“Dance Wreckoning” Workshop with Guest Artist Rebecca Pappas

Wreck It!-A Choreography Workshop 

In this workshop, dancemaker Rebecca Pappas works alongside students to seek the creative potential inherent in destruction. Drawing from choreographer Susan Rethorst’s seminal “Dance Wrecking,” process, Pappas exposes the political potential and joy inherent in “the wreck.” In the workshop students will use texts by early modern innovators Isadora Duncan and Florence Fleming Noyes, snippets of repertoire from Pappas’ work My Body as the Topic Coming Around Again, and source material drawn from their own dance training both within and outside the studio.

They will be invited into a collective undoing as we distort, cut apart, set on fire, erase, color over, and generally expose and undo the bodily practices we have learned. This embodied inquiry becomes a way to problematize our own dance legacies and training-how can wrecking be a method of learning, exploring, growing, and creating new dance traditions? 

Rebecca Pappas has taught workshops and served on faculty around the United States including at UCLA, UC Berkeley, Pasadena City College, Ball State, and Trinity College where she is currently on faculty. Her work has been supported with grants from the Mellon Foundation, the Indiana Arts Commission, the New England Foundation for the Arts, and the Connecticut Office of the Arts. In 2023-24 We Are Destroying Ourselves: A Dance Wrecking will be presented in Indianapolis, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Northampton, and Hartford.