Last Year's Urban Alt-Blues Recess' industrial aesthetic was inspiring, and this year the pendulum swings us to Lost Valley, an intentional ecovillage community in the wooded foothills of the Cascades. Recess Event's 2012 flagship event, LVBR, brings us three days and four nights of alt-blues, fusion, and blues music pumping into the liminal hours of the dawn. Daytimes will be spent wandering the miles of trails and numerous swimming holes on-site, the same mind-expanding skill-share workshops of yesteryear’s UBR (with five to ten workshops at a time (!)), and a community meal plan option with an all local, organic, and seasonal menu. We will have live acts spanning the talents of the recess community, and all with the usual, Recess-patented, "dancing to generators in the woods" on the 87 acres of Lost Valley Ecovillage. Its going to be quite the time!!
Lost Valley will also have a number of classes specifically designed to break down the lead/follow binary, and develop more Fleads, Lollows, Dancers, Switches, insert-your-preferred-gender-neutral-pronoun-here. There will also be a prized Gender Bender Strictly and an Alt-Blues/Fusion/Trad Jack & Jill competition Saturday night.
Located on 87 acres of forested land in the western foothills of the
Oregon Cascades, the Lost Valley Education Center features natural
meadows, a creek with a swimming hole, solar showers, vegetable
gardens, and many miles of trail for you to enjoy. Lost Valley is an
ecovillage and permaculture demonstration site, where people live,
work, play, and teach about permaculture and sustainability: modeling
ecological living, and radical self-sufficiency. Running water comes from
a drinkable, on-site well, and living accommodations include camping,
small geodesic domes, cabins, dorms, yurts, and even a little bit of row
housing. The whole community eats local, organic, vegetarian meals together,
which you are invited to join. You may also bring your own precooked
meats if you must have them in your diet. The conference center has
several nice hardwood floors that we’ll be dancing on, and cozy seating
situations in which to enjoy each other’s company. The weather during
July is warm, dry, ad sunny, with low humidity and cool nights. We
encourage you to explore the land while you’re here, and welcome your
joining us to spend a relaxed weekend dancing and playing in the beautiful
Cascadian summer.
Scholarship Application: tinyurl.com/LostValleyScholarship
Volunteer Application: tinyurl.com/LostValleyVolunteer
In order to make this event financially accessible to as many people as possible, we are offering tickets at four different pricing levels, which will all go on sale at the same time. There are a limited number of tickets available at each level, so please consider your financial situation, and buy a ticket at the high end of what you can afford, leaving the cheaper tickets available for folks who couldn't otherwise afford to come.
We are now offering a new payment system called DWOLLA. It's a secure cash-inspired system that helps us all skirt extortive credit-card fees and instead support the local credit unions we are hopefully all moving our money into. (it works with any bank too :-). It takes a bit of set-up, but if you opt to pay with it, we'll give you 10 busines days to get your account verified and balance transferred. The way to register with DWOLLA is to register with the promotional code "DWOLLA" (all caps) above, which will allow you to fully register for the event and hold a space until we confirm your transfered balance via DWOLLA. The fee is $0.25, as opposed to the $5.00+ through GoogleCheckouts credit card process. Please send the DWOLLA payment to Bluesrecess@gmail.com. We are still accepting Google Checkout, but DWOLLA is the direction Blues Recess Events (as well as many others) is going for all of its registration, so it may be worth the switch.
Schedule of Classes: tinyurl.com/LostValleySchedule
LVBR All-You Can Eat Meal Plan
This highly-subsidized, $35 ticket signs you up for the local, organic, on-site meals that will be
available from 10am until 2:30am, Friday morning to Monday morning.
Show up to the lodge and eat amazing, freshly cooked meals, whenever
you like!. All meals will cater to vegetarian,
vegan, gluten free, dairy free, soy free, and nightshade free diets.
Parking and Transit
The ecovillage is located at the following address:
Lost Valley Educational Center
81868 Lost Valley Lane
Dexter, OR 97431
We're organizing affordable shuttles from the Eugene airport, train, and bus stations. If you want to take advantage of our shuttle services,
please fill out this form now: tinyurl.com/LVBRTransit. It's kind of important, as we won't plan one for a time we don't know you're coming.
Parking will be available in fields on the property for $5 per car for the weekend. Sure, it's not much--but pretend it's a lot and carpool!
For those in need of passengers or those in need of rides, sign up for the rideshare board: tinyurl.com/LostValleyRideShare.
Housing
Most dancers will be camping in Lost Valley's beautiful camas meadow,
or in the limited number of cleared tent sites in the surrounding
forest. If you'd prefer to stay indoors, there are also a limited
number of rooms in the dorms available for an additional fee.
Full dorm-stlye rooms with beds are each $45/night. We have rooms with with two single beds and rooms with a single bed (fulls and queens). For the Queens/Full rooms we will give out Queens until we run out, at which time the single-bed rooms will be assigned. If you purchase a room you will be asked during ticket checkout how many people you want to share the room with and what type of room you would like to reserve. This will determine what type of room you are assigned.
| Room/Bed | Cost per night | Cost per weekend (Fri night-Sun night) |
|---|---|---|
| 2 single beds | $40 | $160 |
| 1 bed (Full or Queen) | $40 | $160 |
If you have dorm or tent space you'd like to share, or if you're in need of dorm or tent space, sign up here: http://tinyurl.com/LostValleySharedHousing
Event Organization
A Cooperative, Profit Sharing Organization. We’re
running Lost Valley (Alt) Blues Recess as a co-op, meaning that if the
event makes money, so does everyone who contributes. All instructors,
DJs, organizers, and volunteers receive a certain number of LVBR
'shares' for their contribution. Each share is worth a minimum amount
and factored into the event budget as an expense. Once the event nets
more than its expenses, what each share is worth increases. The idea
is that it’s all of our’s event. We all contribute to it, and we all
benefit from its success. Ideally with 100 people personally and
financially invested in LVBR, it can’t help but be outlandishly
successful!
What to bring
Remember, this isn’t your everyday, Plain-Jane exchange. This is an
Alt-Blues Recess. Therefore participants may have some additional,
albeit unique concerns to consider. Every night we will be camping in
a large meadow, unless you have purchased one of the few coveted dorm
beds. Coordinate with other recess goers for tent space. Be sure to
bring some sort of ground pad or inflatable mattress, as the ground is
not made of temperpedic bliss unless you make it that way. While few
of us will be getting any sleep over the weekend, it’s at least nice
to have the option to sleep if you want it.
Weather and Gear
Be aware that LVBR is late July east in Oregon. It will be sunny and
beautiful in the daytime, and possibly cool and beautiful at night.
Be prepared with sun wear as well as sleeping and dancing gear for
chilly nights.
Clothes To Be Screen Printed
Once again the lovely and talented Willow Wind and Logan will be
custom screen-printing clothes over the LVBR weekend. They will be
offering custom-prints on any clothes you choose to bring. Clothing to
be custom printed must be dropped off Friday and/or Saturday morning
and will be available for pick-up Saturday and Sunday nights. The
print itself is an original piece by the heavily-accoladed Willow Wind
of the Hermit, which can be viewed at the top of the page. Remember: the inks will be black or white, so bring clothes that will show those colors well. Also, seems get in the way of good prints--so bring clothes with smooth surfaces (the less texture, the better). There is a suggested donation of $10 per print.
Dancing Shoes
Like other recess events, we’ll be dancing on all types of surfaces.
For Lost Valley bring shoes to dance on hardwood, grassy nulls, and
for the dirt!
Food/Snacks
If you are a part of the LVBR meal plan (you have to buy a special
$35 ticket for this) then there will be hella-good food (local and
organic!) sitting out for you from 10am until 2:30am, Friday,
Saturday, and Sunday. However, it is probably a good idea to bring
snack food just in case. If you did not purchase the meal plan be sure
to bring ALL of your food for the extended weekend, as there is
nowhere to eat anywhere nearby.
This year we are setting aside a good portion of DJ sets designated for Traditional Blues. We are shooting for two-thirds alt-blues, and one-third to a-fourth to be trad blues, along with hosting a trad-blues workshop track. Certainly we are amidst a living dance form, but you’ve got to stay true to your roots!!
Live Acts
DJS
Here are the many DJs we'll be featuring, in no particular order:
LVBR Class List: tinyurl.com/LostValleyClasses
Detailed Class List: tinyurl.com/LostValleyClassesDetailed
At Lost Valley Blues Recess we are all here to learn from each other. We’ll have world-renowned blues dance instructors like Brenda Russel (Portlad, OR) and Heidi Fite (San Fran) teaching dance classes, as well as being a student in Nina Longshadow’s (Vancouver, BC) clowning workshop. At LVBR we are all educators and we are all students. If you have a workshop to share, regardless of subject matter, there will be a space available for you to share it with us.
Workshop Breakdown
There will be a minimum of 5 (probably 7!) Skill-Share workshops going
on at a time. At any one time there will be 3 Dance Classes and 2
"Creativity" or Non-Dance classes. So that is 5-7 classes at a time, 4
classes a day, for 3 full days!
Dance Classes
Classes on a dance-related topic. There will be no tracking for
dancers, but rather dancers will be able to decide which class best
fits their needs dependent on class descriptions and instructor demos
held before the specific workshop time slot. At any one time there will be 3-5
dance workshops at a time and two "creativities" workshops on a non-dance topic. We are also
planning to have a "Traditional Blues" line of workshops this year where we will have at least one
traditional blues focussed workshop during each workshop hour.
All-Comers Skill Share Workshops
Have an idea for a class that you want to teach? Email us!
(bluesrecess@gmail.com) and/or just bring your class idea to the event
, sign-up Friday morning in our All-comers Instructor class slot, or find the Instructor Coordinator at any time during the event
and we will find a slot for you to teach your class!
Unfortunately we can’t offer event shares or compensation for
All-comers classes, but that doesn’t mean we don’t want what you have
to give!
Blues Band Jam Class
Musicians bring your instruments!! If you play an instrument—anything
from guitar to washboard, from vocals to the kazoo—and are interested
in performing in a band comprised of fellow LVBR participants, this can happent!
Friday morning there will be a class entitled “Blues
Band Performance,” where musicians will collaborate and practice for a
performance at a dance later on in the weekend.
Themes We are doing Midsummer Night's Dream for Saturday night: horns, hoofs, wings, fairies, and other characters of wooded magic. Additionally, Katie and Milo Hayden (Mr Moo) are having a community wedding ceremony on Sunday at sundown. Milo and Katie have invited everyone to a white procession through the wooded grounds of Lost Valley. If you would like to partake, bring your finest and most lacy of whites for the procession and short ceremony to be held just before sundown on Sunday.
Competitions LVBR will have two prized competitions. A Gender Bender Strictly (enter as a couple) and an Alt-Blues Jack and Jill (judged as an individual). Both competitions will be judged to both blues and alt-blues music. Entrance will be at the registration desk at the event and will be $5 a person for a competition.
With this event we are attempting to deconstruct and dissolve the "dancer hierarchy" that often forms in dance scenes, and that are particularly strengthened at weekend workshops with the juxtaposition of labels like “beginner” and “advanced” or “student” and “instructor,” or even “lead” and “follow.” LVBR offers a much wider variety of workshops, ranging in topics from bicycle repair, to screen printing, to costuming, massage, and DJ mechanics. These are in addition to the usual dance-oriented classes, like advanced fusion aesthetic, tango moves for blues dancers, hip-hop to trip-hop, struten blues, etc. Our hope is that professional dance instructors will be taking classes on bicycle repair from beginning dancers, and new dancers will be taking classes from seasoned dance instructors to create a type of community cohesion that transcends the typical oligarchic structure that so naturally forms within social dancing scenes.
At Lost Valley Blues Recess 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, Fleads or Lollows, insert your colloquial binary-driven pronoun of choice, we will develop the idea that we are all partner dancers who have the ability to both speak (traditional lead role) and to listen (traditional follow role), as well as what it means to be a receptive speaker, and a listener who interjects and affirms. Come join us in the creation of culture!
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