In these public workshops we will do an accessible, physical warm up, learn and practice some modes for creating altars/arrangements with found objects on our own and together, explore simple songs and ways of improvising with sound as a group, and engage in movement-based practices that bring all of the elements of the workshop together. Through our collaborative work, we will awaken enchantment and become more intimate with ourselves, one another, and the energy of the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall. These workshops are open to anyone and will be adaptable to all bodies. No previous dance or performance experience is necessary. You can take one of the workshops or both; they will be related to one another and different from one another. Wear layers of clothing that you are comfortable moving in and bring a notebook if you like (paper and pens also provided).
Tickets:
Available day of workshop only.
$5-$30 sliding scale
About Hana:
Hana van der Kolk is a queer dancer, artist, and facilitator of ritual, embodied learning, and celebration living on unceded Mohican, Mohawk, and Haudenosauneelands, colonially known as the Hudson Valley, New York. Hana is provoked by their interest in care, contradiction, complexity/simplicity, joy/grief, reckoning, eros, and humans’ porous, interconnected, and messy natures. Hana spends time looking for and creating bridges through dance, performance, pedagogy, language, celebration, and personal and collective restoration and transformation. In this process, they create performances, organize events, design and lead workshops, offer counseling & sex and gender expansion work, write, and make videos. Hana sees their work—which is always collaborative—as a conduit for knowing/unknowing what is here and now, for remembering and practicing intimacy at many proximities.
Hana has worked internationally as a teacher and facilitator, performer, and artist for many years. They have a background in Euro-American contemporary dance, somatic practices, and performance art, and are further influenced by Min Tanaka’s experimental dance practices, Black & queer social dance, and Buddhist thought and practice, which they have been a student of for over twenty years. Hana completed an MFA in Dance from UCLA in 2008 and a practice-based PhD in Art at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2022. Their dissertation focused on queer friendship, telepathy, and embodied technologies for re-enchantment and recovery from the delusion of separateness. Hana was based in Troy, NY for almost a decade and is indebted to the city where they learned to coalition build; to be messy, joyful, resistant, together and separate, with and through our bodies, with and through parties, protests, potlucks, city council meetings, dance class, open hours at the community bike shop, and more.
Hana currently collaborates with Angela Beallor and Elizabeth Press on FlagSSS Day and other public processions and rituals mostly in Troy, Erica Dawn Lyle on The Stamina of Utopia, Sondra Loring on We Already Are, Lea Keiffer on Strange Nature, and Adam Tinkle and others on Club SPA spa. Dori Midnight, Tomislav Feller, Erin Sickler, Eli Nixon, margit galanter, Julia Handschuh, and Lailye Weidman are also frequent collaborators and thought partners. Among Hana’s teachers are Deborah Hay, Debra Bluth, Ashon Crawley, Jennifer Monson, Simone Forti, Barbara Carrellas, d. Sabela grimes, Sara Jane Stoner, Mala Kline, Richard Schwartz, Thanissara and Kittisaro, and Pascal Auclair. They also wish to acknowledge teachers they have never met in person including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Bayo Akomolafe, Gloria Anzaldúa, Audre Lorde, Min Tanaka, Paul Preciado, Pauline Oliveros, Silvia Federici, Karen Barad, and many others.
