AD-HOC
September 18 - October 4
STUDIO MAYA
603 Bergen St, Brooklyn, NY 11238
AD HOC is a two week series of workshops centered around experimental improvisation and making performance with readily available materials. Each session will be led by a different artist (roster and calendar is listed below) and follow their unique line of inquiry into improvisational art making.
All workshops are open level, free and in person! Attendees are encouraged to participate in multiple courses, as the goal of the series is to broaden one's artistic interrogation and ignite curiosity by working across several mediums and to research what is at the heart of improvisation without having the confines of aesthetic or style informing artistic decision making.
To register, please email themillionunderscores@gmail.com with the dates and workshops you would like to attend. Attendance is being capped at twelve persons for the sake of COVID safety protocols, so please register early if you are interested. If you need to cancel for any reason, please try to let us know at your earliest convenience.
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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 18 // 12-4PM
Erin Mullin // SOURCE MATERIAL
Erin Mullin is an interdisciplinary theater artist based in New York. She is currently a company member of The Wooster Group with whom she will be performing in Bertolt Brecht's THE MOTHER this Fall.
This workshop will focus on SOURCE MATERIAL - an often used, sometimes misunderstood term and practice that is the building block of much contemporary devised work and improvisation.
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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 20 // 6:30-9:30PM
Jonah Udall // DEEP LISTENING
Jonah Udall is a guitarist, director and certified Deep Listening instructor, exploring the vast territory between improvisation and composition. He directs ECHOensemble, a movement and sound collective creating immersive-installation performances with a practice they call SHIFT. Jonah grew up in Berkeley, California, steeped in folk musics from around the world.
Deep Listening is an invitation to listen to everything (with our ears, bodies and imaginations), all the time (past, present and future), and remind ourselves when we are not listening. Deep Listening is the recognition that how we listen is who we are. Together we will listen to our listening -- sounding, moving and dreaming -- guided by the words and sonic meditations of the late Pauline Oliveros.
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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 22 // 6:30-9:30PM
Nicolás Noreña // DEAR CHAOS
Nicolás Noreña is a Colombian born, Brooklyn based experimental theater director. He creates, designs, produces and directs eccentric theater pieces that interrogate the action and form of theater. He is the artistic director of The Million Underscores_ _ and teaches Six Viewpoints at the Experimental Theater Wing in NYU. Nicolás' theater work is deeply influenced by Mary Overlie’s postmodernist philosophy and Richard Foreman’s total theater. Currently he is curious about electromagnetic energy, morphogenic fields and eccentric movement.
Through Chance, happenstance and randomization processes we will locate ourselves at the edges of our creativity and open its porousness to the richness of chaos and the un-reified. We will move our bodies, hold objects, watch and chat.
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SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 25 // 12-4PM
Paul Langland //WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW; Using Perception to Test, Choose and React in Performative Improvisation
Paul Langland is a New York based choreographer, performer, and educator. Since 1973, his work has been presented by many New York venues and worldwide. NYSCA, NYU, and the Jerome Foundation among others have funded his work. He was a member of the original Meredith Monk and Vocal Ensemble, has been a Contact Improviser since 1972, and has performed set and improvised works with many others including Mary Overlie, Wendell Beavers, Nina Martin, Daniel Lepkoff, Ping Chong, Lance Gries, Steve Paxton, Simone Forti, David Gordon, Barbara Dilley, Douglas Dunn, Elaine Summers, Sally Silvers, Andrea Kleine, Diane Torr, Kirstie Simpson, 600 Highwaymen, Nicolas Norena and Tim Scott, and the improv collaborative Channel Z. His collaboration with Brendan McCall, Almost Rapture, was a semi-finalist for choreography at the Bagnolet Dance Festival, North American Division. Langland founded the dance technique Allan Wayne Work, is an NYU Arts Professor and received the Brooklyn Arts Exchange (BAX) Arts Educator award in 2014. Mr Langland's performance archives are at New York University's Fales Library for Special Collections.
This workshop will utilize skills informed by sight, sound and touch that Mr. Langland has developed for many years to find rich and easily accessible physical improvisation material for workshop participants. Focusing on our perceptions rather than on advanced physical ability, we will explore solo, duet and ensemble possibilities of performative improvisation. We will start with careful solo and group warm-ups, then move into improvisational scores with supportive witnessing. This workshop is designed to welcome all ages and abilities.
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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 27 // 6:30-9:30PM
Lindsay Packer // LIGHTEN UP
Lindsay Packer plays with the call and response of color and light, form and site in performance, moving imagery and architectonic interventions. With a spontaneous spirit and non-hierarchical approach to materials and process, she connects the visual language of painting to the kineticism of early cinema. Pushing cinematic experience into real time and space, she calls out the contingent nature of form and perception and the ways temporal and physical structures are linked to point of view, expectations, and memory. Site, sound, movement, chance, and improvisation inform color and composition in all her work.
In this improvisatory and site-responsive workshop, we play with the dynamics between luminosity and physicality, body and architecture to bring moving imagery into real time and space. With a spirit of spontaneity and a non-hierarchical approach to materials and process, we borrow simple tools like paper and mirrors from our workshop environment, activate these things temporarily with light, color and movement and return them to their original context when the workshop ends. Our shared redistribution of physical and shadow forms establishes new chromatic and formal vocabularies unique to time and circumstance and resets possibilities for future interactions between color, form and perception.
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WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 29 // 6:30-9:30PM
Marija Kovačević // MOVING SOUND
Marija is a classically trained violinist whose improvised and experimental musical projects test limits of her violin based sonic practice using modified violins, electronics and extended techniques (glass, wood, paper, stone,etc). As a performer, she has been a part of The Million Underscores since 2016.
In this workshop we will be exploring ways in which we can make sound using environmental elements through the medium of the violin beyond its traditional understanding. No prior musical training is required.
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SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2 // 12-4PM
K.J. Holmes // RE-TUNINGS
K.J. Holmes, a Brooklyn based dance artist/actor/singer/writer, travels nationally and internationally teaching/performing/creating. K.J. has been exploring improvisation as process and performance since 1981. She has collaborated extensively with Julie Carr, Simone Forti, Karen Nelson, Lisa Nelson and Image Lab, Steve Paxton.
Based on the work of Lisa Nelson and the Tuning Score, this class will awaken participants to the use of their senses, perceptions and imagination as measures for improvising and composing dances individually and together as an ensemble.
How is the dancer an instrument and also the player of it?
How do we see through movement? How do we listen to our choices?
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MONDAY, OCTOBER 4 // 6:30-9:30PM
Timothy Scott // ENVIRONMENT/HORIZONTAL
Timothy is a performer and has worked with The Million Underscores since 2013. He was a long time student of Mary Overlie’s and continues to explore her improv based performance structures.
We will be looking at ourselves as horizontal performers in this workshop. We will improvise focusing on ourselves as material of performance and performance itself. We will research how we affect our environment, or hold our environment.