Dance - Teaching, Performance, Creation

Dance Improvisation

• Classes in Ottawa, ON - weekly, year round, in seasonal sessions; class is a closed group and by invitation only - if interested, please contact me and I will give you details about upcoming sessions;

• periodic workshops, normally several times a year in Montreal, and 1-2 times per year in Victoria, B.C. and/or Salt Spring Island, B.C.

• Contact: klewisperformance@gmail.com

Teaching Values

• 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, disciplined 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.

Stay in the Loop

• 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.