Open ARENA

Join company classes with Open ARENA

July 14 - September 12; M-F

9:30am - 11am

with special guest choreographers master classes within as we prepare for our Fall debut concert Sept. 19+20, 2025 at Luminary Arts Center.

MONDAYS– JAKE NEHRBASS
This dynamic class focuses on traveling in and out of the floor and building strength and agility needed for expressive, athletic dancing. Dancers will explore momentum, weight shifts, and release techniques while pushing physical limits through expansive movement and explosive jumps. Whether you’re launching across the room or grounding into the floor, this class will help you find strength and flight in your contemporary practice. (Asaf Salhov subs 8/25; description below)

TUESDAYS – SARAH McCULLOUGH
The core themes of this practice often include sensory exploration, expansive expression, efficiency, aliveness, and play. We will move through guided improvisation and phrase work to engage the senses and awaken the body. We will spend time on the floor, upside down, on one leg, and moving through space. Class is intermediate/advanced and geared for movers that are interested in researching their own unique movement. (Elayna Waxse subs 8/19, description below. Asaf Salhov subs 8/26)

WEDNESDAYS – NIEYA AMEZQUITA
Nieya’s contemporary class is designed for intermediate to advanced dancers looking to deepen their physical and creative practice. We’ll explore momentum, breath-driven movement, and the body’s connection to space through combinations, floorwork, and improvisation. Drawing from a mix of traditional modern techniques, the class invites dancers to take risks, trust their instincts, and find new pathways in motion.

THURSDAYS – NON EDWARDS
Somatics, Sensation, and Improvisation
This class begins with physical exercises, somatic inquiry, and partnered explorations. We’ll transition to ensemble improvisation structures while investigating the roles of dancer, witness, and director. Note: This class will employ touch and draw upon elements of contact improvisation. (Elayna Waxse subs 7/17, description below.)

FRIDAYS – ALEX ARCE
Range between an open style choreography class that combines and explores fusing styles and genres of music together as well as a foundational class focused on training singular forms within hip hop and Latin diasporic genres such as House, Breaking, Funk Styles, and Salsa. As well as Contemporary Floor work and Freeform Contemporary exploring movement time space and sound.

SATURDAY SPECIAL, August 2 – JULIA ANTINOZZI

During Dance Class, we will move through a series of exercises in preparation for phrase work. We will warm up by rolling down, practicing pliés, tendus, twists, lunges, and gestures. We will improvise and learn set movement material. The movement is influenced by (but not defined as) casual ballet and postmodern release techniques. It is form-forward, athletic, pedestrian, rhythmic, specific, sometimes mathematical and dramatic. Through this material, we will practice performing and dancing through and beyond our technique.

Thursday, 7/17 & Tuesday, 8/19 – ELAYNA WAXSE

Contemporary Dance Forms

This class contextualizes contemporary dance technique as an ongoing process of body awareness within larger ecological systems. How we exist in our bodies replicates how we exist in the world. Utilizing improvisation, set phrasework, somatic exercises and conversation, we will explore physical prowess, sensitivity and authenticity of movement experience.

Monday, 8/25 & Tuesday, 8/26 – ASAF SALHOV

The class begins with floorwork exercises as a way to awaken the body and to practice specific coordinations that will be used later in the class. On the floor, participants concentrate on movement elements and alignment through repetition of a series of short exercises. As the class builds, the elements are layered into more sequential movement ideas in the space. Following the floorwork section of the class, participants transition the ideas from the floor to standing exercises and partnerwork. Through dynamic across the floor sequences and jumping exercises, participants find new ways to connect information gathered on the floor in a new standing orientation while inhabiting and moving in space.