TEACHING

Sarah was invited by Barnard College of Columbia University to create two courses, Digital Performance and Improvisation, as a Guest Lecturer in Dance during the Fall 2023 semester. At the same time, she was an Artist-in-Residence at the Barnard Movement Lab. 

She regularly teaches guided improvisation for Swell Dance Paris as well as improvisation and creative workshops for dancers and non-dancers at Feeling Dance in Paris and other venues. Her teaching style is rooted in musicality, exploring the body’s intuition and sensitivity to multiple points of inspiration: sensation, rhythm, melody, imagination, physical environment and physical memory. 

Sarah’s teaching is influenced by her training and professional experiences, which began in classical and contemporary ballet from the New Mexico Ballet Company, the Boston Ballet and LINES Ballet, as well as in modern, contemporary, improvisation, and composition from dance luminaries including Twyla Tharp, Colleen Thomas-Young, Ashley Tuttle, Ohad Naharim, Sekou, and dancers from the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Her work with Yoann Bourgeois and François Veyrunes and parkour stars Simon Nogueira and Johan Tonnoir also influence her teaching approaches. She is passionate about social dances including house, salsa and forro and learning new ways to feel movement with music. 

Sarah has given talks and participated in roundtable discussions and working groups regarding the role of art and technology in society as well as her artistic work in XR. 

Read the feature article in the Barnard College Magazine about her work here.

Feel free to reach out with any teaching, speaking or workshop requests!

Class Descriptions

DNCE BC3984 Digital Performance 

“Technology today is the campfire around which we tell our stories. There’s this attraction to light and to this kind of power, which is both warm and destructive.” -Laurie Anderson

What is the role of the expressive body in our increasingly technological world? How might embodiment help us establish a new way of interacting with technology? What can the physical world learn from virtual worlds, games, and approaches to connectivity? How do we want our future to feel? 

This movement and technology lab centers around sensation, perception, games and play as a source for creatively interrogating these issues. We will explore non-technical and technical approaches to questions regarding technology, empowering students without a technical background. 

The class will begin with non-tech related physical research, creation, and play. We will focus on themes that intersect both the technical and performance worlds including: presence, interaction, authenticity, and immersion. What is presence and how does connecting with the body help us be more “here”? How can sensation inspire creation and enhance performance? How might games and play inform the creative process? The second half will explore movement in relation to technology, exploring Virtual Reality, Motion Capture, and Artificial Intelligence. Can deepening sensation help us better interact with technologies that take us away from corporeal experiences? How might we use those technologies to bring us back to our bodies?

The class is open to all majors, up to 25 students. Readings range from sociology of games and psychology of play to embodied cognition and media studies. Guest lectures include sessions from leading VR director and AI artist Pierre Zandrowicz and mindfulness expert Adriana Difazio, with potential additional experts in these fields. The class final will require students, working in teams, to pitch their own immersive media project or to present a short performance developed through game and play principles.

DNCE BC3334 Improvisation

“Man, sometimes it takes a long time to sound like yourself”- Miles Davis

This course will explore an array of approaches to improvisation to help students discover and define their improvisational voice. Improvisation, the practice of instantaneous creativity, is used in the ever-more collaborative practices seen in today’s contemporary companies, from auditions to rehearsals to performances. Beyond the professional realm, improvisation is a rich tool for artists to discover new ways of knowing and expressing themselves. Becoming familiar with one’s own creative voice takes time and courage. How do we discern habits from style? How do self-directed tasks help us overcome creative blocks? When there are no clear pathways -in life or in the studio -how do constraints create a framework for moving forward? How does listening closely to the body prompt novel movement invention? This course draws from various improvisation techniques that range from: using sensation and imagery inspired by Body Mind Centering and Gaga methods; to focused musicality inspired by social dances; to finding inspiration from our environments; to mining and transforming dance techniques already familiar in the body.