Attention

Attention

Attention

Saturday, May 2nd: 10:30am-4:30pm

Sunday, May 3rd: 10:30am-4:30pm 

A workshop With Jonathan González, May 22-23, 2027

mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of  the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University, and the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at the UCLA World Arts and Cultures Dance Department. They are currently a Creative Time Research and Development Fellow. 

This workshop is hosted in conjunction with mayfield’s durational experience,

rage rave, on May 1st. Check it out here!

SLIDING SCALE $100-250

Attention is a 2-day workshop that approaches choreography as a collective practice of perception, relation, and formal inquiry. Working through questions of attention, landscape, rhythm, and group structure, participants will explore how bodies organize space together, how environments shape movement and sensation, and how choreography can emerge through sustained acts of noticing, listening, and collective attunement.

Drawing from improvisational scores, durational exercises, flocking structures, and compositional studies, the workshop treats attention not simply as focus, but as a social and spatial practice: a way of orienting toward others, toward environment, and toward the unfolding conditions of the present. Participants will engage movement as both embodied research and formal construction, examining how collectivity produces shifting relations between abstraction, commitment, atmosphere, and form.

Through movement, discussion, and collaborative experimentation, the workshop invites participants to consider choreography as a mode of study grounded in duration, perception, and the evolving dynamics of the group.

Have questions? Please email us at art.at.shebang@gmail.com and we’ll get back to within 1-2 business days.

Want to join?