We're back!

We are back in the studio this week. The dancers reviewed the works they created with Leslie Scates and Lori Teague during the summer. They also dove right into creating a new work with Sue. All of these works will be presented at Shift on September 15 and 16 at The Performance Arts Center at Decatur High School. Be sure to join the Facebook event page and share with your friends.

Company Manager's Tea Time

Patton takes his tea (Alice in Wonderland style!)

SHIFT: An Interview with Guest Artist Lori Teague

Emory University Associate Professor, Lori Teague, is creating "I felt my life with both hands" with the CORE Performance Company artists for SHIFT, a performance of three new dances which premieres in Decatur, Georgia on September 15-16 and in Houston, Texas on November 2-3. In the video she is in the studio creating the piece with the dancers and talking about her piece and the Summer Intensive that she taught together with Leslie Scates in late July.

Tango Buenos Aires

Instructors of Argentine Tango, Horacio and Marissa, have taught their classes at CORE Studios since 2003. Here's a short interview with them about their classes, which take place on Tuesdays with beginning level from 7:30-8:30 p.m. and more advanced from 8:30-9:30 p.m. You can find more information at their website Buenos Aires Tango Academy, and if you come to our Lunchtime in the Studio event, you could win a free class!

What do you teach at CORE Studios? 
Horacio says they teach Argentine Tango, which is a social dance version of tango, not one designed for shows or being performed on a stage. It's an internal tango, not a showy one. The emphasis is about the relationship to your partner and not about you and the audience.

What got you into teaching and when did you start?
Horacio first started dancing in 1969. His father is Sicilian and owned restaurants where there were often tango social dances and he encouraged him to dance at the events at a young age. He began teaching at his own studio in 1995. He moved to the US in 2002 and started teaching at CORE Studios in 2003.

Marissa great up in Columbia, SC and did salsa in college. Her mom encouraged her to go to a Milonga (social tango event) in 2006 where she met Horacio on Halloween. She has been teaching with Horacio since the summer of 2008.

Tell us a little bit about what the focus is for your classes? 
Horacio believes you learn from your body, not simply talking but connecting with the music and the lady. In Buenos Aires, space is more limited so it's harder to move, not like here. Classes should be fun and not so serious, should be based on the learning style of the dancer. Everyone can dance, it's not about showy moves, and you don't need to be slim or beautiful. It's a social dance.

Do you have any upcoming projects or events you are excited about?
Milonga Buenos Aires, a dance party that happens the last Sunday of every month and Milonga el tango y tu which is the first Saturday of every month. Marissa also teaches at Oak Grove 1st grade and they donate classes and perform there.

What do you love about CORE Studios?
It feels like being at home, familiar and the studio is always being updated and renovated keeping things looking great.

A Blog About Searching For a Blog: Houston Edition

Once I found some treasures of the Atlanta blog world it was only natural that I expand my horizons and see what else lay out there. Thus, I started my search for dance blogs in Houston, where CORE's other home. As with my previous search, my requirements expanded to art related blogs and others not solely focused on dance. Interestingly enough though, when I searched for dance blogs this time with Houston in the search bar, a plethora of dance blogs came out of the woodwork. Although not many of them seemed to be located in Houston, the profound amount of pure dance blogs that came up in my results amazed me. With blogs either written by professional dancers, beginning dancers, or even supportive family of dancers, the dance blog world grew exponentially with the word Houston in my search.

Blogs I found that were Houston-related offered a diverse and therefore, I feel, a fitting representation of the arts in Houston. The first blog I victoriously came upon was the lovely all about dance blog Dance Advantage (an editor's shout out to Nichelle, who created this gem of a site!) rife with dance information for dancers, instructors, and parents. Also under the dance category, I found the blog Dance Hunter (here, an editor's shout out to Nancy Wozny, our esteemed Houston critic, and former Field facilitator), where interviews with dancers, choreographers and other artists can be read. Diverging from the sole focus on dance, I found the unique Dear Polia, which features a Houston blogger’s interest in architecture, arts, and travel. Another intriguing blog I discovered in the visual arts realm was the Diverse Works blog which has partnered visual art and dance in the past. Each of these blogs, similar to the ones I found in Atlanta, are so rich with information and context. The passion each of the bloggers has jumps out of the screen at you, making it hard to move on to a different page.

It has been an exciting and insightful journey through the arts blog world. From Atlanta to Houston, it is evident that art is a powerful medium that has no bounds.

-Kathryn, Communications Intern

Summer Intensive: some background

A contact jam, photo by Lynn Lane

Leslie Scates and Blake Dalton, photo by Lynn Lane

This Sunday we start work in the studio in our first Summer Intensive as Lori Teague and Leslie Scates guide the dancers of CORE Performance Company, and anyone else who would like to join us, as we learn and explore movement improvisation through many lenses. Improvisational performance is a skill and an art form that is a shift from the "class, rehearsal, performance" model of traditional dance techniques like ballet and other forms of modern dance. Many of the roots of this approach come from the early post-modern dancers at Judson Church, who were exploring what performance was in content and context. 


Contact improvisation (CI) grew out of the Judson Church movement, begun by one of its members, Steve Paxton in 1972 or thereabouts. The CI movement grew, as Nancy Stark Smith says in a talk (reprinted in Contact Quarterly), because you can't do it on your own, you need a second person to move with! The creators made a conscious choice to keep the form open and not make it a codified and copyrighted, so it continues to grow across the world through jams, retreats and workshops like ours. 


Along the way, Nina Martin of Lower Left Dance Collective, which Leslie Scates has also been a part of, noticed the need for improvising movers to be more aware of the space outside themselves. So she created Ensemble Thinking, a technique to build the mover's skills and awareness of the larger space and structure of the spontaneous composition (s)he was creating with others in a group. The flip side of this work is called Solo ReWire, and instead of a group awareness, it's a solo practice of making choices to move in ways that are not habitual, ones outside your usual movement patterns. Take a look at a blog post from a dancer who took a workshop with Leslie and Nina, a sort of poem about her experience of the process.


And each morning our day will begin with a class from Lori Teague that is infused with lessons from Rudolph Laban's work and Bartenieff Movement Analysis. Lori is a Certified Movement Analyst, which means she is certified in a knowledge set that includes methods for describing movement and how it works, a system not designed only for dancers, but which is often used by dancers to help inform conscious movement choices. 

A Blog about Searching for a Blog (Atlanta Edition)

A report from Communications Intern, Kathryn A.:

My initial reaction to the task of finding blogs about dance in Atlanta was one uncertainty and mixed understanding. So of course, the first stop was Google. In the search bar I typed "Atlanta dance blogs" and like most things typed in Google my results seemed to be endless. I soon realized, however, my seemingly infinite findings would only lead to a handful of pertaining and suitable sites that I would only discover after pouring over waves of words and pictures with a fine tooth comb.

The qualities necessary for a blog to make the cut were:

• Dance or Arts related  
• Based in the Atlanta or Decatur area 
• Updated on a regular basis  
• Having an overall professional and respectful feel 

Over the couple weeks I browsed through blogs, these requirements expanded and became flexible. Finding a blog that solely focused on the dance scene in Atlanta turned out to be a harder task than my initial findings led me to believe. Once I weeded out the websites of actual dance companies and studios in the area, I began reading through content and discovering the vast and diverse blog world that I barely knew existed. Although not all pertaining to dance in obvious ways, the blogs I did find all shared the compelling quality of grasping the reader and further prompting them to go out and do or go out and see through the vividly honest posts.

Some of the treasure I found:

• Drive a Faster Car-Culture and Entertainment blog for Atlanta,Decatur,and Athens
• The Leila Blog-Local Blogger of Art and Music
• AsianCajuns-Local Life and Style Blogger
• Furious Dreams-Artist and Art Blogger
• Brown Girl Next Door- Local Life and Style Blogger

PERSONAL LESSON: In the form and fashion of most of the blogs I read, I will take this moment to add some of my personal views and experiences. Blogs to me were scary, foreign concepts that I hardly understood or cared to understand. My deep trust issues with technology as a starting platform, I just did not see the reason or want for people to share their thoughts in a stream to the entire cyber world. Weren’t social networking sites enough? Who had time to write these things? And even better who would read them?

Well here I am, a good amount of blog banter passed over by my retinas, to say I am now a blog appreciator and follower. I realized in my findings that yes, blogs were random people just sharing their opinion but those distinct opinions are what made reading through them so fascinating. All of these people have a passion, whether it be dance, visual art, fashion, food, traveling, etc., and being so overwhelmed with that passion they make an outlet to let it pour out to any person interested. It is inspiring in a way. Reading through them, you wish you had something you felt so strongly about that you had to share it with the world. Also, you may have a passion ignited within you, you are unaware you possessed. Either way, what I had before dismissed as a time-wasting and absurd practice I now recognize as a unique and valuable method of communication.

Dance/USA in San Francisco

Howdy, all!
This is Claire H. and I do Communications for CORE. Most of the time this blog is for the dancers to talk about their process and what they're creating in the studio. I usually don't post because I'm staying in the office while they go on tour to far off places, not nearly as exciting to talk about! But this last week, Managing Director Elizabeth and I went to San Francisco for the Dance/USA Conference, so I thought talking about it might help fill in the summer gap while we're off season. (And yes, that's the Bay Bridge, not the Golden Gate...that's the side of town we made it to!)

Elizabeth and I joined several hundred colleagues from the professional dance realm talking about everything from leadership through meaning, to online marketing nitty gritty (at least the sessions I went to).

I had a chance to meet up with some other Houston and Atlanta dance people, among all the national attendees, of course:

• our Field Facilitator and Dynamic X-Change teacher, Lydia Hance (photo left, who also has her own company, Frame Dance,) 
• Dance Source Houston's Stephanie and Mollie, 
• and Marlana from Houston Met. 
• And from Atlanta, Full Radius Dance Artistic Director, Douglas Scott 
• and Atlanta Ballet's social media coordinator, Brian, and Artistic Director, John McFall.  

We were welcomed into the beautiful spaces of the San Francisco community at Yerba Buena Arts Center and ODC/Dance. And once more proving that the dance world is super small, I ran into Lauryn, who lived in Atlanta a few years back, who now works as Studio Administrator for ODC (photo right). There were showcase performances by a huge variety of local San Francisco performers. All were well done, but the most interesting aspect and unique to SF is those companies nourished through the long history of the SF Ethnic Dance Festival, which was happening concurrently with the conference. We got to see performers doing gamelan, Tahitian dance, Cambodian, and more, in addition to a range of contemporary dance and ballet pieces.  

And because I'm the one who looks at marketing for dance, I was impressed to see this ad for a local company in a BART station. I've been in the meetings with arts admin folks locally who talk about doing advertising on a larger scale like the back of buses, etc., but I've never seen a big poster for dance (maybe I just wasn't looking at the right time and place...)  It was interesting to compare cities, and you can see the ways that public funding influences dance in each city. According to a recent Americans for the Arts study, Atlanta is number one per capita for the number of arts related businesses and second in number of employees of arts orgs. But on the other hand, the funding per capita in Atlanta is around $3 and SF's is around $12. At first impression, the number, quality and size of the facilities in SF is what shows that funding disparity the most. Only so many of the dance companies in Atlanta have homes. Houston has better support through local funding than Atlanta, but not up to SF levels, and of course, everywhere the support from government is constantly in danger of being slashed to either a bare minimum or nothing at all.

Schools out for Summer!

Well more specifically it is the last day of the 2011 - 2012 CORE Performance Company Season.
Although you can some of us at the Decatur Arts Festival  Artwalk in the downstairs studio modeling for students of the Art Institute of Atlanta - Decatur Friday May 25th from 5 - 10pm.  Also be on the lookout for class offerings this summer!

Corian Ellisor in deep thought cools off his hardworking brain with a very stylish fan during Core Performance Company's end of the year wrap up meetings. Today we had a great lunchtime in the studio where Juana Farfan, Core Dynamic X - Change coordinator lead introduced our program, lead the lively audience through a sample class warm up. We were also fortunate enough to have the kids from our winter Dynamic X change class come join us and share their artistic talents. Tomorrow Core Performance Company members will take their skills and enthusiasm to Renfroe Middle School to lead a creative dance class with the students there. The company finishes up the season on Monday! In the meantime be on the lookout for summer classes from Core dancers and a summer Fieldwork program.

The Point at The Macon Opera House

We were triumphant at the Grand

Macon Opera House, where we performed 'The Point' for the Georgia Presenters Network Showcase. We got to see some old friends and great fellow artists at the showcase and it was delightful to be in this beautiful historic space. http://www.thegrandmacon.com/ai1ec_event/1764/?instance_id=

In the studio today, we are preparing for our showcase performance in Macon Ga. We will be showing one of our signature piece "The Point." We are resting up this weekend, so we can hit it hard!

If you could not make it to the High Museum of Art last week then here are some photos!

Just back from a crazy performance schedule! There will be pictures coming soon! Please stay tuned! Love CPC

Gearing up for Miller

So...lately we have been working on a few new things for Lets Dance at Miller Outdoor Theatre...Rumba, Cha Cha, Swing, Fox Trot, Waltz, Tango, and TAP! wanna see?

Oh My Josh!

Today we will be introducing you to Joshua Rackliffe who will be making an appearance with CORE in our upcoming performance at Miller Outdoor Theatre. Joshua hails from Mableton, GA and recently moved back to Atlanta after attending Columbia College Chicago. When Joshua isn't dancing with us you can find him servin' biscuits at Homegrown, working as Director of Programming at Living Walls, or holed up in the studio making queer performance art.

lets dance

This week at CORE we're working on a new take on last year's show "In the Mood...for Dance" for Houston's Miller Outdoor Theatre. We're excited to be working again with the Billie Ledbetter Orchestra, who will be joining us on stage playing the music live for "In the Mood 2...Dance!" on April 20.

With love and disregard

Today was our first big day in the studio working on our Museum of Fine Arts, Houston material for "With Love and Disregard"

Lots of sharing of ideas and lots of sweat!

If you happened to be on Decatur Square this afternoon at 3:00, you might have caught a glimpse of us working through a structured improvisation in honor of Dance Anywhere day!

Keep checkin' in, we've always got new tricks up our sleeve.

Return to OZ

Phew! We had a whirlwind weekend at the Bayou City Arts Festival in Houston, TX

We danced, we sang, we laughed, we cried, we trekked through swamps, battled mosquitos, braved a water war, attended a fashion show and became one with the bear. (see photo)

As always, keep an eye out for CORE and upcoming events. Next up is the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. We will create a piece based on the work of abstract painter, Jules Olitski.

Getting Ready for Bayou City Art Festival !

Yup, this is how we roll