Body-Mind Centering® and Contact Improvisation Techniques with Cathie Caraker and Miriam Wolodarski

Name: Body-Mind Centering® and Contact Improvisation Techniques with Cathie Caraker and Miriam Wolodarski
Start: 2025-03-01T13:30:00-08:00
End: 2025-03-02T17:00:00-08:00
Location: Berkeley Finnish Hall

Schedule

Sat, 01 Mar, 2025 at 01:30 pm to Sun, 02 Mar, 2025 at 05:00 pm

UTC-08:00

Location

Berkeley Finnish Hall | Berkeley, CA

SCHEDULE
Saturday 1:30-5:30PM
* Join us at the Saturday Jam in the morning!
Sunday 11AM-5PM, with a break for lunch
REGISTRATION: $150-300
Zelle or Paypal to [email protected]
or Venmo @senseobject
Email [email protected] for questions.
* Money tight? That’s alright. Reach out, and we’ll figure it out.
When those who can, pay more, those who can’t still get to dance.

SOMATIC STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENCE (BMC)
“Tone is the readiness to move.” - Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen
“All real living is meeting” - Martin Buber
How do we cultivate safety and connection through our embodied artistic practices? Can we meet this challenging moment in our shared history with a tone that’s active and resilient?
We’ll begin with the somatic practice of Cellular Breathing as a non-hierarchical paradigm for nourishing self and community. Respecting our cyclic needs for cocooning into action, we’ll explore the tonal continuum of active yielding/ pushing/ reaching/ pulling: practices that foster resilience in the midst of change.
Improvising with the dynamic states of the fluids systems, we’ll play with boundaries, tune our spidey-senses, ride cyclical flow, shake it all out and more. Integrating what comes up through the collective practices of Authentic Movement and Contact Improvisation, together we’ll evolve dance scores for the moment we’re in.

CENTERS OF POWER (CI)
This Contact Improvisation work is about finding power, identifying and contextualizing many different modes of embodied potential in contact improvisation. Mass, mobility, momentum, tone, tuning, and more come into play as we ask ourselves how we move on, move over, move through. From center to periphery, every part of us has myriad locomotive possibilities to offer. Let’s gather up our resources for staying safe, staying present, and sharing weight.
CATHIE CARAKER is a dance artist and somatic movement educator. Her teaching work integrates her extensive background in post-modern dance practices and somatics, including Contact Improvisation and Body-Mind Centering®.
She has taught at dance institutes and festivals including wcciJAM, Moving On Center, the New York Improvisation Festival, the Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, the School for New Dance Development in Amsterdam, Tanzfabrik Berlin, Contact Festival Freiburg, the Barcelona Contact Festival, Contredance Brussels and many others.
She was fortunate to work extensively with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, the founder of Body-Mind Centering®, as well as with Nancy Stark Smith and Steve Paxton, founders of Contact Improvisation. She has been profoundly influenced by their work.
Cathie holds an MFA in Dance from Bennington College and is a Body-Mind Centering® teacher, a registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist, a somatic movement coach and a Pilates and Gyrotonic instructor. www.cathiecaraker.com
MIRIAM WOLODARSKI LUNDBERG
… is a teaching artist, a cultural worker, and a mother, with over a decade of experience teaching contemporary dance, improvisation, and composition at universities, festivals, and studios, including at UC Davis, USF, CI@50, SFDI, wcciJAM and Freiburg CI Festival. Her original performance work has been supported by programs at YBCA, CounterPULSE, TragantDansa, Centre Cívic Barceloneta, and The Hemispheric Institute, among others. She is currently the Artistic Director of the arts organization "Sense Object”, and manager of the Berkeley Finnish Hall. Holds a MFA in Contemporary Performance from Naropa University and a BSS in Political Science from Uppsala Universitet. As a dancer, has had the privilege of working with Scott Wells & Dancers, Sarah Shelton Mann, and Barbara Dilley, among others. Currently experimenting with embodying care, curiosity, and horizontal power sharing in dance pedagogy through Compostable Feminisms, a project with longtime collaborator Rosemary Hannon, which frames dance as a contemplative practice giving practitioners, observers, and teachers alike opportunities to approach the socio-political, emotional, and philosophical questions residing in our bodies.