Sunday, March 11, 2007
Linkoping Sweden
I taught my first workshop using the community building ideas that I have been sitting on for a few years. It was GREAT! One part was the idea of affecting and infecting people with rhythm by making noise on the dance floor. I got a small group of people to dance solo and follow my rhythms while the other people were dancing around them. The goal was to infuse the partner dancers with rhythms they wouldn't normally think of. Another idea was to keep the class close together. Only using the part of the room that was necessary for the amount of people in the class. I have been experimenting with this during my DJ sessions lately and it has had a tremendous effect on the party atmosphere too.
Labels: community building, workshop
Sunday, February 25, 2007
The Quest for The Ninja Rhythm
I taught a class in Austin, Texas with Laura Glaess for a Ninja Workshop and this is what we taught. Don't worry pirate friends, I will do a Pirate workshop sometime in the future too, Herrang maybe?
Quest for The Ninja Rhythm
In the quest to becoming a ninja, one must strive for perfection in what is known as, "The Ninja Rhythm". The Ninja Rhythm is an uncompromising and unconditionally perfect rhythm. It is not affected by a partner, no matter how crazy, wild, or 'pirate like' that partner may be. Go ahead Anti-Rhythm Pirates - try to get a ninja off rhythm! For a true ninja has such uncompromising rhythm, it can inspire even a pirate to lose his ability to be off rhythm.
I started by taking all the 'ninjas in training' into a secret Dojo room where I explained the quest about to be set upon them. The curtains were opened and they were off on their quest. The class was awesome and Laura was perfect to teach it with. Her rhythm was incomparable as not even I could claim to be anywhere near her mastery. She continues to amaze me! Speaking of Laura... Congratulations Laura and Mike Roberts (they just got married)!
Labels: Austin, laura, Ninja, Rhythm, workshop
Sunday, January 28, 2007
An New Style of Workshop with Mihai, Laura Glaess and myself
Mihai, Laura and I decided to do a workshop together. We spent 3 full days before the event preparing it in a new format that was exponentially better than anything I have done before. We started by stating the values and concepts that we wanted to get across during our workshop, i.e. Musicality, Communication, Personal Power, Creating a Community, etc... Then we each went over all of our favorite methods of teaching people the above concepts. By the end of the brainstorming we had enough material for probably 100 hours of classes and we were looking at it and saying that it was very obvious that we would have to cut out a serious amount of the concepts and drills we wanted to teach. However, instead of cutting them out right away we decided to try to create the workshop assuming that we had an infinite amount of time to teach and then we would cut things later. Thru the use of a brilliant organizational system from some business book I read and can't remember the name of we cut out little strips of paper with all the concepts on a separate piece and then kept moving them around and rearranging them in a way that best fit everything we wanted to teach. After many hours of rearranging and discussing we finally came across a final scenerio in which we didn't have to cut out a single concept or drill from the entire brainstorming process. That's right, what normally would have been 100+ hours of material taught in 10 hours! I have taught and taken hundreds upon hundreds of workshops around the world, and this was the best one that I have ever taught or taken! I am taking many of the ideas from this into my regular teaching methods and I hope to continue doing these 3 person integrated workshops in the future. Of course, my fear is that this was some fluke accident and we won't be able to recreate the same amazing workshop again but my heart and mind both know that it will only get better from here! Now if I could only think of a name for this type of workshop... Any ideas?
Labels: laura, mihai, workshop
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Carlisle, Pennsylvania
My workshop was packed! People came from all over PA and even NY and DC! Amanda rocks!
Labels: carlisle, pa, workshop
