Gender Bender 2017 Workshop Schedule
Workshops Descriptions + Instructor Bios
Saturday
Embodied Consent — Carey French
Consent is more than “yes means yes” and “no means no.” To connect joyfully with others, we must have the skills to co-create our mutual safety! Consent reimagines relationship by celebrating our sovereignty and inviting a critical awareness of social power dynamics that raises us all up. Embodying consent empowers us to be present with our bodies, know our true boundaries, communicate authentically, and navigate disappointment with grace. Collectively, we are creating the kind of culture in which we can thrive!
Carey French is a queer white cis woman with a deep yearning to replace rape culture with consent culture and facilitate our collective healing. She integrates somatic experiences of consent with nuanced discussions of power and privilege, inviting an embodied style of learning to get at the heart of what consent really means. She chews hard on the word ‘integrity.’ She supports individuals and communities in practicing tools for safe, authentic connection and mutual pleasure! She thinks boundaries are sexy.
Dancing in Role-Neutral Embrace — Aimee Eddins + Leah Vendl
Partnered dance comes alive when dancers are engaged in rich conversation and play. In this class we’ll explore role-neutral embrace to expand the spectrum of your dance dialogue. From breakaway to body-to-body connection, sensitize yourself to moments when your partner is striving to speak—or to listen—through changes in tone, direction and speed. Expand your sense of what communicative frame feels like and activate your own responsive embrace.
Aimee Eddins has been dancing since before she was born. Her parents were regular Contra and Square dancers before her birth, a habit her family found again when she was 8. After contra came ballet, tap and jazz. Then in college, Aimee fell in love with Argentine Tango. The magic connection between partners sealed the deal for dance becoming an integral part of her life. Since then, it’s been a wonderful adventure with Lindy Hop, Blues, Bellydance, Contra, Fusion Partner Dance, Ecstatic Dance, Traditional Women’s Dances from the Orient (with Anar Dana), and Capoeira. Aimee focuses on how individual technique and connection to the music and oneself can create and improve connection with others. Currently, she lives, teaches and organizes blues and fusion dances in Denver, CO.
Leah Vendl is an improviser, dance adventurer, and organizing member of Recess Productions who has taught at blues dance and fusion events across the US, in the UK and in France. She has been dancing since she had someone to dance with, but fell in love with social partner dancing 10 years ago. Leah has found her dancing voice by way of contemporary dance, improvisation, solo movement, blues dance, and through the communities she's been a part of. She teaches a role-fluid, consent-centered dance practice.
Theatre of the Oppressed — Ouardane Jouannot + Max Macamaux
So many times we go through oppressive situations without knowing how to respond, what to say or what to do. Brazilian dramaturge Augusto Boal created the forum theatre as a political tool to train us to fight oppression. During this workshop, a group of actors will act a short play portraying an oppressive situation. As a spect-actor, you will then get an opportunity to change the course of the events by offering different ways to act to the protagonist. The importance of this work is to generate ideas and discussion about the situations we suffer from and teach other what we’ve learned and how to help using the full range of the expression of our bodies and voices. We will write a short play for this occasion, and we want to make this as relevant as possible to what the participants face, so please reach out to us with ideas and struggles!
Max Macamaux is an actor, improviser, award-winning writer and director from Southern Rhode Island. Max works at the Contemporary Theater Company as the Associate Artistic Director. An improviser for the last 5 years, Max performs and directs weekly in Keith Johnstone formats Micetro and Gorilla Improv. Max also teaches Keith’s school of improv at the Contemporary Theater Company and at Middlebridge Boarding School in Narragansett, RI.
Ouardane Jouannot (Dane) is a french improviser who has been performing and teaching for a decade. They have been performing with META, Smoking Sofa, The Parisian Gentlemen of Paris, and the Contemporary Theatre Company in Hawaii, Seattle, Lyon and many other places. They are strongly influenced by Keith Johnstone’s work and has trained with Keith and his students, as well as other schools of improvisation. Dane is an enthusiastic teacher who likes to work hard and bring their students to the next level in a playful and failure positive atmosphere!
Embodied Consent — Carey French
Consent is more than “yes means yes” and “no means no.” To connect joyfully with others, we must have the skills to co-create our mutual safety! Consent reimagines relationship by celebrating our sovereignty and inviting a critical awareness of social power dynamics that raises us all up. Embodying consent empowers us to be present with our bodies, know our true boundaries, communicate authentically, and navigate disappointment with grace. Collectively, we are creating the kind of culture in which we can thrive!
Carey French is a queer white cis woman with a deep yearning to replace rape culture with consent culture and facilitate our collective healing. She integrates somatic experiences of consent with nuanced discussions of power and privilege, inviting an embodied style of learning to get at the heart of what consent really means. She chews hard on the word ‘integrity.’ She supports individuals and communities in practicing tools for safe, authentic connection and mutual pleasure! She thinks boundaries are sexy.
Dancing in Role-Neutral Embrace — Aimee Eddins + Leah Vendl
Partnered dance comes alive when dancers are engaged in rich conversation and play. In this class we’ll explore role-neutral embrace to expand the spectrum of your dance dialogue. From breakaway to body-to-body connection, sensitize yourself to moments when your partner is striving to speak—or to listen—through changes in tone, direction and speed. Expand your sense of what communicative frame feels like and activate your own responsive embrace.
Aimee Eddins has been dancing since before she was born. Her parents were regular Contra and Square dancers before her birth, a habit her family found again when she was 8. After contra came ballet, tap and jazz. Then in college, Aimee fell in love with Argentine Tango. The magic connection between partners sealed the deal for dance becoming an integral part of her life. Since then, it’s been a wonderful adventure with Lindy Hop, Blues, Bellydance, Contra, Fusion Partner Dance, Ecstatic Dance, Traditional Women’s Dances from the Orient (with Anar Dana), and Capoeira. Aimee focuses on how individual technique and connection to the music and oneself can create and improve connection with others. Currently, she lives, teaches and organizes blues and fusion dances in Denver, CO.
Leah Vendl is an improviser, dance adventurer, and organizing member of Recess Productions who has taught at blues dance and fusion events across the US, in the UK and in France. She has been dancing since she had someone to dance with, but fell in love with social partner dancing 10 years ago. Leah has found her dancing voice by way of contemporary dance, improvisation, solo movement, blues dance, and through the communities she's been a part of. She teaches a role-fluid, consent-centered dance practice.
Theatre of the Oppressed — Ouardane Jouannot + Max Macamaux
So many times we go through oppressive situations without knowing how to respond, what to say or what to do. Brazilian dramaturge Augusto Boal created the forum theatre as a political tool to train us to fight oppression. During this workshop, a group of actors will act a short play portraying an oppressive situation. As a spect-actor, you will then get an opportunity to change the course of the events by offering different ways to act to the protagonist. The importance of this work is to generate ideas and discussion about the situations we suffer from and teach other what we’ve learned and how to help using the full range of the expression of our bodies and voices. We will write a short play for this occasion, and we want to make this as relevant as possible to what the participants face, so please reach out to us with ideas and struggles!
Max Macamaux is an actor, improviser, award-winning writer and director from Southern Rhode Island. Max works at the Contemporary Theater Company as the Associate Artistic Director. An improviser for the last 5 years, Max performs and directs weekly in Keith Johnstone formats Micetro and Gorilla Improv. Max also teaches Keith’s school of improv at the Contemporary Theater Company and at Middlebridge Boarding School in Narragansett, RI.
Ouardane Jouannot (Dane) is a french improviser who has been performing and teaching for a decade. They have been performing with META, Smoking Sofa, The Parisian Gentlemen of Paris, and the Contemporary Theatre Company in Hawaii, Seattle, Lyon and many other places. They are strongly influenced by Keith Johnstone’s work and has trained with Keith and his students, as well as other schools of improvisation. Dane is an enthusiastic teacher who likes to work hard and bring their students to the next level in a playful and failure positive atmosphere!
Sunday
TransLiterate: A Gender Workshop — Dylan Wilder Quinn
Customized for facilitators and participants of Gender Bender, TransLiterate is a workshop to learn to use language and build embodied compassion to be skillfully inclusive or lovingly exclusive of trans and genderqueer people.
This workshop thrives on having people of all genders present. It follows a healing arc, integrates spirituality, and focuses on building relationships to dive into complex and emotional topics. I will be setting a container where people with different levels of familiarity with this topic will be welcome to come and speak their truth, though this workshop is specifically set for people who already have the intention of love and inclusivity towards trans and genderqueer people. The intention is to create a healing container for trans people while cis-gender people practice fully embodying their own allyship and urgency around creating gender-safe spaces for all genders.
I am a working-class, trans nonbinary white person who strives to bring a lens of oppression and liberation into the work I do. I am white, and I try to bring anti-racism into all of my work, though being white, I am far from perfect at it and welcome accountability from people of color and anti-racist white organizers. Many aspects of oppression that affect trans folks also affect people of color, and much of the work we will be doing together involves undoing aspects of white culture that oppress all marginalized groups, including trans people.
Dylan Wilder Quinn (they/he pronouns) is the founder of Wildly Healed, an organization that seeks to create a platform of systemic liberation with a lens of healing our individual and collective traumas through connection, spirituality, pleasure, and political change. When he’s not spending time exploring the pleasure and pain of dancing, ecosexuality, and building authentic relationships, he spends his time as an anti-racist and trans organizer. Dylan is a working class-encultured, trans nonbinary white person. They facilitate trans and gender education workshops, white culture workshops, sensual and pleasure parties, read tarot, and collectivize with people who know that another world is possible.
The Invisible Dance — Loretta Laurin
Radically redefine how you think about partner dancing - beyond the technique, past the fancy moves or vocabulary, and even deeper than lead/follow connection. What’s at the heart of it? Pop open your awareness about the subtle elements that inform the dance but aren’t usually talked about: body language, how we engage and relate to each other, what stories we tell ourselves, and what assumptions we project into the world. We’ll also unpack how systemic structures unique to the social dance scene affect us, and how to address them through our dance. Through a mix of open conversation and fun movement exercises, we’ll explore how we can become more empowered in our dance experience, and more embodied in our awareness.
Loretta Laurin (they/she pronouns) hails from Vancouver, BC and has a diverse set of life influences and a fluid sense of identity and expression. They have a background in social activism and are a co-founder of Shift Delivery (a worker’s co-operative that uses large tricycles to replace truck deliveries in downtown Vancouver). She is also an embodiment enthusiast, and has been teaching dance, fitness, pilates, and yoga for over 7 years. Loretta studied fusion dance with Night and Day Dance, and has influences from a wide variety of forms including contact improv and contemporary dance. They are also the founder of the School of Sense, which runs integrated workshops exploring where art meets activism. They currently work a “regular adult desk job” for Hollyhock, a non-profit learning center on Cortes Island, BC. She also loves clowning, theatre games, home-making, and eating blueberries!
TransLiterate: A Gender Workshop — Dylan Wilder Quinn
Customized for facilitators and participants of Gender Bender, TransLiterate is a workshop to learn to use language and build embodied compassion to be skillfully inclusive or lovingly exclusive of trans and genderqueer people.
This workshop thrives on having people of all genders present. It follows a healing arc, integrates spirituality, and focuses on building relationships to dive into complex and emotional topics. I will be setting a container where people with different levels of familiarity with this topic will be welcome to come and speak their truth, though this workshop is specifically set for people who already have the intention of love and inclusivity towards trans and genderqueer people. The intention is to create a healing container for trans people while cis-gender people practice fully embodying their own allyship and urgency around creating gender-safe spaces for all genders.
I am a working-class, trans nonbinary white person who strives to bring a lens of oppression and liberation into the work I do. I am white, and I try to bring anti-racism into all of my work, though being white, I am far from perfect at it and welcome accountability from people of color and anti-racist white organizers. Many aspects of oppression that affect trans folks also affect people of color, and much of the work we will be doing together involves undoing aspects of white culture that oppress all marginalized groups, including trans people.
Dylan Wilder Quinn (they/he pronouns) is the founder of Wildly Healed, an organization that seeks to create a platform of systemic liberation with a lens of healing our individual and collective traumas through connection, spirituality, pleasure, and political change. When he’s not spending time exploring the pleasure and pain of dancing, ecosexuality, and building authentic relationships, he spends his time as an anti-racist and trans organizer. Dylan is a working class-encultured, trans nonbinary white person. They facilitate trans and gender education workshops, white culture workshops, sensual and pleasure parties, read tarot, and collectivize with people who know that another world is possible.
The Invisible Dance — Loretta Laurin
Radically redefine how you think about partner dancing - beyond the technique, past the fancy moves or vocabulary, and even deeper than lead/follow connection. What’s at the heart of it? Pop open your awareness about the subtle elements that inform the dance but aren’t usually talked about: body language, how we engage and relate to each other, what stories we tell ourselves, and what assumptions we project into the world. We’ll also unpack how systemic structures unique to the social dance scene affect us, and how to address them through our dance. Through a mix of open conversation and fun movement exercises, we’ll explore how we can become more empowered in our dance experience, and more embodied in our awareness.
Loretta Laurin (they/she pronouns) hails from Vancouver, BC and has a diverse set of life influences and a fluid sense of identity and expression. They have a background in social activism and are a co-founder of Shift Delivery (a worker’s co-operative that uses large tricycles to replace truck deliveries in downtown Vancouver). She is also an embodiment enthusiast, and has been teaching dance, fitness, pilates, and yoga for over 7 years. Loretta studied fusion dance with Night and Day Dance, and has influences from a wide variety of forms including contact improv and contemporary dance. They are also the founder of the School of Sense, which runs integrated workshops exploring where art meets activism. They currently work a “regular adult desk job” for Hollyhock, a non-profit learning center on Cortes Island, BC. She also loves clowning, theatre games, home-making, and eating blueberries!
Both Days
Group Choral Rehearsals + Serenade — Soule
Throughout the days we will have breaks where we sing together, two beautiful song arrangements by Soule. We'll serenade each other Sunday evening!.
*You can find the vocal parts to listen to and choose from HERE!*
Group Choral Rehearsals + Serenade — Soule
Throughout the days we will have breaks where we sing together, two beautiful song arrangements by Soule. We'll serenade each other Sunday evening!.
*You can find the vocal parts to listen to and choose from HERE!*
Artwork by N.O. Bonzo