Overground Arts Alliance provide professional academic training and education in contemporary dance, post physical performance, theater and yoga through company classes, workshops and performing arts forums.
Our Academic/Creative and Holistic Platforms:
Contemporary Dance
This class bridges performance theory and practice - providing both cognitive and experiential knowledge on intelligent dance design. It introduces the main elements of dance by drawing on evolving practices in dance training today.
Students are exposed to the philosophy underpinning contemporary dance, including formal ideologies, codified and personalized vocabularies, aesthetic concepts and technical attributes.
The main principles of dance - such as space, time and energy are experienced through the body, as dancers learn the basics of postural and energetic alignment, dynamic transitions, tempo-rhythm, effort, shape, articulation, sequential flow, centering, pacing - while developing their personal kinesthetic awareness.
The theory runs in two main tracks – deconstruction and bricolage. Students learn techniques for debriefing the body from unwanted patterns, before they get exposed to contemporary trends of fusing modalities and dance styles.
Special emphasis goes to grasping the difference between codified and personalized dance techniques and styles derived from the pre-modern, modern, post-modern, contemporary and post-physical performance menu of the form-driven American Dance Theater, and the expressionistic European Tanz-Theater.
Physical Theater
The class examines the three levels of being – identity, reality and ecology; self, other and the world. Actors are urged to debrief the body from fixed patterns of movement and thought, as they perceive it as an expressive organism of organic form.
Students explore the elements of time, space and energy as they find efficient pathways of action and movement to distill physical image into psychological gesture. They trace an impulse as it travels through the body to trigger a psycho-somatic response. Students further study the pathways of thoughts as they evoke sounds to coin words and unleash a stream of consciousness. Words travel through image and associations to distill into speech and create narrative. Actors tap the emotional memory to unleash their voice and generate authentic movement.
The class culminates in a contact improvisation where the newly carved characters engage in a group “plastique,” while exploring different styles of movement and relationship.
Artflow Yoga
This class emphasizes the importance of fluid transitioning. It takes you into a Vinayasa adventure through subtle and elegant transitions cascading back into organic form.
The practice builds on the 10 principles of energetic alignment – a reflection of natural physics, and introduces you into the art of structuring organic sequencing. A creative warm-up opens the energetic body and oils up the joints for a deep “yogaleidoscope” of transitions and innovasanas – the brand concepts of Yogea. You will learn how to re-create this functional Vinaysa flow that optimizes transitions with minimum weight shift and mirco tilts, contractions and twists. You will learn how this subtle dance through the poses depends on the economic weight transfer and guided energetic and anatomical alignment dictated from the synergy of all body parts.
Sacred geometry is central to this exploration as you will investigate how form follows energy, energy builds up frequency, and how the individual vibration shifts you through the spiral of consciousness.
Yogea is an emerging ArtFlow yoga style that has developed over the past 18 years across Europe, Asia and America. It is geared towards unleashing authenticity, cultivating mindfulness and adaptability to grow and thrive in a constantly changing world. Its creatively blended exercise routines structured like a compass, together with its breathing and meditation techniques inspire practitioners to keep physically fit, mentally balanced, stress-free and able to tap the cosmic flow by bridging the personal with the universal. Yogea’s innovative routines emphasize flow of energy over rigidity of form and inspire individuals to transition organically from one stage to the next in full trust and gratitude, letting the natural flow guide them into their life mission. It enkindles the urge to awaken the “guru” inside, and releases the need for discipleship and the following of a single teacher or path. It affords practitioners the freedom for personal spiritual pursuit and creative expression.
