Classes

Dance Classes

Luke and Nicole Trissell

Active Following
Follows leverage leeway leads leave in this class. Let leads leave leeway.

Ain’t What You Do…
It’s the way that you do it. That’s what gets results.” How we do what we do shapes the feeling of our dance more than what we do. Go past dancing to music, and start dancing the music. 4 out of 5 Experts Agree: Employing these concepts may cause fatigue, exhaustion and dehydration from lack of time between dances.

Beyond “Yes, And…”
Taking a suggestion and subtly redirecting if you don’t agree. How to change the thread without jarring the initiator(trix) of the move. Giving resistance at appropriate time. Finding a level of engagement that works for both people”

Blues Fundamentals
This is probably the best place for us to start. Frame, Connection, Turns, Walking. All things that will be familiar to you by the end of the class.

Blues Up Close
Create a comfortable close embrace connection for you and a partner. A relaxed comfortable close embrace can open up a whole new set of possibilities in dance. (And will make people want to dance with you)

Build A Lift WorkshopLuke Teaching Safe Spotting at Atomic Blues Fusion 2012
Partner Required Learn how to effortlessly create lifts from your regular dancing. In this class we’ll give you the tools to create great lifts on the fly. We’ll start with safe basing and flying techniques, give you a few ground rules to construct all the lifts you could want, then learn how to dance in and out of them to create seamless movement.

Connection Lab
This class is really about all the secrets of great following, but packaged nicely into a variety of interchangeable patterns that leads get to drill to create solid muscle memory.

Crimes Against Dance
Learn how to be sensitive to other people’s dance preferences. We all have certain taboos or personal preferences we may not be aware of. We may also not be aware of them in other people; leading to disaster. Take this class to learn how to deal with or avoid these situations.

Dance like the song
Different Songs Have Different rhythmic themes. In this class we’ll be finding rhythms underlying musical structure to Find a unique basic movements for each song.

Dancing as one
Dance is a conversation. If you want to have a good one, you need to connect to everything your partner is giving and receiving, as well as give and receive input of your own. The balance point is where we can dance as one.

Emotive Dancing
You know the moves. Now feel the moves. Music has emotion, it lifts us up, drops us down, creates an evenflow and shapes how we feel. This will change how we dance.

Flowing through dance styles
The song has changed, so has your partner. Has your dance changed?

Get Your Mojo Workin’
Get your solo dance magic on. Start with music; identify the parts of a song and learn how to express those. Add awesome solo movement. Mix it up with a cutting circle. Top it off with a group hug.

Intro to Blues
Getting people up and running on Blues

Lego your Preconceptions
Have you ever seen a workshop class schedule and wondered what it would be like to learn 125 moves in one hour without being overwhelmed? Are you wondering now? Come to our class and see!

Lyrical Connection
What do you do when the beat drops out of a song for a moment? Or what about those songs that don’t have a back beat? Or maybe the song does have a beat, but that violin over the top of it is what really moves you? Well you dance to that awesome melody, of course. In the world of lyrical dancing, we’ll explore some connection and movement techniques to allow you to really dance to that haunting melody.

Lyrical Lifts and Lines
Rise and fall with the swell of the movement and sometimes the music may take you off the floor.

<alternate Description>

Every story has a climax and a resolution. This class is about helping you tell your story with with the rise and fall of the music. Learn how to add level changes and take your dance off the floor… if just for that perfect moment.

Lyrical Styling
Now that we know how to connect with our partner and the music in a lyrical dance, we’ll delve into the world of lyrical styling. Movement control and dynamics, body shaping and extension, legato and staccato movement, we’ll bring all these concepts together to create the ultimate expression of lyrical music.

Mirror Mask
Using Techniques from pantomime, traditional dance and younger siblings to build our awareness of what we’re learning by practicing mimicking exactly what we see so that we have a better fundamental understanding of how to learn new technique from others.

Music Theory
Don’t worry, This is a class for dancers not musicians. We’ll explore rhythm, phrasing, movement and stillness to help you dance as the music instead of to the music.

Navel Gazing and the Way of the Lazy Follow
Empty your mind and become one with the core of your partner’s being. Learn to dance gracefully, floating along a stream of music and energy. Above all, don’t fight the current.

Opposites Attract
Using opposites in dance creates contrast and interest for you and your partner. It also frees you from needing to learn more moves, by giving your different ways to employ the movement you already know in a new way. Staccatto and Legato, Linear and Circular, High and Low, Silly and Serious, Yin and Yan, Dogs and Cats living together. It’ll be Anarchy!

Out of your head and into your body
Just as a sommelier selects fine wines to accompany certain foods, you can learn how to quickly become attuned to the music and the general vibe of any room. Your dancing will soon transcend combinations of moves & become something created uniquely by you, your partner and the music.

Quintessential Alchemical Dance
Quintessence literally means the “the fifth element.” This is our philosopher’s stone as dancers. Legend holds that the fifth element could be found with the right combinations of the other four and help lead man to an elightened era. To find it we will explore the other four elements and use our selves as catalysts to achieve a higher level of dance.

Robots and Mole Men and Slime… Oh my!
These exercises will help to conceptualize your movement in a different way by building false dichotomies for you to play with. You may call it a logical fallacy, we call it fun!

The Secret Class
Shhh- Secrets… We could tell you, but well you know the rest!

Spins and Turns
How do you differentiate between spins on the spot, traveling turns, and partnered rotation? We’ll unlock the secrets of variations in prep steps, body alignments, internal torque and more, to help you spin and turn with grace and ease.

Shut up and Listen
Dancing, at it’s best, is a conversation. While the lead generally guides the dance, follows can still contribute style, musicality and even direction. We’ll slow ourselves down and learn a few tools to get our leads to shut up and listen, as well as some cool ways for follows to speak up, so you can take your dancing conversation to the next level.

Slow Motion Blues
Maintain connection even when moving very slowly. focus on quality of movement and body awareness

Steal this move
Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. if you know what this means, you know what this class is about.

Steal This Move (Alternate Description)
Mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal. In this class, we’ll work together as a group to take basic movements, both solo and partnered and add changes and layers to build them up into something awesome.

Strength in Stillness
There are many classes about moves and movement. Finding the stillness in your movement will open up another dimension of expression and connection to your partner and the music

Strength in Silliness
Why so serious? After all, it’s just dancing!

Swoop There It Is
Swoops, slides and off-axis spins. Remember when you were a kid and you were on a swing set, coming down from the peak of a swing? Want to add that feeling to your dance? In this class we’ll learn how to safely add swoopyness into your dance through a variety of cool tricks that will leave your partner wanting more.

Take Your Burdens to the Floor
Learn how to achieve emotional catharsis through dance. Catharsis: a climax of overwhelming feelings to precipitate a renewal, restoration, and revitalization. Like when you watch a really sad movie, it makes you cry, but you feel much better afterwards. Or you run past when you can’t run anymore to purge emotions you are dealing with. In this class, we’ll create a safe space where we can all learn to achieve cathartic release.

Tension And its opposite
“In life as in dance. Never. Never build up tension, without a good release.
We’ll how far and how high we can go with this concept. (Partner Suggested)
We will also try to observe the rare flying Koala in its natural habitat.”

Tension and Its Opposite (Alternate Description)
What is the opposite of tension? If you said “I don’t know” or “Compression” You need this class. You need both Tension and it’s opposite in order to do anything. Especially anything like this! Usually partner is required (this should give you a hint as to which directions our class will be going)

Use the Force
For some reason we get the idea that we need some amount of force between ourselves in order to initiate a movement with a partner. In fact, we don’t even need to touch them to dance with them.

What is the Why?
“Most of the time when we are learning we spend time on the What, the How or even the
In this class we will seek the Why of our art and possibly the who of ourselves.”

Zero to Blues in Four Easy Steps
An intro to blues dance that sets participants up with a good base for the rest of a weekend’s classes.

  • Step 1: Posture
  • Step 4: Profit!

Zero to Lindy in 8 counts Flat
If you can do a blues basic, you can do lindy hop. This class will take what you know about pulse, blues basic steps and turns, and transmute it into Lindy Hop. Never done a swingout? We’ll make it easy. Love to swingout? We’ll make it better. Side effect may include irrepressible grins.

Dance-Adjacent Classes

How to Practice
No musician gets to a professional level without practicing their scales. This discussion-style class will take a multi-disciplinary approach to the idea of practice and how we can do it most effectively to grow our dance in the directions we want.

Dance Photography 101: No flash, One Lens, One Camera? No problem
This is an introduction to what you need to make good images of dance!

Dance Photography 202: Critique-al mass
This is a critique class where we will examine what we have practiced since the first class and try to improve our work.

One thought on “Classes

  1. new classes added-

    Class 1: Foundational Fusion – Part of what we seek in fusion is the ability to dance with anyone, anywhere to any music. The point of this class is to get you started down that road.

    Class 2: Make the Music – Melody, Rhythm, Volume, these are just some of the elements we can express in dance. In this class, our goal is to start thinking about how we can dance not to the music, but as the music.

    Class 3: Release and Redirect – Avoiding collision hazards, speeding up spins, stopping into solos, it’s all about the temptation of tension and the redemption of release.

    Class 4: Where’s the Weight? – Here, we’ll learn to share our partner’s weight (a good thing if you want to sweep someone off their feet…). Apply these techniques and you may find yourself asking, “who forgot to pay the gravity bill?”Class 1: Foundational Fusion – Part of what we seek in fusion is the ability to dance with anyone, anywhere to any music. The point of this class is to get you started down that road.

    Class 2: Make the Music – Melody, Rhythm, Volume, these are just some of the elements we can express in dance. In this class, our goal is to start thinking about how we can dance not to the music, but as the music.

    Class 3: Release and Redirect – Avoiding collision hazards, speeding up spins, stopping into solos, it’s all about the temptation of tension and the redemption of release.

    Class 4: Where’s the Weight? – Here, we’ll learn to share our partner’s weight (a good thing if you want to sweep someone off their feet…). Apply these techniques and you may find yourself asking, “who forgot to pay the gravity bill?”

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