with Philly Dance Share

A mini dance intensive

Rigorous Play Towards

Multiple Ways of Being 

November 7-9

Rigorous Play is a mini dance intensive presented with PDS and an intimate cohort of movement-artists for a weekend of body technologies ((technique/somatics)) and creative practice workshops.

Rigorous Play: We tap into our childlike wonder and curiosity, to explore and make without presciousness, judgement, or pre-editing. We approach this practice of play with rigor– focus, diligence, care. We take our play, our joy, our fun, seriously. Loosely. This work of movement is vital and profound and at the same time… its just dance! 

Multiple Ways of Being: The counterpart to our rigorous play, perhaps the outcome. How can we use this practice of rigorous play, to explore our multifaceted natures as movers makers and performers? This mini intensive offers six creative perspectives on the question. Rigorous play as an oxymoron, the practice of letting disparate ideas live all at once in our bodies, in our movement, and in the room. “Both things can be true.” We explore confusion and contradiction, and what can emerge from sitting with the discomfort that comes along with those concepts. Maybe the discomfort dissipates after a while to make way for— something yet to be discovered!

Adam

Jungwoon

Ben & Rhonda

Kayliani

Shannon

  • Bio coming soon!

  • Bio coming soon!

  • Rhonda Moore

    Rhonda is a dancer, performance artist, educator, and a founding member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company. Moore has danced with Jamie Cunningham’s ACME Dance Company and began her dance career with intensive training in Dunham technique, performing with the Akosua Afro-Haitian Dance & Drum Troupe. Currently a teaching artist for the award-winning Pierre Dulaine’s Dancing Classrooms Program, Moore previously served as Choral Director for the Singing City-in-the-Schools Program. Moore’s extensive international and domestic portfolios include conducting professional sound and movement workshops; creating site-specific interdisciplinary installations that integrate sound, movement and visual art through shared experience collaborative elaboration; teacher-specific professional development laboratories geared to generate curriculum development with a focused, integral inclusion of visual art, design, movement; and music and vocal concerts as jazz soloist in small combos as well as with chamber and full orchestral formations. She holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase, a diploma in classical piano performance from Hoff-Barthelson Music School in Scarsdale, NY, and full, permanent certification in Italian as a second language, conferred by the Foreign University of at Sienna, Italy. Ms. Moore serves as adjunct professor, dance faculty at Boyer College of Music and Dance, teaching a variety of courses spanning from dance composition to the study of the development of jazz music and dance in the United States.

    Ben Grinberg (he/they) is a Philadelphia-based performing artist, director, educator, and festival producer. For over ten years, they have created community-based platforms for artistic presentation and exchange both in Philadelphia and abroad. He is a company member, co-founder, and director of Almanac Projects (formerly Almanac Dance Circus Theatre), an award-winning and internationally touring physical performance ensemble, and from 2017-2021 was a founding core faculty member and head of Performance and Artistic Craft at Circadium, the nation’s first certificate granting program in contemporary circus performance, where he developed and curated the Test Flights series. He co-founded and led (2021-2025) Cannonball Festival, a hub for new performance in Philadelphia, and is on faculty at the (formerly UArts) Pig Iron MFA program in devised performance. Through Almanac, they initiated and co-produce the biannual Fit Fest in Penn Treaty Park. He is the 2025 recipient of the APAP/CIPA Award for Outstanding Achievement in Creative Producing, is a 2024 Festival Academy graduate, and was a 2024 and 2022 invited choreographer at the Breaking Walls Festival in Cairo, Egypt, a 2022 Subcircle resident artist, and a 2021 APLI fellow. With Almanac, he won a 2020 Rocky Award, a 2017 Suraya Award, and a 2019 Barrymore Award for Outstanding Movement/Choreography. Recent directing and producing credits include I Think It Could Work, Dead Muse, Fix Me, $7 Girl, I Hear You and I’d Like to Respond, The Fleecing, and xoxo moongirl. Grinberg’s work has been presented by Queer Zagreb, Jacob's Pillow, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Morris Museum Presents, Touchstone Theatre, FringeArts, New York Live Arts, Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Co, the Mexico City International Festival of Contemporary Dance, Assembly Festival, Zoo Edinburgh, Circus Now, and more. Regional performance includes Pig Iron Theatre Company (Franklin’s Key, Swamp is On, 99 Breakups, Pay Up!), Theatre Horizon (Peter and the Starcatcher, Hero School), Lantern Theatre Company (The Tempest), and more. As a video collaborator he has worked closely with artists such as Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Eiko Otake, and Zina Saro-Wiwa.

  • Kayliani Sood (she/they) is a femme dance artist, choreographer, and educator based in Philadelphia. Their multidisciplinary work spans movement, songwriting and visual arts to articulate rich, personal narratives of neurodivergence and femmehood. Sood is a passionate teacher— whose practice ranges from the realm of early childhood to adult dance education. They hold a BFA in Dance from the University of the Arts, and have performed with Brian Sanders, Curt Haworth, and Vincent Johnson, among others. Sood has showcased their own work in the 20/92 film festival, Cannonball Festival, Fringe Festival, and most recently in Philadelphia Dance Projects’ 2025 DANCE UP CLOSE series.

  • Shannon Murphy (she/her) is a dance artist/educator who creates invitations to notice our complexity, differentiation, and resilience in the classroom, studio and stage. She received her MFA in Dance from the University of the Arts and a BA in dance from Point Park University. She is senior faculty specializing in Franklin Method for dance at Franklin Method Institute, Switzerland, training educators internationally since 2019. Shannon created the first Franklin Method modular training for dancers and has focused on bringing this to professionals and dancers in training. As an educator, she is committed to radical sustainability and develops curricula to reduce injury and support the resiliency of performers. Shannon is an Assistant Professor at Temple University. As an adjunct professor, she has taught at Drexel University, was assistant director of the Drexel Dance Ensemble, Stockton University, and UArts, where she was the Curricular Head of Body Pathways for 10 years. This year she was commissioned for a new site specific work at Subcircle Residency and has been presented at many institutions including Cannonball Festival, Penn Museum, The Painted Bride Art Center. Her choreographies span contemporary performance, dance theater and musical theater. Shannon has performed for choreographers such as Charles Anderson, Nichole Canuso, Group Motion, Jaamil Kosoko, and Annie Wilson, and was co-director of idiosynCrazy productions alongside founder Makini (Jumatatu Poe). She has been awarded a Rocky Award through Dance USA Philadelphia for her choreography. Her work has been supported by numerous residencies, including New Edge at the Community Education Center, Live Arts LAB, Mascher Space Co-Op, the Whole Shebang, Archedream for Humankind, University of the Arts, The Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio at Temple University, and most recently, Subcircle Residency.

  • Marguerite is a Jamaican-American artist who specializes in emergent, improvisational and social movement styles and technologies. They research the subversive role of dance and music throughout the African Diaspora and channel this research through performance, body, text, social/public media, and moving image.

    Hemmings’ work is also embedded in alternative pedagogy and social practice having worked with various universities, afterschool programs, and community centers. They have received grants and fellowships from many organizations such as Urban Bush Women’s Choreographic Center Initiative and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts to further their research.

Marguerite

Schedule

CLASS DESCRIPTIONS:

  • What’s possible when the boundary between performer and audience dissolves? This workshop is a lab for exploring interactive performance as a tool for choreographing dances—especially with unrehearsed participants. You’ll experiment with making invitations, following discovery, and holding space for others’ choices as movement emerges. The goal of this collaborative space is to generate something new that allows you to apply your findings to your own practice as we reconsider who dances are for and how they’re made.

  • In this partnering workshop, we will explore ways to identify the innate connection that exists between two people, and two bodies, and how to make it visible for an audience. Beginning from a place of curiosity in the unknown, we will observe, question, connect, judge, challenge, and learn each other through impulse, games and tasks. Based on Rhonda and Ben's research for Helpful Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People, a new platform for duet creation, the duo will lead participants through scores and exercises based on the 1901 book Illustrated Hints for Strength and Health for Busy People, as well as their own partnering practice. The workshop will progress from stationary small body geographies to the movement of bodies through space, experimenting both independently and with shared weight. We will encourage participants to share their own tips for strength and health (whatever that means to them) as the basis for devising. By the end of the workshop, participants will know each other a little better than before.

  • “Mud… limning fingernails, encrusting children’s knees and hair, sucking feet like a greedy newborn on the breast.”

    — Hillary Jordan, Mudbound

    In this 2-hour improvisation dance class, we will explore—individually and collectively—the qualities of mud and how the body embraces and responds to them.

  • This class is a vibrant, athletic approach to postmodern techniques. Teacher Kayliani Sood draws from principles of house and modern dance to create a unique fusion that prioritizes grounded, rhythmic, and momentum-based movement. Within an intention of generosity, we warm up to strengthen, mobilize, and revitalize the body for our practice. Guided solo improvisation and collaborative exercises attune students to their bodies, their intuitions, and each other. Technical exercises and choreographic ideas challenge students to move with efficiency through footwork, floor work, and gestures. This class is appropriate for intermediate to advanced movement practitioners.

  • In this workshop we’ll learn strategies of making ourselves ready again with help from the trickster, the fool, and the hero. Using a score developed in residency at The Yard in 2023 with Anise Hines and Coley Curry, students will engage in different games and prompts pulling from dance improvisation, comedy improvisation, and dance theater. This score was originally made in the context of building embodied, collective responses to trauma in an attempt to make the body-mind-spirit-people ‘ready again’.

    All levels and experiences are welcome. 

  • This is a contemporary dance class incorporating improvisation and guided phrases. Shannon introduces internal domed spaces in the body (roof of the mouth, diaphragm, pelvic diaphragm and souls of the feet) through short Franklin Method®  studies and then expands these ideas into dance practices prioritizing these spaces as locations of support, dynamics, balance and power. Expect flashlight (zooming-in) and playtime (application of embodied understanding), guided imagery both anatomical and metaphorical, group and personal reflection (notebooks welcome), functional anatomy (images and models), and big bodied dancing!

FAQ

  • We are prioritizing having a cohort of 10 people doing the full intensive. If we still have open spots closer to the workshop, we will open up drop in spots.

  • Invest in these perspectives, and how they layer together. Begin together, end together and talk along the way. How might navigating this as a group expand the experience of YOUR rigorous play towards OUR multiple ways of being, in ways expected and not?

    Let’s get into it and have fun. 

  • We will open up drop in spots on October 15th, so if you plan to do the full weekend we recommend registering BEFORE that date.

  • If you’re wondering about how to determine how much to pay on the sliding scale, feel welcome to reference this method devised by Alexis J. Cunningfolk of Worts & Cunning Apothecary and introduced to us by Cannonball Festival.

  • Yes you can use Afterpay at check out to pay in smaller installments. If that doesn’t work for you, contact us about paying through Venmo or Paypal. (But we would prefer for you to pay through this website 😊)

  • Email us at art.at.shebang@gmail.com. We are happy to answer any questions you may have!