COCRÉA is an improvisational partner dance practice for developing presence, opening gateways to creativity, empowering mindful leaders and followers and generating authentic connection in relationship.
In this weekend workshop, facilitators Wren LaFeet and Usha Rose will guide participants into an experiential embodiment practice based in the forms of many of the world’s social partner dance techniques, while inviting and allowing an easeful flow of ideas to emerge through listening and responding to the moment. Familiar techniques woven together in this practice include contact improvisation, blues, tango, fusion, and more!
As we hone this dynamic, kinetic toolbox, we emphasize connection, communication and presence between two people within a community of others. Allowing intuition and feeling to guide the partnership, their centers and frames to support it, Cocréa celebrates our ability to embody profound joy through being in a body moving in harmony with another body while honing mastery and individual genius.
Weaving the threads of collaboration, cross-pollination and consciousness, the practice focuses on how dance can enhance and expand relationships into a deeply connected, honest and powerful tool for personal, interpersonal and collective transformation.
COCRÉA FUSION WEEKEND WORKSHOP ▬
Goals of Instruction
* Give you empowerment to enter into partnership confidently on any dance floor regardless of musical genre or dance style.
* Provide a context for you to connect in a positive, supportive and mutually enjoyable manner.
* Expand your movement vocabulary by guiding you through a progressive curriculum.
* Gain greater body awareness and sensitivity – both physical and emotional – to your partner.
* Practice deep listening to adjust and adapt to what is emerging between you and your partner in keeping with good consent.
* Build physical, emotional and spiritual resilience to change.
* Grow into releasing expectations and agendas.
* Learn to invite, allow, accept and embrace what is.
Benefits
* Develop mindfulness and deeper body awareness.
* Open gateways to your creative mind.
* Exercise confidence in all your interactions.
* Get an excellent, full body workout.
* Learn and practice valuable consent tools for being in integrity in all your interactions.
* Nurture authentic, compassionate and intimate connections to those with whom you relate.
* Create calm in your life through engaging mirror neurons and offering your body the touch it needs without expectations, attachments or entanglements.
* Increase your intelligence through the one activity scientifically shown to activate the neuroplasticity of the brain and decrease the risk of dementia and Alzheimer’s more than any other – social partner dance!
A few of the concepts Cocréa workshops explore:
* Spinaesthesia – Jedi musicality. Sensing music as movement in your body.
* Conversational dance – blurring the line between lead and follow moving towards a roll-less dance.
* Flow State – letting go of the mind and entering into total embodiment of a higher frequency presence with a partner.
* Dynamism in partnership – dancing with non-duality in all the places along the spectrum.
* Technique – dancing sustainably, setting yourself up for a lifetime of dancing.
* Radical Presence – being aware of everything that’s happening in your body, with your partner and the space around you, all of the time, no matter what.
Please join us for a weekend of rich development in dance and authentic relating!
DATES AND TIMES ▬
Saturday and Sunday
June 8th & 9th
11am-5pm
This will be a full weekend with two days of workshop sessions building on each other.
Saturday will be geared towards people new or newish to partner dance. Exploring personal style, establishing structure, connection, lead-follow dynamics, trust and surrender and musicality.
Sunday will be exploring more advanced concepts such as conversational/switch dance, specific moves, listening and responding to shifts in energy and partnership dynamics and dips.
No housing on-site.
Nearby accommodations available through AirB&B and local friend stays.
LOCATION ▬
507 55th Street (at Telegraph Avenue)
Oakland, CA 94609
RESOURCE EXCHANGE ▬
Sliding Scale
FULL WEEKEND
$95 / $125 / $155
SATURDAY or SUNDAY ONLY
$45 / $60 / $80
Please pay what is available to you that feels like a stretch.
For scholarship or work trade opportunities, please contact Wren at the email below.
Both singles and couples welcome.
FACILITATORS
Wren LaFeet
A dancer in the Fusion social partner dance movement since it began, Wren’s dancing largely defines fusion as an emergent aesthetic dance form. Fueled by his curiosity in spirituality, the body, global community, the natural world and relationships, and guided by his devotion to love and the idea of the Beloved, partner dance has served as the vehicle for his inquiry and understanding. He has inspired the formation of multiple fusion dance communities on the west coast of North America, and teaches partner dance internationally as a practice for mindful, authentic living, enlivening communities with his signature modality, Cocréa. His facilitation encourages individuals to create themselves as safer spaces for the embodiment of the full range of human expression. Promoting dance as medicine, spirituality and salve for our modern ailments of disconnection and alienation, his practice insists we trust our bodies with the music and our partner to catalyze elevating our whole being into higher vibrational states.
Working with the holographic overview of humanity provided by the Gene Keys and combining its contemplative practice with his own somatic exploration and intuitive listening through the body, as well as his study of human conflict through theater, Wren empowers individuals and communities to dance with joy, helps free insights locked in the body, coaches people to more easily access their sensuality and even on privileged occasion supports the healing of chronic disease. Wren’s goal is to support people into right relationship with the moment; to listen and respond appropriately to what is being called for in service to the highest possible good. He holds a BA in Drama and Dance from the University of Washington, is an author in the published work, “Reinhabiting the Village,” a TEDx speaker and your muse for all things somatic.
USHA ROSE
Usha Rose is a Somatic Sex, Intimacy, andRelationship Coach, Workshop Facilitator, Dance and Yoga Teacher, and Licensed Massage Therapist. She is trained in the Somatica™ Method of Sex and Relationship Coaching and is a graduate of the International School of Temple Arts Practitioner Training. She also spent three years studying closely with Sonika Tinker and Christian Pederson in the LoveWorks Relationship Training Mastery Program, including two years in the Assistant and Leadership Program.
She is the co-founder of Foothills Fusion Dance, a weekly, social dance in Grass Valley, CA and co-founder of Convergence, an annual Ecstatic and Fusion dance mini-festival in Northern California. She is also the Production Manager and Facilitator for Cocréa, a mindful partner dance company that produces transformational dance retreats and workshops around the globe.
Usha discovered the conscious dance community in 2010 when she started attending Ecstatic Dance Oakland. Since then she has studied SoulMotion™ with Vinn Marti and Zuza Engler, completed the JourneyDance™ Teacher Training with Toni Bergins and continues to be inspired by the many teachings of Contact Improv and 5Rhythms™.
She took her first partner dance class (Salsa) in 2005, although she was first introduced to partner dancing as a young child in her living room with her grandmother who was an avid Lindy Hop dancer. It was around 2010 when Usha discovered Blues dancing, and soon thereafter fell in love with Fusion dancing. She has studied several other partner dance forms including Salsa, Tango, Swing and Zouk, to name a few. In addition to teaching locally, she has taught dance at several events around the country including Enchanted Forest Gathering, Jumpsuit Family Gathering and Northern California Dance Camp.
CONNECT ▬
To learn more about Cocréa check us out at our website at http://dancecocrea.com/offerings
Contact Wren LaFeet via FB Msgr or
or email dancecocrea(at)gmail(dot)com
Excited to dance with you!!!