San Francisco, and in Seattle, Los Angeles, New Orleans, Provincetown, London, Edinburgh, Berlin, Zürich, Paris, Reykjavik, Rome, Catania and Cork. I have created space for kids to dress drag queens at a major museum and created college curricula. I played the DIRT (originated by Justin Vivian Bond) in Taylor Mac’s Lily’s Revenge and Eurydike in Anne Carson’s ANTIGONICK. I engaged in public conversation with Gender Studies luminary Judith Butler and RuPaul bestie Michelle Visage within days of each other. My memoir Faux Queen: A Life in Drag is available January 25, 2022 from Amble Press/Bywater Books. Honors include residencies at Headlands Center for the Arts, Tanzhaus Zürich and Atlantic Center for the Arts, an Irvine Fellowship and residency at the de Young Museum, GOLDIE and BESTIE awards and 7X7 Magazine’s Hot 20. I have been nominated for the Theater Bay Area, Isadora Duncan Dance (IZZIE) and Herb Alpert Foundation awards and have received support from San Francisco Arts Commission, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, CHIME, Center for Cultural Innovation and the Kenneth Rainin and Zellerbach Family foundations.”

REGISTER | Sequins Sequence is a movement workshop focused on generating and linking together contemporary, improvisational and floorwork based movement sequences. Led by slowdanger directors, anna thompson and taylor knight, participants will be facilitated through repetitive and iterative based movement pathways that focus on somatic sensation, texture and sustainable pathways, building and linking them together as the session goes on to create longer phrases and choreographic sequences. This class is a research based class and allows space for taking time to discover pathways and question how it can evolve and change for each unique mover. This workshop is for the intermediate-advanced/professional mover.

BIO: taylor knight and anna thompson are co-founding artistic directors of slowdanger, a multidisciplinary performance organism founded in Pittsburgh, PA in 2013. slowdanger uses systematic approaches to movement, technology, sound, queer world building and ontological examination to produce performance work, utilizing process based practice to delve into circular life patterning including effort, transformation, and death. From engaging a multi-channel sound installation to teaching dance at a queer rave in the woods, they transform their shape to adapt to a variety of different containers. slowdanger has performed across North America and Europe in venues ranging from proscenium theater and gallery to nightclub and dive bar. The name, slowdanger, was inspired by the Pittsburgh road construction signs that signify a demolition of old surfaces to build upon the remnants. They return to this overarching concept cyclically in performance creation; rebuilding, slowing down to examine the remains and re-imagine new futures. Recently, slowdanger was awarded a NPN Creation Fund, New Music USA’s New Music Organization Fund, the inaugural Texas A&M New Work Development Artist in Residence, and a Jacob’s Pillow Pillow Lab for the creation of STORY BALLET that will premier in fall 2026.