Extending Your Percussive Dance Technique with Nic Gareiss

This class for intermediate-advanced percussive dancers endeavors to reimagine our relationship with clog, flatfoot, tap, step dance, sean-nós, and other percussive dance footwork forms. Borrowing the term "extended techniques" from vocal and instrumental musicians, we'll think about the ways that our respective pedagogies have shaped what we have come to know as possible (danceable) within our dance practices. By both engaging gestures borrowed cross-culturally and delving into the historical archive, we'll work to listen beyond normativity within our own traditions. Honing in specifically on sound-making footwork to explore and expand, deconstruct and develop audibly and gesturally, this course aspires to reshape our danced relations of discovery within embodied rhythm, time, and timbre.

For intermediate-advanced percussive dancers. Leather-soled shoes, tap shoes, clogs, flamenco shoes, and other smooth-soled sturdy supportive footwear all welcome.

One of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch," dancer, musician, and dance researcher Nic Gareiss (he/they) has been hailed by the New York Times for his "dexterous melding of Irish and Appalachian dance" and called "the most inventive and expressive step dancer on the scene” by the Boston Herald. They reimagine movement as a musical practice, recasting dance as a medium that appeals to both eyes and ears. Originally from what some people call Michigan, Gareiss engages many percussive dance traditions, weaving together a singular dance practice marked by his love of clog, flatfoot, and step dance footwork vocabulary, improvisation, and musical collaboration. In 2020 Nic received the Michigan Heritage Award, the state's highest distinction bestowed on traditional artists. They have performed in seventeen countries with many of the luminaries of traditional music and dance at London's Barbican Centre, the Irish National Concert Hall, the Munich Philharmonic, and the Kennedy Center.

www.nicgareiss.com / @NicGareissLFI

photo credit: Louise Bicham @ Club Passim

Host or Publisher Percussive Dance Preservation Project