Earthdance is excited to be offering several Axis Syllabus trainings of various lengths for the 2025 calendar year. As a hub for Axis Syllabus training in the North-East, we invite you to explore the various events we’re hosting below.
What Is The Axis Syllabus?
The Axis Syllabus is a compendium of information about the human body drawn from the somatic sciences of anatomy and physics. The AS has inspired an ongoing interdisciplinary research and pedagogical project that explores relationships between movement, anatomy, physics, and evolution, often with a focus on dancing.
The work emphasizes an embodied approach to learning, where the body is considered as a primary source of knowledge and the central tool for exploration and discovery. The AS was first consolidated in the late 90s thanks to the passionate work of the author, choreographer, dancer and pedagogue Frey Faust, as well as the contribution of an international network of artists, therapists, scientists, movement professionals who have gathered over time and who continue to feed the research.
Upcoming Offerings:
Being With: The Axis Syllabus with Claire Turner Reid and Kerwin Barrington
May 15th – 19th, 2025
In this workshop we will explore Being With our bodies through dance. Being as living, bringing forth, and causing to grow.
And With-ness as a multiplicity of potential in relating – that being in relationship can include to oppose, vary, or unify. Our movement investigations will bring us through varied terrain of inquiry: bridging instinctive, intuitive, and intellectual ways of being with. How can we orient towards intimacy and interconnectivity for the long-game of our moving lives?
With information from the Axis Syllabus – such as principles of the Tri-Axial body, Spiral and Fractal patterns, and Dynamic Alignment – we’ll call in clear choice-making, physical readiness, and enlivened awareness. We’ll play and engage through rhythm, collective groove, unison, spontaneity, variation, and heart perception as ways to connect with the varied knowledge our bodies hold. There will be motifs and movement sequences, meditative scores, guided improvisations, reflection and journaling, and collective mapping. Join us as we delve into ways of calling forth the wisdom of the body through shared dance experiences.
Interwoven: The Axis Syllabus and Dynamic Partnering with Daniel Bear Davis
A Three-Class Series on the following Second Sundays:
- June 8th
- September 14th
- November 9th
Workshop 3-6pm, Potluck 6:15pm, Jam 7:30pm
This series of workshops, threaded through the year, will ground our explorations in The Axis Syllabus (AS) and Dynamic Partnering Practices. The AS explores details of our own anatomy, refined over thousands of years of evolution, to gain clues about how to move in collaboration with our own fascinating design. The intention is to encourage healthy patterns that support choice and longevity of the body’s tissues while increasing our aptitude to harness and play with momentum and offer resilient support. As we grow in our kinetic potential, we meet our dance partners with increased access to range and choice.
This workshop will weave explorations of healthy and creative relationships between the many parts of ourselves and with other humans in contact improvisation and dynamic partnering practices. We will identify boundaries and limitations as building blocks of resilience. We will explore ourselves and our shared dances as tensegrity structures, cultivating our integrity through tensile resistance. We will investigate the self within interconnected networks and interconnectivity within the self. And we’ll do a whole lot of dancing.
Nomadic College: September 27th – October 9th, 2025
Nomadic College is returning to Earthdance again this year! The opportunity to intensely study the Axis Syllabus for one to two weeks is a wonderful chance to dive deep into all that the Axis Syllabus has to offer. With teachers from both Europe and North America, this is the only Nomadic College taking place in the Western Hemisphere for this calendar year. Full line up of teachers and classes coming soon!
About The Nomadic College
The Nomadic College is an itinerant school for the principle study and application of The Axis Syllabus. Rather than a festival, or celebration, the Nomadic College is what its title suggests; an intensive study context.
Our Philosophy is: Conscientiousness towards commitments, self organization and voluntary participation. As below, so above.
As organizers, we seek to adapt and integrate the Nomadic College into the local conditions we find at the venue. The living and working conditions we search for are as low cost as possible, to permit as many people as possible to participate for as long as possible. These options usually entail communal living, which offers an opportunity to practice practical coordination & collaboration, mutual respect, and the mature maintenance of hygiene. Participants arrive with the awareness that they are expected to take initiative to alter their circumstances if unsatisfactory, to conserve their health and strength for the intensive demands of the study of The Axis Syllabus, and adapt to the challenges inherent in sharing spaces and resources. If people have the means, they are always welcome to organize living spaces for themselves.
At the Nomadic College, we organize a few pre-scheduled extra curricular events. Our idea is to leave time open for spontaneous initiatives. Alternative meetings, conferences, jams, or performances can be organized on a consent basis with/among the participants during the Nomadic College.