Navigating the dance floor can seem as intimidating as a battlefield to the uninitiated.
The interchange of bodies and energetics fluctuates between the subtle and passionate in the same instant …
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Navigating the dance floor can seem as intimidating as a battlefield to the uninitiated.
The interchange of bodies and energetics fluctuates between the subtle and passionate in the same instant at times.
Sometimes its best to just follow the lead of someone who knows what they’re doing.
With 24 years of experience in partner dancing, and a lifetime background in theater, Wren LaFeet is bringing a day of Fusion dance classes designed to inspire and level-up dancers and novices alike on Saturday, Jan. 14.
“I encourage people to come to the whole weekend because it really is a beautiful progression that I’m going to be offering,” LaFeet said, noting that individual classes throughout the day could be taken a la carte.
Fusion is a type of dance somewhat nebulous by definition. It’s often thought of as a contemporary, social improvised partner dance that combines different dance styles to create a new aesthetic, though some might say it doesn’t need to be contemporary, doesn’t need to combine different dance styles, and doesn’t need to create a new aesthetic (but often does have elements of each of these).
Some will say it is a dance form of its own while others will say that it is not a dance form but a way of dancing and thinking about dance, often termed “conscious dance.”
LaFeet first began offering classes in Fusion in Port Townsend in 2012 while visiting his mother. He had been working as a professional performer for years, and while transitioning out of that role took the opportunity of the visit to also enter the community as a teacher.
“I was very curious about this burgeoning field of conscious dance, which I’ve lovingly renamed for myself over the years as ‘becoming conscious’ dance because it’s a practice,” he said.
Stylistically, Fusion usually incorporates dance partnering techniques such as connection, extension-compression, and frame. Fusion culture also places significant emphasis on consent between partners.
“Consent is a very big and important thing, for sure, and I could talk for a long time about it,” LaFeet said. “It is a topic that I have spent multiple weekends in workshops on, and studying, and learning about, and deconstructing my own colonized mind around it. It definitely deals largely with ideas of power and privilege and patriarchy and how we are all kind of swimming in the soup of it.”
Much of that conversation will take place in the “Intro to Mindful Partner Dance” workshop that will start the day. That class will offer a “kinetic toolbox” to help even the most novice dancers work through their discomfort using the various dance forms that have influenced fusion, including Lafeet’s own brand which he terms Cocréa: Collaborative, Organic Communication, Revolutionizing Embodied Awareness.
“If Cocréa is anything, it is a somatic practice for dealing with life’s changes. And oftentimes to get the lessons and to really go into the changes we have to experience discomfort on some level, and then we get to celebrate that we actually met the moment,” LaFeet said.
LaFeet calls his teaching style, “facilitainment” — “facil” in Spanish means easy which combined with the word attainment means he loves to make attaining advancement and understanding both easy and fun.
“There’s a very, very limited number of set structures and forms that I teach. And then the rest is really about evolving it in the moment and seeing how does this work with this body, with this other person,” he said.
After the foundation has been set, the next classes focus in on some of the more specific techniques.
The first of these is “Blues Fusion: Groove and Flow” where LaFeet will use the blues vernacular to help dancers craft smooth, elegant, and unified dances.
“It’s oftentimes a very slow and sensuous dance. But you have a lot of variety within blues music, so therefore you have a lot of variety within the dancing,” LaFeet said.
Up next is “Spinaesthesia: Refining Musicality and Tone for Clearer Communication” where attendees will learn skills to help embody the variability in the electronic music genre.
“It’s really all about musicality and learning a different way to listen to or hear music and the different layers that it comes to us in, and being able to code shift between the different qualities of music,” LaFeet said.
The last class of the day is “Swing Hop: Lindy Hop and Hip Hop Fusion” which will offer LaFeet a chance to show attendees techniques from a craft he has long honed.
“Lindy Hop was my first dance love language,” LaFeet said, having started learning swing dances at age 15 while doing musical theatre.
“We’re going to dance swing to hip hop and we’re going to bring in some of the stylistic elements of hip hop,” he added.
The night then culminates into an evening of open dance where people can put what they’ve learned to good use. Dancers are also welcome to come whether or not they’ve attended the classes.
LaFeet will DJ alongside local dancer Sarah Peller, who has been an integral part of carrying the Port Townsend Fusion movement forward after attending the first workshop LaFeet taught in town.
“Sarah and I have different styles. Sarah tends to favor uptempo music,” LaFeet said. “I’m going to be playing more breakbeat, slower, lower tempos.”
What’s more important than the style or substance, however, is the presence people bring to themselves and others.
“That’s largely what I think these dance spaces are here to teach us in terms of relationship, giving us the opportunity to interact with lots of different people in that path of love and learning how to love ourselves even better,” LaFeet said.
To register for the event, go to dancecocrea.com/fusion-micro-festival-port-townsend.
