Warm and Sweaty with Maria Bauman

CLASS DESCRIPTION:

Classes led by Bauman focus on broadening dancers’ physical resources while remaining true to their current range and strengths–contemporary dance emphasizing powerful, spatial fluidity and floorwork. We sweat our truths, flying into the floor safely and using our hands like feet.

Based on modern, post-modern, and social dance techniques, this class prepares dancers to share themselves with clarity and with control as well as with vulnerability and imagination. Bauman focuses on phrasing and community, prioritizing both sweating and taking up space together as states not to be taken for granted during these pandemics nor ever.

The popular notion of a “neutral body,” often described in contemporary dance classes, does not exist within MBDance class sessions. Rather, we honor and add to storied bodies, mythological bodies, bodies-in-creation, and bodies-as-manifestos. We recognize and tune in to our bodies as dancing testaments to survival, to expressivity, to inter-dependence, to pleasure, and to defiance.

BIO:

Maria Bauman is a two-time Bessie Award winning multi-disciplinary artist and community organizer from Jacksonville, FL. She is also a sought after public speaker and facilitator on race equity and community-building as and with arts. Her company MBDance’s community engagement and performance-rituals particularly center Black Queer people without tragedizing or tokenizing us. Bauman is also co-founder in 2014, with Sarita Covington and Nathan Trice, of ACRE (Artists Co-creating Real Equity), a grassroots organizing body of artists dismantling racism in our own practices and institutionally fields.

In 2021, Bauman was a BRIClab Fellow, granted a Petronio Residency Center award and a Red Tail Arts Fellow. She was a 2020 Columbia College Dance Center Practitioner-in-Residence, 2019 Gibney Dance in Process residency award winner, 2018-20 UBW Choreographic Center Fellow, 2017-19 Artist in Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and was the 2017 Community Action Artist in Residence at Gibney. She’s been recognized by Dance NYC’s Dance Advancement Fund, Brooklyn Arts Council and Jerome Foundation. While formal accolades are affirming, some of the best approval Bauman has gotten for her dance work was from a group of Black and Brown queer teenagers at camp in Connecticut who, upon seeing her dance exclaimed “Oooo, she bad!”

Attend on Zoom or in-person at Triskelion Arts (Greenpoint, Brooklyn // Lenapehoking). NOTE: In-person spots are limited. KN95 or N95 masks and proof of vaccination (including booster) required. Please distance 3ft from others during class. You may not attend in person if you have had a COVID exposure, COVID symptoms, or been COVID-positive in the past ten days.

PAYMENT (SLIDING SCALE):

Unemployed/Under-employed: $8-15

Employed: $15-30

Artist Supporter: $31-50

ACCESSIBILITY:

In-Person Option (Triskelion Arts’ Theater): Triskelion Arts is a fully ADA-compliant and accessible theater venue with a marley floor. The theater is located on the ground floor, with an accessible restroom on the ground level. You may enter the building via ramps or stairs.

Zoom Option: Rev Live Captions, which are computer automated CCs, are provided.

COVER PHOTO IMAGE DESCRIPTION:

A person with Black curly hair tilts her body with full momentum to her left so that she is on one leg with her torso parallel to the floor. She is looking up towards a high ceiling with bent arms and right leg in the air folded inward.