pdx gender bender alt blues recess -- a portland workshop weekend -- may 18-20, 2012 -- portland, or

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PDX Gender Bender Weekend Schedule

Friday, May 18th

6:30pm: Potluck dinner at Jae, Kiri, and Tess' house! (4315 SE Holgate)
8:30pm-3:00am: Opening Dance at above house with live acoustic music from Olympia!

Saturday, May 19th

11:45am-7pm: Workshops at Paradise Dance Studio: (826 SE Belmont St)
Three Classes at a time to choose from, taught by a mix of Brenda Russel, Drew Robinson, Justin Riley, and the numerous talents of the Activist Track Facilitator and Teach-In Team
9pm-4am: Saturday Main Dance (Location TBA). Live performance by local favorite, Mr. Moo

Sunday, May 20th

12:00-6:00pm - Workshops at Paradise Dance Studio: (826 SE Belmont St)
9pm-5am: Dance at the infamous MoJo DoJo (5030 SE Bush St). 2 rooms of music!

Monday:

Noon: Decompression Brunch. Location TBA

Vision Statement: At the Gender Bender Recess Workshop Weekend we are not only challenging, encouraging, and empowering social dancers to step outside of their normal gendered role on the dance floor, but by introducing new techniques and concepts we will bring into question the very need for a gender-binary in partner dancing.

Rather than creating Leads that follow, Follows that lead, or Fleads and Lollows (insert your colloquial binary-driven pronoun of choice) we will develop partner dancers who have the ability to be both speakers (traditional lead role) and listeners (traditional follow role); or even better to be receptive speakers and listeners, interjecting and affirming.

Many of the workshops will be led in like-gender groups. This will allow primary leads to perfect follow/listener-specific skills with an experienced lead, and similarly allow primary follows to hone lead/speaker-specific skills with an experienced follow.

Time for group discussion and processing will be available in the "Activist Track" as we work on ourselves as dancers, as a community, and as people attempting to cultivate a less-gendered world.

Curriculum: For most of the weekend, there will be three workshops, one in each of the following topics.

Following Workshops: Designed for primary leads developing following skills.
Leading Workshops: Designed for primary follows honing leading skills.
Activist Workshops: Discussion and interactive workshops addressing larger cultural and community issues such as homophobia, consent, and the sexualization of dance. There will also be personal sharing sessions as well as breakout action groups with a trained facilitators.

Additionally, blues-lab/peer-review style workshops will be offered during the course of the recess.

The curriculum is formatted so that the dancers can shape the weekend as they like. If someone wants to focus on their non-dominant dance role all weekend, they can. If someone is more interested in enacting social change within the dance scene, they can do that as well.

Environment: We will dance until the early morning hours Friday, Saturday, and Sunday nights and workshop all day Saturday and Sunday in cool Portland venues. Out-of-towners will hosted by local Portland dancers, and community events will be planned to help make the Gender Bender Recess Weekend have the community-centered feel of other Recess events.

Instructors:

Drew Robinson: Portland, OR
Justin Riley: Lawrence, KS
TBA

Facilitators:

Elizabeth Rieke: Olympia, WA
Adam Gaya: Bellingham, WA

A few of the workshops:

De-Gendering Dance: Overthrowing the Patriarchy! The Series: This is a two-part, intermediate dance series focused on making blues dancers ambidextrous (able to both lead and follow). After this series, you will walk into a room of a hundred people and rather than seeing fifty people you can dance with, you will now see a hundred. We will focus on both the physical, such as proper frame and posture, and the conceptual, such as issues of masculinity and femininity. We will have dancers that identify primarily as leads and those that identify primarily as follows working in separate groups. At the end of the second class, we will combine the follows and leads and coalesce our newfound skills. Come help us deconstruct and rebuild the social framework of conventional partnered dancing!
Making Dancing a Conversation A few goals of this class are to re-define the conventional idea of lead-dominated dancing. We want to impart to follows the confidence, freedom, and skills necessary to properly give varying degrees of input in the dance. The class is designed to transform typical lead monologues into a dynamic conversation that gives and takes, listens and asserts, builds and deconstructs- to a point where issues of lead and follow dissolve into those of connection and commuication. This class does not only deal with the conceptual, much of the course will focus on variations in frame, tone, and muscle engagement that will serve the concepts mentioned above.
Portland Style Blues Lab A peer-review based dancer lab following the form of Portland's infamously effective Blues Lab with moderator Justin Riley. Dancers will be rotating through, taking turns giving and receiving guided feedback specific to their own dancing. In brief, this class is a guided peer-review session of 10 mini privates with 10 different instructors.
Gender Issues in Partner Dancing: A Discussion Nearly all partnered dancing has developed in a male-dominated, gender-binary-dominated world. From the assumptions we make when you ask “would you like to dance?” to the language we use, to the expectations we have for our partners. This discussion will deal with many issues revolving around the inherent gendered nature of partnered dance, and what we as a community feel are proper actions or inactions to take.

among many others!