May 12 to 16, 2025
9:30 am to 1:00 pm (Mon-Fri)
Full week: $120 (taxes included)
Drop-in: $72 (3 day registration only)
Language of instruction: English and French
Questions can be asked in: English and French.
This professional workshop is supported by the Conseil de la formation continue Arts et Culture de Montréal (CFC), with the financial participation of the Government of Quebec through the Intervention-Compétences program.
CATEGORY
OBJECTIVE
This year’s Movement Educator Forum (MEF), Safety and Risk in Practice, proposes a space for inquiry into the different ways practitioners cultivate and harness experiences of safety and risk in dance and movement education contexts.
Facilitated by Corinne Skaff and Kelly Keenan, over the course of a week, 5 teachers across fields of practice are invited to lead a movement class followed by a facilitator and peer lead discussion. We begin knowing that degrees of safety and risk are present in all sensing and movement invitations:
- What kinds of safety and risks is each invitee attending to?
- What kinds of safety/risks are backgrounded?
- What are your bodily ways of sensing safety and or risk?
- What strategies do you summon in response to risk?
- How may these senses of safety/risk be at the service or disservice of movement education?
By the end of the week, the hope is to render more explicit and expanded the ways in which safety and risk are mobilised in practice. How can we use them intentionally in fostering evermore positive and empowering spaces for training?
CONTENT
Monday May 12th
Corinne Skaff // Arriving
Description: Arriving will approach safety and risk through a ludic and somatic approach to movement that I articulate as Homecoming and Border-crossing. The elaboration of Arriving practices emerged from the confluence of my experiences as a newcomer in Montreal and my Levantine understanding of both welcoming and of being welcomed.
Homecoming is a somatic concept that I associate with safety, whereas Border-crossing is a compelling invitation to embrace risk. While the first emphasizes inward attention to sensations, limits, vagal states, and the grounding force of gravity, the latter calls for negotiation of somatic boundaries, perceptions and the cultivation of ecosomatic nurturance.
The chosen framework for the forum will be inspired by contact improvisation and bodywork drills that lead to solo and collective dances. The practice propositions invite touch as a supportive tool, and other participants as practice contributors and companions that support the cultivation of a state of Arriving beyond the time of the workshop and into the rest of the week.
Tuesday May 13th
Nicole Jacobs // Contemporary acrobatics and floorwork
Biography: Nicole Jacobs, a member of Curve Lake First Nation, is a Montreal-based choreographer, teacher, dancer, and cultural worker. A graduate of Concordia University’s contemporary dance program, she has collaborated with notable creators such as Theatre Junction, A’nó:wara Dance Theatre, Corpuscule Danse, and My-Van Dam. Nicole has shared her practice at institutions including Espace Ouvert, UQAM, and Studio 303 and presented her choreographic work at Festival Quartiers Danses, Here&Now Festival, Quai 5160 – Maison de la Culture Verdun, and Tangente. Currently, she is working as an independent curator with various festivals and organizations across Montreal and serves as the artistic director of Watershed, an Indigenous youth dance program.
Description: Nicole will share insights from her personal practice and teaching approach to contemporary acrobatics and floorwork. Acrobatics inherently carries an element of fear, a natural reflex tied to risk. Rather than resisting or dismissing this response, how can we work with fear and honour it as an essential part of our experience? How do we recognize when fear is protective versus when it limits our movement potential?
Together, we will explore foundational tools that cultivate a sense of safety and deepen our awareness of internal and external forces, fatigue, control, and adaptability.
Through this process, we will reframe fear not as a limitation but as a pathway toward possibility, resilience, and innovation. By developing methods for sensing, assessing, and adjusting complexity within movement, we open the potential to transform our relationship with risk and create space for errors to become opportunities.
Wednesday May 13th
Laurel Koop (they/them) // This is how we fight
Safety as undoing assumptions about safety and risk as thinking about urgency. This workshop will come at safety and risk as integral parts of conflict … and conflict as the source of so many things. Inspired by my extensive experience navigating the emotional-physical worlds and fights of kids (as both a parent and a teacher), one of the main themes will be: How do we fight? We’ll go back to some basics together, simple movement practices to help us map out feelings<–>facts, along with themes of (un)ease-endurance-mindfulness-perseverance.
Laurel is the director of Studio ED, in the Mile End, and runs the Queer Teacher’s Collective, the From the Ground Up Series (with @beefcake strength, Nadine Forde) and the Superhero Moves program (with Ethan Douce). From Scottish and Russian Mennonite roots, Laurel is a jack of many trades but has experience and training in a lot of different body stuff: ballet, sports, physical labour, contemporary dance, yoga, the biomechanics of movement, strength training and somatics. Laurel’s approach as a teacher is to facilitate movement practices that bring together ease+endurance and mindfulness+perseverance as they relate to the politics of trust building (with ourselves/others/community). I would not be where I am without many collaborators, those named above, also Eroca Nicols, Maxine Segalowitz, Chava Field-Green, Kelly Keenan and Leanne Dyer.
Thursday May 15th
Nicolas Patry (he/il) // Tamalpa Life\Art Process
coming soon!
Friday May 16th
Andréane Leclerc (she/her) // Contortion
Performer, choreographer, and educator, Andréane Leclerc has developed a somatic practice inspired by contortion, which she practiced for over twenty years, to create transdisciplinary works rooted in cooperation, listening, and relational ecology. In 2013, she completed a master’s degree focusing on the dramaturgy of the body in the École supérieure de théâtre at UQAM. Through her company Nadère Arts Vivants, she presents her pieces and workshops on contemporary interdisciplinary stages in Quebec and internationally.
Contortion requires a posture of listening and connection. It is an accessible bodily technique that can be learned, practiced, and developed over time. Through attentive listening, it fosters heightened awareness of bodily sensations and enables an intimate dialogue with our limits, which become allies in the process.
With an attitude of gratitude, recognition, and respect, this workshop teaches participants to collaborate with their physical, mental, and emotional resistances. Intrinsically tied to our bodies and identities, these resistances guide us in the journey toward self-discovery. This approach to contortion adopts a transdisciplinary methodology. It is based on principles of amplitude that aim for an internal opening of the body and the spine, facilitating the (re)birth of movement. How can we approach a bodily technique—one that may seem extreme—as a process?
| Workshop pace | Workshop features |
| Slow Fast Variable Adaptable to the group’s needs | Intense emotional work Visual support (i.e., documentation, texts…) Short verbal explications Exercises are adaptable Subgroups exercises Physical contact between participants Floor work Jumps and shocks Cardio exercises Standing up for a long time High music or sound level |
BIOGRAPHY
Kelly Keenan is a Mother, a dance artist, teacher, researcher, and event organiser based in Montreal/ Tiohtiá:ke/ Mooniyang. Kelly has 20 years of experience teaching, both in and outside of institutions, locally and abroad and started as a professor in the field of new approaches to technique and training at UQAM Département de danse in December 2022. As a dancer, Kelly collaborates with several independent choreographers. As an event organiser, she has organised several Axis Syllabus workshop festivals, teacher’s laboratories and founded the Montreal Movement Educator’s Forum in 2012 which has hosted 50+ teachers across fields of practice and enthusiastic participants to exchange, reflect and re-inspire their teaching practices. Kelly’s research explores the foundational values in dance training and diverse complementary trainings through a genealogical and feminist perspective. She is dedicated to the creation of spaces for dialogue between movement educators and practitioners to renew and innovate socio-culturally informed approaches to dance and movement training.
Corinne Skaff is a Lebanese dance artist and educator. She is the founder of ContactCampBeirut and the School of Movement Arts (S.o.M.A) in Beirut, as well as the artistic director of the Éphémère company. She approaches dance as a vital practice of self-embodiment and exploration, focusing on the process rather than the outcome. Constantly seeking dances that resonate with cultural and personal contexts, her movement and teaching practices draw inspiration from contact improvisation, contemporary movement practices, physical theater, dance science, and ecosomatic principles. As an educator, she is guided by the state of continuous learning through play and everything ephemeral. She is particularly interested in the strategies and politics of transmission, as well as in cultivating community connections through movement practices. Corinne Skaff, is at the end of her maîtrise en danse at UQAM Département de danse. Her research-creation project developed a prototype of a ludic tool to facilitate Arriving practices through somatic and creative danced explorations. She is currently working on creating NABAD, a platform to develop, serve, and discover a broader generation of Arab diaspora talents in dance in Canada.
Kelly Keenan is a great inspiration to my work as a dancer, researcher and creator. I am amazed by the diversity of knowledge and resources that Kelly manages to gracefully string together. Her generosity in sharing her practice is what keeps me coming back for more. There is always something new or a new way of looking at the same thing, which is a quality I look for and admire in the various disciplines I practice. Kelly manages to open my eyes into my body and all its many layers, always with a refreshed gaze and an insight of awe.
— Mona El Husseini
