Tender Attention to the Wild Unknown
Nicole Bindler
We're also offering a full-day workshop at WildHeart: Center for Performance and Embodiment Practice on Saturday, April 18th.
This workshop will begin with a Body-Mind Centering warm up that will heighten participants’ senses and prepare them for rigorous use of their body and voice in Action Theater. We’ll explore our kinesthetic senses, and our auditory, visual, and vocal systems. The second half of the workshop will invite participants to continue on the path from sensation to perception, and further out into the imagination—following this awareness to its wildest, most expressive states. Together, we will create a nurturing environment to move through any blockages that may inhibit vocal expression, fostering greater confidence, creativity, and freedom in both movement and speech. Through the intelligence of these complementary forms of improvisation, feeling, images, and ideas are embodied, lived, and amplified into movement, vocalization, and words—where even the subtlest sensation can blossom into a new, astonishing world.
Skye Hughes is a multidisciplinary, body-based performance artist. Her artistic practice is driven by the desire to investigate information war, identity politics, oppression, and the climate crisis — how these phenomena are inscribed upon the body, and how that inscription shapes our inner life and how we relate to the external world and each other. Skye majored in dance at Interlochen Arts Academy in Michigan; holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in dance from the University of Colorado, where she studied with Michelle Ellsworth, Erika Randall, Gesel Mason, and Rennie Harris; and is an alum of Headlong Performance Institute in Philadelphia, PA, under the direction of David Brick. She has also worked as assistant to Ed Bowes on four feature-length films. She is an Action Theater teacher, and studied with Ruth Zaporah over a decade. Skye uses the Action Theater method to deconstruct and integrate improvisation skills with fellow performers, students, and teachers. skyehughes.wtf
Nicole Bindler–dance-maker, Body-Mind Centering® practitioner, writer, and activist–has practiced contact improvisation since 1997. She is a registered Master Somatic Movement Therapist through The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association. Her work has been supported by numerous grants and fellowships, and presented on four continents. Recent projects include curating an evening of Palestinian dance films; somatic research on the embryology of the genitalia from a non-binary perspective; a workshop on neuroqueering embodiment; co-producing the Consent Culture in Contact Improvisation Symposium at Earthdance; and a solo dance, The Case for Invagination, in which her scars speak candidly about trauma and desire. Notable performance projects have included touring as a choreographer with the Bethlehem-Based Palestinian company, Diyar Theatre; a Pew-funded performance residency in Japan including Butoh training with Yoshito Ohno; and performing Deborah Hay's I Think Not at Unidad De Vinculación Artística in Mexico City. She is co-editing a book, Gathering Sparks: Jewish Arts and Somatics that will be published by punctum books. nicolebindler.com