Teaching

Assistant Professor of Dance at Bowdoin College
Modern Technique, Repertory, Choreography for Dancers, Making Dances, Improvisation

Bates Dance Festival, Young Dancers Workshop
June 22-July 13, 2019 

Slow Wave Small Projects with Julia Aoki
August 2018, Old Dogwood Society for Arts and Ecology, Coast Salish Territories
Reading, writing, dancing, talking
Julia and Aretha will offer two separate but complementary workshops that consider/access/reflect on the diaristic or autobiographical mode, socially entangled personal history, and emplaced practice.
Dancing stories
Assuming our bodies contain multitudes, can we access these different voices through movement? Can we bring these voices to the surface, into the room, in the air we collectively breathe? We will access the potent space where perception meets sensation and the imagination. Where past, present and future converge. We will warm up through somatic exercises and image-based, improvisational structures. At the center of these practices is automatic or timed writing, dancing and talking—so do bring something to write on and something to write with.
Group Reading
We will gather in the afternoons to collectively read aloud semi/autobiographical narratives that directly and indirectly address notions of womanhood through the prism of class and identity politics. Group reading allows us to meet without having read the text in advance and consider what it means to conjure personal histories in a social space. There is an intimacy to vocalization that requires compassion and support from our counterparts, and opens the possibility of embodying an informal, dialogical sharing and learning environment.

Professional Practice Workshop:
The Dancer is a Haunted House
We will invite the seen and unseen murmurings of past, present, and future to surface in spontaneous dancing, writing, sounding, and speaking—using the principles of automatic writing to structure improvisations that move between language and body mind. We will use our imaginations to extend the boundaries of the self into the unknown so as to be more weathervane than conductor: pointing the direction of the wind, not making the wind happen. Please bring something to write on and something to write with.

2017
December 3, 2017 at Moving Target at the Living Room (Portland, ME)

2016
Moving Target at the Living Room  (Portland, ME)

2015

September 20 at SCDT (Northampton, MA)

August 6, at ODC (San Francisco, CA)

May 27 & 28 at Brooklyn Studios for Dance (BkSD) (Brooklyn, NY)

May 3 at Movement Research (NY, NY)

February 11 at New Museum (NY, NY)

2014

March 25-27 at Abrons Arts Center as part of ClassClassClass (NY, NY)