Widening the Circle: movement improvisation and somatics classes with Megan Bridge

6 sessions on December 9, 10, & 11
Register for the full series or per session:
• 10am–12noon: Somatics & bodywork
• 1pm–3pm: Group improvisation and play
Whole Series Tuition: $195
Pay-by-class + sliding-scale options available

Widening the Circle, a movement improvisation and somatics class with Megan Bridge, is open to all levels. Formal dance training is not required, but participants should be comfortable in their bodies and, ideally, have some kind of regular physical practice. This workshop is an invitation into movement, mindfulness, and presence. Choreographer and performer Megan Bridge’s performance, teaching, and research centers around consciousness and attention in the embodied, moving self. These classes will guide students to heighten perception and use all their senses, accessing their own phenomenological experience and using it as the very material of their own performance. 

Each morning, we will start with a slow warm up using breath, stillness, and quiet, beginning to allow a multitude of signals into our experience with each passing moment. Partnered as well as solo bodywork exercises will be introduced, using touch, weight-sharing, massage, and meditative stretching to wake into the body. In the afternoon, we will continue to tune our embodied perception: picking up communication, we move and dance in deep physical resonance with our space, with sound, and with each other. We will progress to dancing in groups and performing for each other, collectively devising movement scores for group improvisation.

Megan Bridge’s teaching draws on her own decades-long investigations into bodywork, somatics, dancing improvisationally, and her intensive study with masters of improvised dance such as Brigitta Herrmann, Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Manfred Fischbeck, and Merian Soto.

About the Teacher:: 

Megan Bridge is an internationally touring performer, choreographer, educator, and dance researcher based in Philadelphia. She has presented her choreography at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, FringeArts, and many other venues in Philadelphia, throughout the United States and internationally throughout Germany and Poland as well as in Vienna, Sofia, Bogotá, Tbilisi, Skopje, Rennes, Johannesburg, and Zurich. Bridge holds a BFA in dance from SUNY Purchase, and an MFA in dance from Temple University, where she currently serves as Adjunct Assistant Professor in the dance program. She has published more than 30 articles for thINKingdance.net, as well articles for the Dance Chronicle, Dance Magazine, Pointe Magazine, and Philly Artblog. She has taught week-long intensive workshops at FringeArts in 2024 and 2025, and she is a certified Group Motion Workshop facilitator. Her teaching practice is focused on somatics, improvisation, and collective play. She loves bringing philosophical inquiry into the studio, and her ideas are influenced by philosopher Erin Manning, affect theory, concepts of presence, and altered states of consciousness. She has studied with Steve Paxton, Lisa Nelson, Deborah Hay, Merian Soto, Manfred Fischbeck, Brigitta Herrmann, Rennie Harris, André Lepecki, and Neil Greenberg.