The 2025 Dance On GATHERING is an in-person and online event at Dance Exchange celebrating aging with dance, creativity, and connection

GATHER – Saturday, May 17 @ 4:00 – 5:15pm EST

Dancing Through Generations – The Role of Dancemaking and Performance in Intergenerational Collaboration

Session Fee: $15

Join us for an engaging conversation with artists Ami Dowden-Fant, Esther Geiger, Sarah Ramey, Vincent Thomas, Ken Vail, and Dance Exchange’s Executive Artistic Director, Cassie Meador, as we explore the transformative power of intergenerational dancemaking and performance. Dance Exchange has long been a leader in building community across generations through dancemaking, and in this session, we’ll hear from artists who are pushing the boundaries of this practice through their work in Creative Aging and beyond.

This session will provide an inspiring opportunity to reflect on how dancemaking and performance can be used to foster deep connections, inspire creativity, and build resilience across generations.

The panel will delve into key questions such as:

• How are these artists using dancemaking and performance to build community and connection across generations?
• Why do they continue to dance on and cultivate opportunities for their communities to “Dance ON” through dancemaking and performance?
• What role does intergenerational exchange play in fostering a more embodied, resilient, and just world?

Join us as we discuss the joys, challenges, and impacts of dancemaking and performance in creating a space for intergenerational collaboration and community building, while considering the future of dance in fostering a more inclusive, embodied world.

Register here

Tutorial: Revealing the Meaning of Bodily Expression of Human Counterparts for Robots Using Dance Theory and Human-annotated Benchmark Datasets

Cat Maguire will lead a day long tutorial (with Amy LaViers) as part of the Arts and Robotics special track at ICRA (International Conference on Robotics and Automation) in Atlanta, USA, May 23rd, 2025 highlighting motif and notational abstractions of movement.

How do we make a machine that indicates changes to its internal state, e.g., goals, attitude, or even emotion, through changes in movement profiles?

This workshop will pose a possible direction toward such ends that leverages movement notation as a source for clearly defining abstract concepts of similarity and symbolic representation of the parts and patterns of movement – in order to identify, record and interpret patterns of human movement on both the micro and macro levels. First, we will move together. This will activate an innate ability to imitate each other and, in doing so, illuminate the principal components of Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies and the Body, Effort, Shape, Space, and Time (BESST) System of movement analysis. Next, we will try to write down what we’re doing. A set of symbols for describing elements of the BESST System, which seem to be particularly perceptually meaningful to human observers, will be presented so that movement ideas can be notated and, thus, translated between bodies. We will explore both Labanotation and a related ”motif”-style notation. This workshop is supported by NSF award #2234196.

Read more aout the day here

On December 31st 2024, WholeMovement graduated its first cohort of CWMAs, Certified WholeMovement Analysts, in Rome, Italy (in connection with Choronde Progetto Educativo). Welcome to the international community of Movement Analysts!

CWMAS / Certified WholeMovement Analysts and research project titles:

Caterina Fava: The role of Movement in my French learning process: How the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System has accompanied my personal process of learning French.

Diana Magri: Indomesticate Spaces: knowing practices for choreographic composition.

Emanuela Canton: A journey through embodiment, between conscious and unconscious images, towards self discovery and personal growth: LBMS and psychotherapy.

Francesca Cassottana: INVISIBLE SUN.

Maurizio Azzurro: Finalized to the creation of a Pedagogy For the use of masks in the Atellan Farce and in Ancient Latin Theatre.

Susanna Odevaine: ESCHER, dancing the infinity.

Vittoria La Costa: The movement of the psyche: LBMS as an observational lens and tool for reading and intertention in psychotherapy.

Matteo Vignali: Italian portraits:Through the sound of their dialects.

Camilla Crispino: Towards Lines of Embodied Becoming -The Eight Basic Action Strokes-

Chiara Parisi: Laban Bartenieff Movement System: A tool to increase and lead creative movement classes.

Ondina Cassotta: Reverse Canon – seeking new forms for ballet teaching. 

Alicja Paleta: Application of LBMS in embodied emotional self-regulation – a case study.

Mara Camelin: The Ancient Art of Tai Ji Quan and the Laban-Bartenieff Movement System: A Comparison.

Maria Romana Benevento: Application of the Laban Bartenieff Movement System to Postural Gymnastics.

This program was taught by Karen Studd, Laura Cox, Cat Maguire, Alexandra Baybutt with guests tutors Lorella Rapisarda, Joanna Brotman, and Alessio Maria Romano.

The modules were supported by Caterina Mocciola as interpreter/translator in both English-to-Italian and Italian-to-English.