Professional Contemporary Class
The Work Room & Barrowland Ballet co-run weekly classes for the professional dance community in Glasgow on Thursday & Friday mornings 9.30am to 10.45am.
Class is led by Aya Kobayashi with occasional guest teachers. Started in 2018 in response to the lack of professional-level contemporary classes in the city, Pro Class provides a space for independent dance artists to come together to dance and sustain practice. Our aim is for these classes to be accessible to a wide range of physicalities.
Thursdays:
The class includes both set materials and improvisations to train the clarity and embodiment through release based technique. We start with gentle way-in to our moving body, often focus on breath and energy paths to find attentiveness. With a few simple repetitive exercises we will try to find a deeper understanding of gravity, alignments and skeletal connections. The class is designed to develop your stamina and strength as we will move through with full bodied engagement and articulation. Some phrases are repeated over a few weeks to explore familiar and unfamiliar coordination of movement vocabulary.
Friday’s:
The class starts with giving space to breathe, land or ponder then offering some images or small questions to navigate an explorative journey. Using various imageries, somatic exercises, or looking at other species or other art forms as hints or metaphors, we explore the anatomical potential and find the connections in things we live with. We will enrich our embodiment and feed into your practice. The class welcomes all movers. Aya cares about the journey of each class and within the inclusive facilitation, will move with openness and playfulness to cultivate the moving body together.
Alternatively, join Aya Kobayashi’s and/or Molly Danter’s audio-only online classes on mixcloud.
Upcoming Classes
The Autumn Term runs from Thursday 31 August – Friday 15 December
Thursdays | 9.30am-10.45am | Newlands South Church, 37 Riverside Road, G42 2EG
Fridays | 9.30am-10.45am | Kinning Park Complex, 43 Cornwell Street, G41 1BA
Classes operate on a Pay-What-You-Can sliding scale of £0 > £3 > £5> £7 tickets and should be booked in advance via TicketLab.
While we remain keen for these classes to be an accessible resource supporting the professional dance community in Glasgow, the long-term sustainability of these is not possible without generating income to towards the cost of running these.
Please do book in advance via the links below, and we encourage you to consider what you are able to contribute financially to make these classes possible.