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PETER, audio dance workshop
Dance Workshop
Explore, imagine, move.
A companion series to PETER, dance with... These short audio workshops invite you to explore dance through imagination, movement, and curiosity. A space to rethink what dance can be, anywhere, for anyone.
To contact PETER email peterapeterpeter@gmail.com
Listen here or anywhere you get podcast >>>>>
S1 Ep1 Dance workshop (What is dance?)
In this first session, we begin with the deceptively simple but endlessly complex question: what is dance?
Through a series of guided exercises, you’ll explore your own felt sense, the bodily awareness that tells you when something feels like dance and when it doesn’t. Starting with the practice of not dancing, you’ll learn to notice where dance emerges in your everyday actions, how it shifts with your attention, and how your personal definitions already shape the way you move.
No experience is required. Whether you’re new to dance or returning after years of practice, this episode invites you to pause, experiment, and reflect on your unique relationship to movement.
By the end, you’ll have started building your own map of dance, one rooted in curiosity, perception, and the knowledge already in your body.
S1 Ep2 Dance workshop (Space and Self)
In this session, we turn our attention to space, the rooms we move in, the pathways we carve, and the invisible boundaries that shape how we dance.
Through guided explorations, you’ll notice how your body relates to positive and negative space, how personal space expands and contracts, and how moving across a room creates paths that carry meaning. You’ll also experiment with proximity, boundaries, and how awareness of the environment, walls, objects, even imagined others, changes your felt sense of dancing.
This episode invites you to deepen your awareness of where you are, how you occupy space, and how space itself becomes a partner in your dancing. By the end, you’ll have new insights into how the environments around you shape your movement, your choices, and your evolving sense of dance.
S1 Ep3 Dance workshop (Stillness as Dance)
In this episode, we explore the role of stillness in dance and how pauses, holds, and subtle micro-movements shape the way we perceive and create movement.
Through guided exercises, you’ll develop a deeper awareness of your body’s natural stillness, experiment with accumulating stillness, and play with the contrast between motion and pause. You’ll also reflect on how stillness interacts with movement, space, and attention, helping you notice nuances in your dancing and expand your creative expression.
With exercises designed for solo practice or paired exploration, this episode highlights how both movement and stillness are essential tools for understanding and shaping your personal dance vocabulary.
S1 Ep4 Dance workshop (Weight and Gravity)
In this session we explore one of the most fundamental forces in dance: gravity. Together we investigate how weight shapes every movement, from the subtle balancing of Steve Paxton’s Small Dances to the dynamic play of falling and catching yourself. You’ll be guided through exercises that invite you to feel your centre of gravity, to yield or resist weight, and to notice how balance is constantly negotiated in the body.
We expand this exploration into movement with the ground, furniture, and even the walls around you, introducing ideas from contact improvisation, release technique, and somatic practices like Body-Mind Centering. You’ll also experiment with the “weight of consciousness,” sensing how holding or remembering weight changes your awareness and your movement possibilities.
By the end, you’ll have a richer felt understanding of how weight supports, challenges, and inspires dance, whether you’re walking, rolling, balancing, or simply standing still.
S1 Ep5 Dance workshop (Balance and Imbalance)
In this session we explore balance as both a physical and conceptual experience, how we find stability and how we lose it. Building from last week’s work on Weight & Gravity, this episode looks at balance as an ever-changing negotiation rather than a fixed position.
You’ll be guided through a series of experiments: finding your own centre of balance, tipping, twisting, and reaching beyond your base of support. We’ll play with different dynamics, stillness and suspension, speed and softness, to notice how balance shifts with every choice we make.
Rather than drawing from established dance techniques, this session invites you to explore your own ways of balancing and destabilising, to ask how risk and control shape your dancing. Is balance a point of safety, or a moment of daring? How do you balance your references, your emotions, your sense of self within dance?
Through this, we continue developing a personal and felt understanding of dance, one that’s grounded, unstable, and alive.
S1 Ep6 Dance workshop (Tempo and Rhythm)
In this session we turn to time: the internal clocks that live in your breath and pulse, and the external cues that shape how we move. You’ll be invited to listen first, to your heartbeat, your breathing, the quiet rhythms already present in your body, then to use that inner tempo as a guide for movement.
We move through simple experiments: syncing movement to breath, exploring snail-slow and lightning-fast tempi, and noticing what kinds of movement each speed invites. Then you’ll make rhythm with your body, claps, stomps, vocal sounds, and feel the difference between sounding a beat and marking it with gesture. After that we bring in outside rhythms: dancing with, against, or ignoring a chosen piece of music, and watching how it changes your choices.
The episode also opens up the idea of polyrythm, multiple rhythms layered through the body, and offers a practical challenge: try moving one body part slow while another moves fast. Finally, there’s a long, free exploration without music, so you can discover how many rhythms may already be living in you and how they shape what you want to make.
By the end you’ll have a clearer sense of whether rhythm is central to your dance, how external structure helps or limits you, and what tempos light up your curiosity. Bring patience, a willingness to sound silly, and a notebook if you like, this one rewards listening and reflection.
S1 Ep7 Dance workshop (Direction and Pathways)
In this session, we turn our attention to where movement goes, to direction, pathway, and the lines our bodies trace through space. What determines where we move? Is it choice, curiosity, gravity, emotion, or something else entirely?
We begin by drawing invisible lines through the air, straight, curved, spiralled, zigzagged, inspired by William Forsythe’s improvisation technologies, where the dancer becomes a kind of draftsman, sketching motion in space. From there, the session shifts toward losing and finding orientation: following impulses, sounds, or sensations that redirect us. We wander and deviate, noticing what happens when direction dissolves into discovery.
The episode then explores the body as compass, guided not by left and right but by north, south, east, and west, a way to reimagine orientation as planetary rather than anatomical. This expands into experiments with momentum and redirection, asking: how can we keep moving without simply continuing? What does it mean to be redirected, by a wall, the floor, another person, without stopping?
Finally, we play with forgetting direction: moving toward something, then letting go of the intention and finding a new path in the same motion. This practice of continuous reorientation invites a softer sense of purpose, where each line and curve becomes an open question.
By the end, the focus widens back to daily life, noticing how direction and pathway shape not only our dancing, but the way we inhabit the world: every trace, curve, and hesitation a kind of personal choreography.
https://improvisation-technologies.zkm.de/lectures/lines/
S1 Ep8 Dance workshop (Size and Scale)
In this session, we explore the scale of movement, from the tiniest gestures inside the body to the expansive reach of the whole universe. Starting with the human body as a reference point, you’ll notice the range and limits of your gestures, the arcs and sweeps you naturally make, and the spaces you inhabit as a mover.
You’ll then be guided through exercises inspired by Glenda Batson and Susan Sentler, exploring the concept of the fold. First, you’ll investigate folds in your environment—fabric, paper, furniture—then shift your attention inward to the folds and creases within your own body. Finally, you’ll play with folding and unfolding yourself, imagining how your movements can expand into the surrounding world or contract into the universe.
The session concludes by inviting you to map your dance across multiple scales: from the particle level to planetary phenomena, from micro-movements to cosmic gestures. By the end, you’ll have developed a heightened awareness of scale, attention, and imagination in your dancing, and new ways to perceive and shape movement in relation to space, self, and the wider world.
S1 Ep9 Dance workshop (Effort and Ease)
This episode focuses on the tone and energy of movement, exploring the dynamic spectrum between effort and ease. You’ll start by sensing where tension, holding, or gripping exists in your body, gradually exaggerating and then releasing it, noticing how attention itself carries effort.
Through free movement, you’ll explore high-effort gestures—pushing, resisting, reaching—contrasted with low-effort, yielding, and softening actions. Imaginative prompts, such as moving through air, water, syrup, or stone, help you feel how effort adapts to different qualities of resistance.
Next, you’ll engage in “repetitive waves”: small repetitive movements that swell to intensity and fade to near nothing, discovering how to sustain, release, and let ease lead. The session culminates in whole-body movement in ease, inviting flow, suspension, and softness with and without music.
Finally, reflection exercises encourage you to map where effort and ease live in your body, sketch or write about your sensations, and consider how this awareness can inform your next movements, daily activities, and ongoing practice. By the end, you’ll have a deeper sensitivity to the tonal qualities of your dancing and a richer sense of how effort and ease interact in motion.
S1 Ep10 Dance workshop (Breath)
In this episode, we return to breath as the basis of movement. I speak about the role breath played in my performance O, and how the score I used there can function as a simple structure for dancing:
grounding, breath, vocal resonance, expansion, and release.
We begin with grounding and noticing the breath without changing anything. From there, we work through a series of vocal and physical expansions inspired by Leah Landau and Lisa Schåman. We follow a progression of sounds — sighs, yawns, small vibrations, and vowel tones (u–o–e–a–m) — noticing how each one creates a different kind of movement or softening. The session also includes panting, laughter, and crying as physical rhythms rather than emotional expressions.
At one point, the group builds toward a short collective scream, simply as a shared peak of breath and sound, before letting everything drop back into quiet. After the scream, we stay with whatever movement remains when we stop “trying” to move.
Throughout the episode the focus stays on breath as the primary mover, allowing the body’s movement to remain secondary or responsive. The session ends with a period of dancing with breath in your own way — in silence or with music — followed by a brief reflection on how breath affected the quality of movement.
S1 Ep11 Dance workshop (Coordination)
In this session we investigate coordination as the practical work of organising different moving elements so they relate rather than collide. We begin simply: choose one or two parts of yourself and explore timing and sequencing — can you make a rhythm or pattern that feels connected rather than disjointed? From there we broaden into multiple-element awareness, noticing and managing several impulses or qualities at once (speed, intensity, flow) and trying the work with and without music. Next we examine independence and interaction — how one movement depends on, supports, or interferes with another, and how these relations change when you bring in space, gravity, breath or imagined constraints. We then extend coordination outwards: match and contrast your movement with the environment, furniture, objects, other people, or music, testing opposition and counterpoint as part of being “coordinated.” Finally, we explore fluidity and adaptability — how patterns arise, how established habits shift, and how transitions are coordinated between different activities. The session closes with a short reflection: what does coordination mean to you after practising it — timing and sequencing, balancing multiple qualities, or something else?
S1 Ep12 Dance Workshop (What is choreography?)
In this session, we shift focus from how we dance to what is being danced. After exploring multiple approaches to improvisation and movement, the workshop turns toward choreography, not as fixed steps to be copied, but as the set of conditions, influences, and structures that inform movement.
The episode begins by questioning a common understanding of choreography as something taught and reproduced. Instead, choreography is approached as that which informs dancing: histories, contexts, people, objects, spaces, moods, language, and attention. Improvisation is examined not as complete freedom, but as something already shaped by these influences. This opens a blurred space where choreographed and improvised practices overlap rather than oppose one another.
From here, the session introduces the idea of choreography as an art form in itself, sometimes referred to as expanded choreography. Rather than asking only how steps are made, the workshop asks what causes dance to take the form it does, and whether those causes might themselves be considered choreographic material. Furniture, clothing, architecture, habits, music, instructions, and social situations are all considered as potential choreographers.
The practical exploration invites participants to dance while paying attention to what is structuring their movement. This includes revisiting earlier exercises, such as trying not to dance and noticing when dance emerges, or deliberately dancing and asking what makes it feel like dance. Participants are encouraged to experiment with music and silence, different spaces, and varying contexts, while observing what informs their movement choices.
The second part of the session focuses on collecting choreographic influences. Participants are invited to gather what choreographs them: movements they’ve learned, music they return to, objects, environments, images, words, or observed behaviours. Reflection is approached through multiple methods including journaling, drawing, recording, watching, copying, and revisiting material, emphasising rehearsal, repetition, and noticing.
The workshop concludes with a reflective practice drawn from Zoë Poluch’s work: a simple instruction to “just dance.” Without analysing or structuring, participants are invited to let go and allow dancing itself to become the reflection on choreography and the questions raised throughout the session.
This episode frames choreography as an ongoing, lived process rather than a finished product, offering tools to notice how dance is continually shaped in everyday life.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2251240/episodes/15073886-ep-29-peter-dance-with-zoe-poluch
S1 Ep13 Dance Workshop (Choreography as Set and Setting Steps)
In this session, we focus on choreography in its most familiar sense: choreography as set material, as steps that can be repeated, remembered, ordered, and followed. Building on the previous episode’s exploration of what choreography is and where it comes from, this workshop turns toward how choreography is made concrete through steps, phrases, and sequences.
The workshop begins with a sustained repetition of a single, simple movement. By repeating one step for an extended duration, attention is drawn to how a movement is initiated, what elements of it are essential, and how repetition relies on memory, sensation, and bodily awareness. This exercise foregrounds the labour of precision and the difficulty of doing “the same thing” again and again.
From there, the session opens into improvisation, inviting participants to notice when steps begin to emerge from free movement. Rather than deciding steps in advance, the focus is on recognising how movements become identifiable, repeatable, and potentially part of a sequence.
The workshop then shifts toward consciously setting choreography. Participants create a short sequence of steps and observe how they remember, order, and connect movements. Attention is given to decision-making around transitions, timing, spacing, and orientation, as well as the different tools that can support memorisation and composition, such as writing, counting, recording, or visual reference.
Finally, the session addresses choreography as something that can exist outside oneself, by copying and following an external source such as a video or written description. This brings questions of authority, accuracy, control, and interpretation into focus, asking where choreography actually resides when steps are set and followed.
The session closes with a reflective task that turns away from strict execution and toward description. By describing movement qualities in words, participants are invited to consider how language itself can influence, prompt, and shape dancing, without fixing it into a rigid form.
https://www.buzzsprout.com/2251240/episodes/14185052
S1 Ep14 Dance Workshop (Movement or experience as Material / Scores)
In this session, the focus shifts from choreography as set steps toward movement and experience as material. Building on the previous episode’s exploration of set choreography, the workshop opens choreography back up again, asking what happens when movement is treated less as a fixed product and more as something that can be shaped, altered, abstracted, and reworked.
The session begins by proposing movement as something similar to clay: a material that can be molded, refined, reduced, layered, and reshaped over time. Participants are invited to take a movement and work on it incrementally, making small changes, extracting parts, adding texture, tone, or emphasis, and viewing the movement from multiple angles. This process can be done directly through the body or through external materials such as clay, drawing, writing, video, or images, continually returning to the experience of movement itself.
Alongside this, the workshop addresses the complications of treating the body as material. Attention is given to how choreographing on oneself can lead to over-identification with image, self-presentation, and visibility. By working with movement as material among other materials, the practice offers a way to distance choreography from personal identity, allowing movement to be handled, tested, and changed without needing to fully represent the self.
The session then introduces choreography as score. Rather than choreography only meaning set steps, it is framed as a system of instructions or written directions that inform movement. Participants are invited to write scores ranging from highly detailed to extremely minimal, noticing how different forms of instruction affect autonomy, intention, memory, and interpretation. The relationship between scoring and improvisation is acknowledged as fluid, with scores functioning both as compositional tools and as prompts for exploration.
Toward the end of the workshop, attention turns to what else might be considered material: not only movements or instructions, but also the transitions, gaps, and relationships between elements. From here, participants are invited to work with what is most readily available in their experience, allowing ease, accessibility, and external materials to lead the dance. Objects, environments, or simple external cues are used to guide movement, shifting choreography away from control and toward acceptance of what emerges.
The session closes with a reflective assignment that moves outside the studio, encouraging participants to articulate their dancing through conversation, using language as another way of shaping and understanding choreographic material.
S1 Ep15 Dance Workshop (Habits)
In this episode, we turn our attention to habits and their complex role in dancing and choreography. Drawing on Jonathan Burrows’ questions “Are you doing what you want to do, or are you following your habits?” and “What if following your habits is the right thing to do?”, the session approaches habits not as something to simply overcome, but as embodied knowledge formed through repetition, practice, and skill.
The episode begins by unpacking what habits are: repeated actions that have become unconscious, allowing movement to happen without constant decision-making. Habits make dancing possible, yet they are also often what dancers attempt to disrupt in order to find new ways of moving. Rather than treating habits as a problem, this workshop holds them in a more neutral space, asking what they give us, what they limit, and whether it is ever truly possible to move outside them.
A guided improvisation follows, led continuously through voice and music. You are invited to move, sit, lie down, or walk, wherever you are, while listening to a series of spoken prompts inspired by Deborah Hay–like questioning. The guidance encourages you to notice initiation, effort, attention, stillness, ease, difficulty, and choice, and to explore what happens when habits are neither corrected nor avoided, but observed as information. The voice acts as a score, gently disrupting habitual decision-making and shifting focus away from self-judgement or performance.
After this shared improvisation, you are invited to explore the opposite approach: deliberately following your habits. In this short solo investigation, the task is to dance only what feels habitual and familiar, and to notice whether creativity, difference, or accident still appear. This raises questions about repetition, awareness, and whether habits can ever be fully known or isolated.
The episode closes with a reflective assignment focused on practice and repetition. You are invited to journal, map, or schedule your dancing habits, noticing how practices form over time and how they choreograph the body. This reflection can be observational or intentional, structured or loose, offering a way to consider how habits shape both daily life and long-term dancing practices.
This session sits between acceptance and resistance, asking not how to escape habits, but how to dance with them.Music mason by mobygratis
S1 Ep16 Dance Workshop (Stages, Performance, and Audience)
In this workshop, we use the idea of the stage as a way to think about how dance appears, how it becomes present, and how it is witnessed. Rather than treating the stage only as a traditional theatre space, the episode expands the notion of staging to include solo practice, social dance, public space, teaching situations, media, and everyday contexts.
The session explores how different stages produce different kinds of performativity, attention, and choreography. Who is watching? How is the dance being witnessed? What codes are at play? Through a series of invitations, listeners are encouraged to experiment with staging their dance alone, with others, for known and unknown audiences, in private and public settings, and through non-bodily media such as sound, scores, and images.
The workshop proposes staging as an active choreographic material, something that shapes how dance is understood, felt, and practiced, and invites dancers to explore how audience, context, codes, and framing continuously choreograph the dance itself.
Types of Stages Mentioned
- Solo and Personal Stages
- Dancing alone for oneself
- Self-witnessing through sensation, memory, or bodily experience
- Dancing alone while recording video
- Private outdoor spaces where one feels “alone enough”
- Practice as a staged situation
- Relational and Social Stages
- Dancing with one other person
- Social dance and folk dance
- Dancing simultaneously with and for others
- Club or discotheque dance floors
- Participation-based stages
- Educational and Workshop Stages
- Dance studios
- Classroom stages
- Teacher-led staging
- Improvised classroom configurations
- Demonstration, copying, and mimicry
- Traditional Performance Stages
- Theatre stages
- Proscenium and elevated stages
- Ballet and musical theatre stages
- Frontal audience seating
- Codified theatre conventions
- Public and Street Stages
- Street performance
- Shopping centres
- Public squares
- Informal audience gathering through action
- Performances without explicit audience consent
- Disruption of public-space codes
- Contextual and Codified Stages
- Stages produced through social codes
- Historical theatre conventions
- Shakespearean interactive audiences
- Silent, observing audiences
- Judgment deferred until the end
- Participatory and Invitational Stages
- Social invitations to dance
- Instruction-based participation
- Guided movement situations
- Teaching as staging
- Material and Object-Based Stages
- Dancing on grass
- Dance studio floors
- Dancing with objects (fabric, parachutes, umbrellas, sticks, canes, hats)
- Furniture as stage (chairs, tables, beds)
- Playgrounds
- Mobile and Guided Stages
- Guided tours as choreography
- Walking audiences through spaces
- Sequential staging across locations
- Media and Representational Stages
- Film
- Video
- Sound and music
- Audio formats
- Text/Scores as stages
- Written instructions
- Pictorial and visual forms
- Clay and material artefacts
- Perceptual and Imagined Stages
- Empathetic and kinesthetic witnessing
- Watching as learning
- Neural and sensory staging
- Audience imagination as stage
Music leaning by mobygratis
PETER 