Classes

Contact Dance Improvisation

Weekly classes in Ottawa, ON - year round on Sunday evenings. Workshops offered regularly, in Ottawa, ON, and further afield (recent workshops have happened in Montreal, Victoria, Salt Spring Island).
Learn foundational to advanced techniques in Contact Dance Improvisation, with a community of dedicated dancers. Each session involves technique, structured improvisation, and free improvisation, aka “jamming.” All levels, all ages, all genders, all abilities welcome - we practice contact dance improvisation as an essential humanistic practice whose aim is to refine, deepen, enrichen relational intelligence.
Weekly Classes - Ottawa, ON
January 11, 2026 to July 26, 2026
- Sundays from 4:30 -6:30 pm @ the Ottawa Dance Directive, 2 Daly St., Ottawa
- no class on February 15, 2026 - Family Day
- Class is ON unless I indicate otherwise here and in the student mailing list
Fees: $20 Drop-in for 2 hour class. Inquire about scholarships, no student turned away by reason of inability to pay.
To register: Please email me at: klewisperformance@gmail.com. New students are required to fill out a one-time only student-teacher agreement form.
Drop-ins welcome, but be advised that space is limited. First come, first served.

Healthy, alignment-based approach to classical ballet, aimed at the needs of the maturing body. Classes held in multi-week sessions from September to June, through the School of Modern Dance in Kanata
We work on a choreography to perform for video each session & students have the option of performing in the year-end recital in June
Current Session: January 11 to March 8th, 2026, $160/8weeks
runs in consecutive sessions until early June, 2026.
12pm to 12:55pm: Adult Beginner Ballet
1pm to 1:55pm: Adult Intermediate Ballet
Register through the School of Modern Dance, here: https://schoolofmoderndance.com/programs-sessions/
Workshops, Private Sessions, Creative Mentorship
I hold workshops and intensives several times a year, normally in or around Montreal, QC and in Victoria, B.C./Salt Spring Island, B.C. Contact for upcoming workshops and/or to book one.
I work selectively with students one on one in a mentorship capacity; please contact me if interested -we will design a course of study and fee structure fitted to your needs.
Private lesson fee is typically $100/hour, with adjustments to student budget and needs - and lower rates for more frequent sessions

I have been teaching dance since 2010, and dancing since 1983.
I approach dance as a fundamental expression of our human capacity for joy, courage, generosity, expressive diversity, creativity, and kindness. I value dance and performance for the way they connect us to our humanity - ever more important in a world where social connection and humanistic values are in decline.
Rigour and discipline lead to surprising results - even older adults can attain satisfying levels of expressive capacity and bodily capacity - with regular, discplined attention to practice
My practice has roots in:
- Laban & Developmental Movement based approaches to modern dance;
- experimental performance techniques emerging from the Performance Studies tradition;
- a long, deep personal study of improvised dance and performance as pathways for creative realization;
- critical-theoretical approaches from my training in Western academic traditions (via, inter alia, my two law degrees);
- insights from a twenty plus year history as a serious student of yoga, including a decade plus of yoga teaching - taking a non-dogmatic, open approach to this ancient discipline, freed from cultural baggage and delivered as an effective set of techniques to reveal hidden strength, wisdom, capacity to hold reality.

This website is a container for my work -and a place for current and prospective students to reach me. I value live, in-person connection over internet representations of experience. This website is therefore intentionally bare-bones - to know more about classes and approach, come to class!
The way I share about classes now is old-fashioned: you email me, I put you on the email list and I send notices about classes and workshops.
I only work with a small-ish number of students, so that we can get to know each other well, build community based on familiarity rather than volume - and build strong containers capable of holding students in the changes the seasons bring.