Underscore +/- Group Showing: Build-A-Floor Celebration Festival

A.P.E.@Hawley Presents:

Build-A-Floor Celebration Festival: Honoring floors for dancing and the lineage of Nancy Stark Smith, Steve Paxton, and Contact Improvisation

Thursday-Sunday, May 2-5

Project host: Andrea Olsen

The Workroom at 33 Hawley and Shepherd’s Barn at Historic Northampton

Northampton, MA USA

“A good floor will gather us together, it will support us as we create and watch live performances, and it will last for generations.”

-Build-A-Floor Project endorsement by Jeffrey Bliss 2020

The Underscore +/- Group offers a “showing” of their practice from 6–9 pm in The Workroom at 33 Hawley to commemorate the completion of the new sprung floor, sometimes called “Nancy’s Floor” in honor of Nancy Stark Smith.

The Underscore is a framework for practicing and researching group dance improvisation developed by Nancy Stark Smith in 1990, incorporating Contact Improvisation into a broader arena of improvisational dance practice.

The Underscore guides dancers through a progression of changing states. The three hours will include periods of very small, private, and quiet internal activity and other times of higher energy and interactive dancing. The 20+ phases, 12+ connections, and 7+ aspects of the score—each with a name and graphic symbol—create a general map for the dancers. Within that frame they are free to create their own movements, dynamics, and relationships—with themselves, each other, the group, the music, and the environment. Each Underscore is unique.

While not initially designed as a performance form, the Underscore offers rich and often inspiring views of the human and artistic phenomena of dance improvisation. The environment is “somewhere between a 3D moving art installation, a visit to the zoo, and your living room.”

Attendees are invited to observe their own experience and their influence on the space, letting go of being traditional audience members. Attendees can shift their vantage point throughout, leave and return, draw or write (at the drawing/writing corner), in support of the whole experience.

Sliding scale $10-$20 (Income supports festival artists)

The Underscore +/- Group began in 2010, initiated by Nancy as a weekly peer dance workgroup to research the Underscore and other related work.

Dancers: Neige Christenson, Patrick Crowley, Claudio Garrido, Dey Summer, Jeff Bliss, Gabrielle Revlock, Ione Beauchamp, Liana Foxvog, Lani Nahele, Meta Bobbe, Rythea Lee, Chris Aiken, Dale Rosenkrantz, Saliq Savage, Sarah Young

“This sprung floor is a buoyant home.”

Build-A-Floor Project endorsement by Patrick Crowley 2020