Adriana Léon Workshop

Finding Motifs as Your Body Speaks

Taught by Adriana León

August 7–13, 2016

I believe that if you allow it, dance generates itself and teaches the course it will take within the body. When we pay attention to our movements and their causes, we can find minimal movement units that contain for each one of us sense, expression and communication.

In each class I work with improvisation, repetition and guidance, while calling upon intuition and the body’s intelligence. I propose small actions to help discover minimum movement units, which we develop in studies and short pieces, which in turn will dictate the self-expression through movement.

During the classes I try to take a playful approach to help set the scene for open discovery. I believe that moment of discovery is key to develop ideas, and that surprise and enjoyment encourage the creative process.

holds an MFA in Scenic Arts and a BFA in Dance from the University of Veracruz. She is the director, choreographer and dancer in Univerdanza, a contemporary dance company from the University of Colima. She has been a teacher at the University of Veracruz, at the National Dance College in Querétaro, and currently of Creative Experimentation and Composition at the Universiy of Colima. Adriana received the XIV DIF-Walden award as the best dancer of the Twentieth International Dance Festival of San Luis Potosí, Mexico. She received support from the New England Foundation for the Arts to participate in the International Visiting Artists program at the Bates Dance Festival in both 2003 and 2007. She was a recipient of a grant from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and Arts (known as FONCA) in 2006 and 2007. From 2008 to 2013 she participated in the project ”La Voz del cuerpo / The Body Speaks,” directed by Christine Dakin and hosted by the University of Colima and the Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Studies at Harvard University. Her Master's thesis, “Univerdanza, dance company of the University of Colima: Organizational processes, methodology and creation,” was published in 2015 by the University of Colima. Adriana has presented her choreography in the most important dance festivals of Mexico, the U.S. and Tenerife, Spain.