Helping DanceJam Thrive
We continue to invite you to become involved with creating a sustainable structure that will ensure a thriving and long lasting dance jam. Ways to be involved are numerous with varying levels of committment. Many hands make light work. We invite you to give us a hand.
We are looking for someone interested in being a house DJ on February 10 for set 2 of the evening. Please contact us at
to let us know your interest. Training will be provided (don't be intimidated; the system is quite user friendly!)
This week at DanceJam San Diego
Friday, February 3
5 Rhythms with Eugene Hedlund
This class will be a in-depth, guided exploration of the five rhythms followed by a two-hour jam in which dancers are invited to continue that exploration. Due to the nature of the intention of the meditation, dancers are requested to keep conversations out in the lobby during the jam.
The 5 Rhythms is a simple, powerful moving meditation that anyone -- of any age, size, or physical ability -- can practice. There are no steps to follow, no choreography to learn, no way to do it wrong. The only requirement is a body that is still breathing, a heart that is still beating, and mi...nd that is still curious!
Just like light, sound or ocean waves, a dancing body when moving freely passes through 5 distinct rhythmic patterns. These patterns continuously repeat themselves in a wave of motion.
The 5 Rhythms are:
FLOWING the fluid, continuous, grounded glide of our own movements
STACCATO the percussive, pulsing beat that shapes us a thousand different ways
CHAOS the rhythm of letting go, releasing into the catalytic wildness of our dance that can never be planned or repeated
LYRICAL the rhythm of trance, where the weight of self-consciousness dissolves, where we lighten up and disappear into our own uniqueness
STILLNESS the quiet emptiness, where gentle movements rise and fall, start and end, in a field of silence.
Class starts promptly at 8:00pm. Please be respectful of start time and arrive early to register before the class begins. Doors will close at 8:10pm. The space may be cold so bring something warm to wear.
DJ: Eugene Hedlund
Welcome to DanceJam San Diego
DanceJam's Mission
To provide a safe, respectful, and non-judgmental dance environment in which to have fun; to foster community around the human body in motion; and to re-connect us with the playful child inside.
DanceJam is a by-product of the expressive arts movement that began in the early '70s along with the post-modern and contact improvisation dance movements. Here in San Diego County, our community has been coming together in the dance for over thirty-five years. We meet three times a week – on Friday nights in North Park, and on Sunday mornings and Tuesday nights in Encinitas.
All of our jams are volunteer-run, barefoot boogie, open-floor dances that are operated by our action team members for people who love to dance and express themselves through movement. Our weekly spaces are a safe, playful and friendly alternative to the club scene.
Click the photo or this link to see DanceJam photo albums.
You don't need to get dressed up or worry about being cool. You don't have to be graceful or have studied dance. All you have to do is like to move your body and have fun. You can dance alone or dance with others -- you choose whatever you need to feel comfortable on the dance floor.
Rotating DJs spin a wide variety of dance tunes from many different genres -- from world-beat, to disco, to swing, to hip-hop, to boogie. The music changes all night long offering a variety of moods and beats to dance to.
As one of our regular dancers puts it, "It's like when you turn up the stereo and dance in your living room just because you need to dance -- except that there's a bunch of other people doing the same thing!"
Why not stop by and check it out?
We invite your feedback and thoughts, both prior to and after experiencing Fridays with the new schedule. This is your space. Your heart. Your energy. Your place to be present, as you are moved to be present. Your voice is important! Contact us at dancejamsandiego@gmail.com.
In the Dancing Spirit,
Lisa Marie, Leah, Manuel, Steve B., Michelle, Bradley
DanceJam San Diego (North Park) is produced by Whole Being, Inc.
DanceJam San Diego
Every Friday Night in North Park, 9 to 11pm
DanceJam Happy Hour: $5 from 9 to 9:30pm.
DanceJam from 9:30 to close is $7.
Eveoke Dance Theatre
2811 University Avenue, North Park 92104
two blocks west of the North Park Sign
click here for a directions and a map
Class Hour: 8-9pm
Dance Classes: $10; If you attend the class, the jam is free.
Classes/jams are for everyone regardless of skill level.
Class will start promptly at 8:00pm. Please be respectful of start time and arrive by 7:45 to take care of payment and whatever you need to do to ARRIVE. Doors will close at 8:05.
Dance Church Encinitas
Sundays. 11am-1pm
681 Encinitas Blvd. Suite 309 Encinitas 92024
Suggested Donation: $5
Info: 858-945-7686
Every Sunday we invite you to move to a variety of rhythms... to sweat your prayers, create a devotional stomp, play with peaceful passion, dance alone... with others... or with the dance toys, join in the community feeling, kids welcome.... And on the first Sunday of the month we have no toys and no talking, to encourage a more meditative approach.
Encinitas Community Boogie
Tuesday Nights: Movement Class: 8pm to 9pm; Jam: 9 to 11pm
681 Encinitas Blvd. Suite 309 Encinitas 92024
Suggested Donation: Class and Jam $10. Jam only $5
Info: 858-945-7686
The purpose of the classes is to increase our range of choices in movement and interaction and to cultivate specific kinds of body awareness, technique and group coherence. Each class will focus on different aspects of movement and dance, ranging from contact improv, authentic movement, acroyoga, dance tools and toys, internal energy work etc. Please be on time for the class.
Bring your hoops, chiffon, dance toys and playful self to this north county jam.
Class Descriptions
Classes vary from week to week. Below are some of the regular class offerings.
Contact Improvisation with Paul Laurey
We will explore our grounding with the floor and connection with a partner. We will practice fundamentals and also specific dance exercises to expand our partnered movement vocabulary. The class will be fun, challenging, and a creative engagement of everything else you bring.
Paul has been dancing contact improvisation since 2000. He is devoted to the practice of mutual listening and our authentic creative response as a tool for dance and art making. Paul has also been active as a performer and choreographer. This fall, he joined the MFA program in Dance Theater at UCSD.
Contact Improv Class with Anya Cloud
This class will focus on ways of physically and verbally saying yes and no within contact improvisation. Through tuning into self and partner, with a base line of trust, we will dive into ways of listening and responding to limits, comfort zones and risk taking.
Some previous experience with contact improvisation is suggested.
Anya Cloud is pursing her MFA studies in Dance Theatre at UCSD and has been practicing contact improvisation for nine years. Her work with Nancy Stark Smith, Martin Keogh, Nita Little and Carol Swann deeply informs her teaching/practice. Contact improvisation continues to challenge and inspire her way of being in the world.
Contact Improv Class with Karen Wilkening
The basics of creating the magic of presence and center in Contact Improv, an improvisational dance form with a partner. We will explore center, weight, safety, impulse and flow to explore this most meditative yet nurturing dance form. Beginners, this is your chance to try out what you've seen on the dance floor.
Taught by Karen Wilkening, MA, expressive arts therapist and somatic educator with 10 years experience teaching improvisational dance and 25 years liberating the soul within the body.
Core Connection with Karen Wilkening
Experience a connection to your energetic core and bring deeper authenticity to your dancing. We will work directly with the spine; grounding, breathing, and mobilizing muscles to free your center. Expand your range of movement and expression. Enhance your sense of presence. Increase your sensory capacity. This technique works for both beginners and advanced dancers alike.
Taught by Karen Wilkening, MA, expressive arts therapist and somatic educator with 25 years experience teaching improvisational dance and liberating the soul within the body. Change your body, change your life!
Contact Improv Class with Sarah Jaffe
Within the form of contact improvisation, this class will focus on increasing physical possibilities and heightening awareness about choice making within both a solo and partnered body. Inspired by "states of being", we will play with disorientation, stability and risk taking through exertion, patience and curiosity. Open to all levels of movers.
Primal Partner Dance with Meeshi Ravi
Explore the wild boundary where Freeform Dancing meets Partner Social Dancing. Exercises include Grounding/Flying Techniques, Quadrupedal (Animal) Movement, Spin/Turn Drills, and Lifts & Dips. No partner required.
Taught by Meeshi Ravi has studied, performed, and taught various ethnic arts for over 20 years. He has trained with masters of West African drum and dance, Afro-Brazilian dance, Korean Percussion, Modern Dance, Acro-Yoga and Tai Chi. In 1996, he discovered the Lindy Hop and has been focusing his energies on exploring this African-American improvisatory partner dance form ever since.
Since 1998, Meeshi has taught swing classes at all of San Diego’s major local universities (UCSD, SDSU, and USD) and has been the promoter/organizer of several of San Diego’s most popular swing venues including the popular Firehouse Swing Dance (1998-present), San Diego’s longest running Lindy Hop Swing venue.
Meeshi is a house DJ at the Firehouse and loves to play music that moves his soul. He is excited to share his eclectic collection of music from around the world in the hopes of moving your soul.
Approaching Butoh with Charlene Penner
In this class we will explore the qualities that venerate a place, object, or action to the position of being sacred and how we share or protect that which we hold sacred, including ourselves. Using movement, breath, imagery, and intention, we will stir our energy and enliven our subtle sensitivity as we develop the practice of recognizing and respecting the sanctity of everything around us. No previous experience needed in movement, dance, or Butoh.
The studio has no heat -- except our bodies and breath -- so even when the days are warm, the studio may be cold by the evening. Bring warm clothes.
In 1996, Penner began exploring the powerful transforming dynamics of Butoh, focused in a mentorship with Diego Piñón, Butoh master from Mexico. She continues to work with him and has also studies with a variety of other teachers. A 30-year practice in a variety of energetic forms that integrate breath and movement, such as yoga, tai chi and chi gung, and contact improvisation also influence her work. Since 1999 she has been creating, performing and teaching her own work and collaborating to bring her form into many other works, predominantly with Eveoke Dance Theatre.
Contact Improvisation with Paul Laurey
We will explore our grounding with the floor and connection with a partner. We will practice fundamentals and also specific dance exercises to expand our partnered movement vocabulary. The class will be fun, challenging, and a creative engagement of everything else you bring.
Paul has been dancing contact improvisation since 2000. He is devoted to the practice of mutual listening and our authentic creative response as a tool for dance and art making. Paul has also been active as a performer and choreographer. This fall, he joined the MFA program in Dance Theater at UCSD.
Contact Improvisation
with visiting Master Teacher Kim Epifano
This class builds contact improvisation skills to open the body and the imagination to dancers' potential. Students explore their individual creativity, balance, and body awareness while learning to move in relation to their self, the floor and a partner. By sharing weight, strength, space and gravity, participants learn how to trust and be trusted while falling on and off the edges of their bodies. We will explore how the ending of one move is the beginning of another and how to utilize momentum to continue the progressive nature of the dance. Fine tune your improvisor and deepen the dance! All levels of experience welcome.
Kim Epifano has a 25-year history as an award winning performer, choreographer, director, educator, and collaborator. She is the Artistic Director of Epiphany Productions Sonic Dance Theater based in San Francisco, California. Since founding her company in 1997, Ms. Epifano has choreographed, directed, and created music for 19 evening length works of "sonic dance theater." Her work has been nominated for and awarded several Bay Area Isadora Duncan Dance Awards (IZZIES), won the SF Weekly's Black Box Award in 1998 for Best Dance Ensemble, and placed first in Mexico's Bi-National Competition. She was a main collaborator with Contraband and The Dance Brigade. She studied Capoeira with Mestre Accordion for eight years and competed with his team winning a first place medal in Brazil. She received her MFA in Choreography from UC Davis and has more than 19 years of experience teaching dance at the collegiate level. Epifano has taught Technique, Contact Improv and many other forms of movement, theater and vocalization nationally and internationally. Most recently Chile, Mexico, Vietnam, Ethiopia and India. She is the Artistic/Executive director of the popular San Francisco Trolley Dances which is in its 8th year. For more information go to www.epiphanydance.org.
For more information visit her website: www.epiphanydance.org.
Healing Dance Fusion! with Parminder
Dance has been an important form of self-expression and communal connection in all cultures. Traditional tribal dances marked important rites of passage and allowed for a spirited and uninhibited way for people to express their griefs, joys, hopes, and fears. This type of unselfconscious expression has enormous potential for release and healing of repressed emotions and blocked energy. In this workshop, you are invited to get in touch with your most playful self and to experience the power and joy of freely expressing all that is stored inside you. Guided by philosophies as diverse as yoga and bioenergetics, incorporating moves ranging from a variety of traditional and modern dance traditions, this four part workshop series promises to be a fun, energizing, and healing experience. Each class is stand alone, and no prior experience is necessary, so come join us and experience the healing power of self-expression!
February 10 incorporates African music and dance
March 16 incorporates Middle Eastern music and dance
April 20 incorporates Latin/Caribbean music and dance
May 25 incorporates Bollywood/Bhangra music and dance
Parminder is an educator and healer who grew up in both India and the United States. She has traveled to many countries and has a deep and abiding love for indigenous traditions and the timeless wisdom they offer. Her aspiration is to integrate the wisdom of the sacred traditions of the past with modern knowledge in order to assist in the spiritual upliftment, healing, and connection of individuals and communities. Feel free to contact her at parminder@alchemyofpresence.com if you have any questions or would like to learn more about Healing Dance Fusion.
Parminder is an educator and healer who grew up in both India and the United States. She has traveled to many countries and has a deep and abiding love for indigenous traditions and the timeless wisdom they offer. Her aspiration is to integrate the wisdom of the sacred traditions of the past with modern knowledge in order to assist in the spiritual upliftment, healing, and connection of individuals and communities.
Blues Tango with Mihai Banulescu
Blues dancing, as taught by Mihai, is about connection and creative musicality. The connection part is quality touch, embrace, leading, listening and, eventually, co-creation. While many people experience life as separate, (blues) dancing offers an opportunity to be intimate within a safe container, to experience the joy of human touch. The creative musicality part is an opportunity for self-expression. Can you be an artist on the dance floor? Why not? This is part spiritual practice, part fun, part opportunity for personal growth. What we will actually do in class is a lot of dancing, with some gentle guidance. Think about your relaxation and balance, now dance. Here's how you know quality touch, now dance. Leading and following work like this, now dance. This is an inside turn, now dance. Mihai's teaching will be an invitation, just as leading a dance is an invitation.
Mihai's teaching is defined by curiosity, practical creativity and compassion. He constantly grows and improves his pedagogy and curriculum, comes up with many unique exercises and loves giving individual feedback in a gentle, useful manner. Mihai started dancing in 1997 and has been teaching full time since 2005. He has taught workshops and festivals in over 20 states. He has also been DJing blues, swing and tango since 2003 and started San Francisco'sFriday Night Blues - the world's first blues-only weekly dance. Visit Mihai's website (beyondblues.com) for more information.
Argentine Tango with Isabelle
Isabelle focuses the full range of her movement training on teaching Argentine Tango, believing that people will find confidence and pleasure in dancing with their bodies as fully engaged as possible. Classes start with an introduction to weight and balance awareness in the individual, followed by games and exercises that demonstrate and practice communication between pairs. Incorporating the specific walking techniques of Argentine tango allows couples to move close together without interference, and then they are ready to embrace and experience the magic of tango, all by the end of the first hour!
Isabelle found Argentine Tango by accident in 1998, when a disabling event prevented her dancing modern and African dance. Tango not only allowed her to start moving again, but eventually became a vehicle for collecting and synthesizing her life-long training in dance. Isabelle started dancing as a child in Barbados, the West Indies, instructed in the rigorous ballet syllabus of the Royal Academy of Dance, and also dancing spontaneously to the indigenous rhythms of the steel drum. She continued her ballet training with the National Ballet School in Washington D.C., and Ballet Rambert in London, with additional training in mime, flamenco, and jazz at the Metropolitan Ballet in Bethesda, Maryland. At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, she discovered African dance, and in graduate school in Houston first performed with a modern dance ensemble.
Isabelle's tango training started in San Diego with Ive Simard and Todd Martin at El Mundo del Tango, followed by numerous world-renowned tango dancers, including Fernanda Ghi and Guillermo Merlo, Jorge Nel, Pablo Veron, Fabian Salas, Cecilia Gonzales, Chicho Frumboli, Pablo Villarraza & Dana Frigoli, Norberto Esbrez, Luisa Paes, Daniela Pucci & Luis Bianchi, and others. Performances have included Celebrate Dance Festival, Bravo San Diego, the Del Mar Fair, San Diego Magazine's Celebration of Who's Who, the Jewish Film Festival, the San Diego Klezmer Festival, and for numerous corporate and private functions.
Isabelle has taught Argentine Tango at El Mundo del Tango, UC San Diego, and in various studios and private functions around San Diego and in Washington DC, Portland, Oregon, and elsewhere.
Whole Being Weekend Quarterly Dance party
Join us for the Whole Being Quarterly dance party on January 13, 2012. Doors open at 8:00pm and we invite you all to a great evening of music with DJ Candice, dance and health. Put it on your calendar. There will be 2 massage tables, light snacks and good company!
Since there will not be a class, happy hour has been extended and will last from 8 to 9:30pm. Come early and get in for $5. After 9:30 $7.
Contact Improv with Lisa Frank
Building on CI principles and skills, we will take partnering dances across the floor and around the space. Class will be a traveling conversation between one's own body parts and those of other dancers while playing with gravity and momentum. Class will culminate with a Round Robin.
Lisa Frank is a dancer, improvisor, choreographer, performer and educator. Her recent ventures include a year-long project in 2010 as co-creator / artistic director of Chicago-based improvisational performance ensemble OosImaginary, who, in addition to performing regularly in the Chicago-area, went on a month-long national tour during summer 2010. Lisa has collaborated and performed with Concert Dance Incorporated, Reveries In Motion, Chicago Dance Crash, Blushing Poppy Productions and Dance Union in Chicago.
Teacher and dance-maker, she has taught workshops and set pieces of choreography for the dancers of St. Mary's College of Notre Dame, Northeastern Illinois University, and Southwestern Michigan College. Lisa is also co-creator of Imaginary Friends, an interdisciplinary program of creative movement & dance for elementary age students.
She holds a B.A in Dance from Northeastern Illinois University. She has also attended American Dance Festival/Duke University and Southwestern Michigan College. Beyond her dance training, she has also studied and trained in the artistic styles and movement of Butoh, Clown, Contact Improvisation, Theater, and Multiple forms of Yoga. Following the path of her own movement and creativity through curiosity and collaborative practices, she continues to seek knowledge, wisdom and inspiration as teacher and student.
5 Rhythms with Eugene Hedlund
This class will be a in-depth, guided exploration of the five rhythms followed by a two-hour jam in which dancers are invited to continue that exploration. Due to the nature of the intention of the meditation, dancers are requested to keep conversations out in the lobby during the jam.
The 5 Rhythms is a simple, powerful moving meditation that anyone -- of any age, size, or physical ability -- can practice. There are no steps to follow, no choreography to learn, no way to do it wrong. The only requirement is a body that is still breathing, a heart that is still beating, and mi...nd that is still curious!
Just like light, sound or ocean waves, a dancing body when moving freely passes through 5 distinct rhythmic patterns. These patterns continuously repeat themselves in a wave of motion.
The 5 Rhythms are:
FLOWING the fluid, continuous, grounded glide of our own movements
STACCATO the percussive, pulsing beat that shapes us a thousand different ways
CHAOS the rhythm of letting go, releasing into the catalytic wildness of our dance that can never be planned or repeated
LYRICAL the rhythm of trance, where the weight of self-consciousness dissolves, where we lighten up and disappear into our own uniqueness
STILLNESS the quiet emptiness, where gentle movements rise and fall, start and end, in a field of silence.
DanceJam DJs
Doug: "I think of my music as opening the door to heaven, intent on swirling the dancer up into a spiritual let go experience, to a tribal depth."
Candice Land: Eclectic sounds to ignite the spirit of the dancer in each of us including: 5-Rhythms, electronica, world rhythms, poetic subconscious meanderings, and shamanic inspired sounds interspersed with old school classics including soul and R&B!
