The Department of Theatre and Dance in conjunction with graduate student Teresa Salas will host a free Temblor workshop on May 6 in the Hickey Gym 12-4 p.m. Taught by Valentina Menz Nash, the workshop consists of a series of practices oriented to the exploration of our capacity to re-appropriate our vitality as living beings in a living environment. 

Temblor is a search to re-encounter ourselves by listening to our body and the contradictions that can emerge from this task in a colonial and neoliberal context. How does the intensity of the living manifest itself in a body and in our environment? This is one of the working questions with which we will begin.

The references used in Temblor practices are the knowledge of the body present in Afro-Latin dances and rhythms, improvisation practices and Axis Syllabus. These practices, put in relation during the workshop process, seek to enable, from the physicality, a collective space for the exercise of questioning vitality in our current context.

Nash, performer, choreographer and researcher, has investigated Afro-Latin American dances participating as a performer in the Afro Mestizo Dance Company. Her research led her to link with other movement practices such as contact improvisation, instant composition and body-mind centering. In 2010 she founded the Artistic Mediation Network with other collaborators to explore intersections between creative processes and critical pedagogies. Her choreographic research is situated in the exploration of the vital impulse of the bodies through improvisation strategies, using references of movement languages from Afro-Latin rhythms and principles of contact improvisation. Her mission is seeking to create compositions where rhythm, intensities and implosions regenerate the vitality of the bodies. As a performer and researcher, she has participated in numerous residencies and festivals in Latin America and Europe. 

The Department of Theatre and Dance is part of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science. For information about other department productions, visit theatredance.ucdavis.edu.