50¢ Dance Class Day

Ready for a day full of dance for just 50 cents? Head to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Forum between 11 am and 3 pm, or anytime in between, with your two quarters for the Jazz Migrations Edition, a nod to This Was Made Here by Meklit Hadero, presented at YBCA May 19–21, 2016.

Dance Class Schedule

11 am — Latanya d. Tigner — Here We Go Again
It’s true: nothing is ever new, especially in dance. Dances and steps within forms reemerge, re-visioned with new rhythmic structures, movement qualities, attitudes, and intentions based on the lived experiences and needs of the generation responsible for their revival. In this workshop, participants experience how different traditional African and African diasporic movements show up again and again in African American dance (jazz, hip-hop, house) as means of rejuvenation, evidence of resilience, acts of resistance, and roads to revelation.

12 pm — Traci Bartlow — Authentic Jazz Dances of the Harlem Renaissance
Traci Bartlow has a rich dance vocabulary that spans nearly one hundred years of urban dances, from jazz to lindy hop to funk to hip-hop. She invites you to take a ride back in time to the Harlem dance halls of the 1920s and 1930s, when jazz was a party dance that gained international acclaim and changed the landscape of music and dance culture worldwide.

1 pm — Reginald Ray-Savage — Contemporary Dance
Reginald Ray-Savage is known for pushing dancers’ boundaries to make them better. He is constantly innovating creative new ways to teach and pass on information to enable students of all ages and experience levels to access and demystify a physical art form that can often feel mysterious and inaccessible. He provides unique corrections and imagery that seem to work almost instantaneously, empowering students to push their technique further than they thought possible.

2 pm — Tsedal Agidew — Ethiopian Fusion Dance
The traditional Ethiopian shoulder dance known as eskista merges with the modern Afro-diasporic sounds of jazz. A contemporary style of dance that speaks the language of globalization, it is a fresh new take on East meets West. Tsedal Agidew incorporates a variety of African dance styles as well as elements of jazz and improvisation/freestyle. The class centers on eskista technique and includes a short piece of choreography involving various Ethiopian dances.