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not all operations left to chance: ​scoring improvisation across mediums
w/Gerald Casel & Tim Russell

Sunday, July 28th @9am
Björklunden
​7590 Boynton Ln, Baileys Harbor, WI 54202 
In this session, longtime collaborators Tim Russell and Gerald Casel share their improvisational methods that encourage a generative and supportive space through their individual disciplines of movement and sound design. Besides co-creating and responding to movement scores, participants will experiment with quick writing prompts, duration and legibility, and recalibrating “default” modes of being in improvisational spaces. Collectively, the group will acknowledge and welcome diverse artistic practices, ethno-cultural histories, aesthetic sensibilities, and abilities.

Gerald Casel (he/they/siya) is a dance artist, equity activator, and antiracist educator. As director of GERALDCASELDANCE, his choreographic work complicates and provokes questions surrounding colonialism, collective cultural amnesia, whiteness and privilege, and the tensions between the invisible/perceived/obvious structures of power. Casel is Professor and Chair of the Dance Department at Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. He has previously been a faculty member at NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Palucca Hochschule für Tanz Dresden, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, California State University Long Beach, and UC Santa Cruz where he also served as the Provost of Porter College. A graduate of The Juilliard School with an MFA from UW-Milwaukee, they received a New York Dance and Performance Award “Bessie” for sustained achievement dancing in the companies of Stephen Petronio, Michael Clark, Stanley Love, Zvi Gotheiner, Sungsoo Ahn, and The Metropolitan Opera Ballet. Casel founded Dancing Around Race, an ongoing community engaged-participatory process that interrogates systemic racial inequity in 2018 and continues to expand its depth and reach. www.geraldcasel.com
Tim Russell (he/him) lives at the confluence of the aural and the visual. He currently serves as Music Director for the University of Wisconsin Dance Program. In 2019, Tim was selected as one of the Cowles Visiting Artists at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, a first for a Musician in the field of Dance. He has a vast catalogue of works specifically for choreography, most of which exist live, in collaboration with movement. His commitment to the nowness in performance led him to co-create/curate, along with choreographer Maria Gillespie, Hyperlocal MKE, a Music and Dance improvisation series that exists to this day in Milwaukee. His current curatorial project: Common Sage Arts, promotes multidisciplinary artists through carefully curated performances. Along with Tim’s long time collaboration with the Gerald Casel Dance, his audio shares the stage with choreographic artists such as: Kate Corby, Abby Crain, Danceworks, Maria Gillespie, Holly Johnston, Stephan Koplowitz, Sara Shelton Mann, Li Chiao Ping, Liz Sexe, Marlene Skog, WildSpace Dance and Jin Wen Yu, bringing Tim and his music across the world from Dock 11 in Berlin to YBCA in San Francisco. He holds an MFA in Music Improvisation from Mills College in Oakland, California, where he studied improvisation, electronic music and composition with the likes of Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell and Zeena Parkins. His 2020 album: “Junct”, a collection of improvisational duets with bassist Ari Smith, was included in Tone Madison’s top 20 records of 2020.
Design- Charlie Stephens, Photo- xoMe studio
Photo (Gerald Casel): Katherine Helen Fisher