Oni Dance is a nonprofit organization of artists that provides creative collaboration, performance, and movement education as the formula for furthering the growth and cultural impact of contemporary dance theater. The mission of Oni Dance is to ensure that dance retains a vital position in the social rituals of daily life of though classes, workshops, collaborations and public performances. Artistic Director, Maria Gillespie’s choreographic practice is rooted in improvisation while her dances seek to locate the kinetic logic of the body within the rituals of daily life. In designing performances, Gillespie demonstrates the semiotic relevance of body-based practices as she juxtaposes the politics of place and space with the constructions of the moving/dancing body and its identifications. The company creates vibrant and idiosyncratic dances that inspire both emotional and kinetic insight. Oni Dance serves as a social medium to present performances where the psyche and intellect co-exist with the challenges and gifts of humanity: the body. The work of Oni Dance reveals the complications of power, intimacy, and interrogates ideas of beauty and power using the expressive volumes of the body and human interaction. Aesthetically ranging from poignant and tender to raw and far-flung, the work of Oni Dance is centered in creating intricate theatrical environments, which expose and represent the multi-faceted layers of the human psyche.

Maria Gillespie is a dancer, choreographer, improviser, educator, and collaborator who has been making dances since 1994.  She received her BFA in Dance from State University of New York at Purchase and her MFA in choreography from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures. Gillespie is the recipient of 4 Lester Horton Awards and grants from The Irvine Foundation and The Durfee Foundation. Gillespie founded Oni Dance in 2005 and was selected by Dance Magazine as one of the “25 to Watch”.  Her choreography has been presented at Joyce SoHo in NYC, CounterPULSE in San Francisco, Tokyo, Japan and in Los Angeles at The Getty Center, UCLA, REDCAT/Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater, The Ford Amphitheater, Highways Performance Space, The Fowler Museum, CalArts Lund Dance Theater, The Electric Lodge, Diavolo Space, and The Met Theater as well as at numerous festivals. She has received commissions from UCLA, Cal State Long Beach, Santa Monica College, Scripps College, and Pomona College. She performed and collaborated extensively with Victoria Marks and Helios Dance Theater. Her dance film Saliendo, was screened in Dance Camera West’s Local Makers Film Festival. Gillespie teaches modern technique, improvisation, and composition. She has taught at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance (2001-2011), CalArts, Loyola Marymount, Scripps, Pomona, Cal State Long Beach, and at the University of Iowa. She regularly teaches workshops and master classes and holds community class in Venice.

R E P E R T O R Y

Vanished Earth – Beginning and ending with spinning, as if in a slow fall between lives, Vanished Earth contemplates existing between worlds – where elation and unity collide with the isolation and violence of migration. Reveling in the movement between states or worlds, the dancers are catapulted along a path of migration: continually spinning, falling and diving. A trio set to contemporary Polish folk music; it is performed on a stage covered by feathers.

Wasteland (arrival) is a dance is about grappling. Set in the round and on a stage covered with dirt, four strangers are thrown into a dirt-covered, torched dystopia. This quartet and its text is inspired by Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The dancers grapple with their past, present, limited resources, and obligatory new companions. They discover each other, try out new identities, and cling to their previous selves. After being thrown into the dance space, the individuals investigate the site, continued existence, and are relegated to contact with others of the same lot.  Their collaboration unearths the humor and the pathos that glue them together to comment on social dependence in troubled spaces.

Exquisite.Corpse – What is a dangerous body? 8 dancers lined up, overlapped, & covered with layers of plastic–does the grotesque elicit disgust or a compulsion to look closer?  Exquisite.Corpse presents bodies and their boundaries as exquisite but malleable structures. This dance imagines how the body is simultaneously banal, sublime, and gruesome and celebrates the body in all its states. The metaphor of the corpse signals a lullaby for the past, a peace with mortality, the pain of non-intimate proximity, and the beauty loving the vanished. Exquisite.Corpse is an image-based work in which I want to focus on constructions of the image of the body, mortality, a lack of gesture, a lullaby for the past, and a collapsing of what is gruesome and beautiful. Exquisite.Corpse is a series of dance experiments on varying numbers of dancers and in different modules depending on the venue. This work can be performed with the audience in the round or on opposing configuration.

These three works share common themes of intimacy, survival and companionship, migration, location, textures, and states of the body, endings, and beginnings.

W O R K S H O P S

Artistic Director, Maria Gillespie teaches modern technique, improvisation, and composition as the means to create tension between refined, technical clarity and spontaneous expressionism. As a dance educator, her personal mission is to continue to make dance in unexpected places, to collaborate with artists in ways that expand each artist’s methods of invention, to share with new communities the value in kineticism and relevance of challenging standards of what we consider beautiful and what we consider to be dance. As a dance educator, Gillespie is fortunate to contribute to a forum where dance becomes a kinetic epistemology in which the moving artist is empowered as they employ their body, mind, and psyche to claim or redesign their social self.

Technique Class

Maria Gillespie’s technique class combines release technique fundamentals, ballet & modern vocabularies with lots of floor work to explore movement that is grounded, supple, and quirky.  Her classes offer opportunities for strength building and musculoskeletal support. The idea of softening gravity will be introduced in the floor work.  Dynamic, complex phrases are experimented with to deepen sensitivity to gravity, devour space, and dive off center.

This class will emphasize a practice heavily informed by release technique fundamentals:  skeletal placement, movement initiation from the deep, skeletal system, efficiency of movement, intentional design of dynamics/effort for joint stability and/or an expressive tool, movement in stillness, stillness in movement, release of muscular tension to experience weight, gravity and the subsequent momentum, a quieting of performing personality to attend to internal physical and mental events.

This class uses practices based in release technique fundamentals (letting go of superficial muscular effort, initiating movement from bones, sequential movement) to let the body find alignment, flow, and efficiency.  The floor work will warm and stretch the body, establish joint articulation, and lay foundation for inversion and moving low to the ground. The center warm-up will teach mechanical precision, balance, coordination, and emphasize functional movement in weight shifting.  In more dynamic, complex phrases we’ll dance with heightened sensitivity to gravity, play with momentum, and take risks.

Improvisation

Improvisation class blends practices from contact improvisation and short scores as exercises to expand movement vocabularies, explore thematic material, and experience kinetic and somatic states that can either contribute to a dance making practice or be the building blocks for improvised performances. Longer improvisation scores for performances are based on her study with Simone Forti and Guillermo Gomez-Peña.

Composition

Beginning to advanced composition classes are designed for each group of students and /or professionals based on experience level, social interest, and creative goals. Choreography workshops are taught as experiments in: Process, Vocabulary, and Autobiography/Ethnography of Self. Regarding the specificity of each student’s process, we will differentiate between choreographic habits and new compositional methods.  We will acknowledge our old processes and begin to design and discover some new ones in order to expand our toolkit as dance makers. Secondly, we will be able to distill complex ideas into clear movement vocabularies. In holding composition classes, Gillespie wants to ask each student to consider how each dance develops its ideas through the movement vocabulary? Lastly, we want to our dance making skills to celebrate and interrogate everything.

AUG 13, 2011		Los Angeles Movement Artists (LAMA) Festival Nate Holden Performing Arts Center Los Angeles, CA