Time: Studio is open from 9.40am, class time is 10-11.30am, with time to stretch and meet 11.30-12noon.

Location: Bristol Old Vic

Booking: Book in advance to secure your place via Headfirst. Pay-what-you-decide with a min. price of £5.00 + 50p booking fee (donated to a Bristol-based charity via Headfirst).

Realise you can’t make it?:

We try our best to price our classes and workshops fairly and offer good value for money. To ensure the viability of our programme we do not offer refunds. However, you can put your ticket up for resale if the event is fully booked or you can arrange to transfer your ticket to a friend using the Headfirst booking system.

Waiting List:

When an event is sold out, a waiting list will be set up, should you wish to join it and be informed when a ticket gets released.

Access:

Get in touch if you have access needs that we could support you with: info.gatherup@gmail.com

Creative Audio Description: if you are a visually impaired dancer planning to attend a class, you may like to book a free Creative Audio Describer to provide you with 1-1 support during the class. Please get in touch if you would like to request this support.

Care Pot: the Care Pot exists to offer cash support towards childcare, parking, travel, access or other extra costs that may surround coming to these classes. Take a read and please be in touch with how we could cover some of your extra costs so that you can come along and participate.

Rest: Our spaces are rest welcome. There are various benches, seats and corners in the studio or you are always welcome to leave the studio for a break.

Read our Sharing Spaces commitment

ABOUT CLASS:

Anna’s movement sessions are primarily about coming together, with whatever's present in you, to tap into the wisdom of our bodies and find joy in our senses.  A guided warm up, bringing awareness and connectivity to breath, body and mind will be followed mostly by structured improvisation and some set sequences. Closing the eyes will be encouraged at times to deepen the awareness, and although largely on our feet, we will be moving in and out of the floor. The classes will focus on some if not all of the following: harnessing different states of energy to find more wholesome ways of moving, rhythm and musicality, imagination and play, elements of folk dance, influences of yoga and using the body as a whole instrument including voice and sound. Expect some light contact within the sessions with the option to opt out or modify, as well as some bodywork drawing from Anna's background in massage therapy. 

About Anna:

Originally from Wolverhampton, Anna obtained BA Hons and MA Degrees from London Contemporary Dance School. She has worked extensively in dance theatre with choreographer, Michael Keegan-Dolan/Teac Damsa for productions such as Rian (2011),The Right of Spring & Petrushka (2013) and Swan Lake/Loch Na hEala (2016) touring nationally and worldwide. Other notable companies include Scottish Dance Theatre, Dan Canham/Still House, Emma Martin/United Fall, Catherine Young Dance, Company Philip Connaughton and Anatomical. After receiving an Arts Council Award to develop her practice, she's been enjoying exploring theatre, voice and clown work, with the intention to work more interdisciplinary. Anna is also a massage therapist in Bristol and loves to hike, volunteer on eco-builds when she can, and is trying to grow things this year. 

ABOUT CLASS:

Nina’s s class will move between guided practices and set material coming from her repertoire. Her artistic language is very much driven by the idea that the voice is dancing, and the body is singing. The class requires curiosity for voice work, talking, singing, as well as moving, but no specific skills. As a resonance to her current creative process, we will aim to explore our relationship with liquidity, in the body, in the space, in relationship, and in memory. We will draw our attention to the breath, on ways of listening deeper, on perceiving movement and sound as vibration, and on musicality. We will seek playful ways to tune to each other, to voice the body, to talk and sing and dance simultaneously, associating or dissociating different patterns. We might close our eyes to muscle our imagination and sensory tentacles. The class will involve light touch such as holding each other’s hands, with always the possibility to adapt.

www.lafronde.net 

image credit: Aude Arago

ABOUT NINA:

Nina Santes is a choreographer, dancer and singer. She is co-artistic director of La Fronde with Ève Magot. La Fronde is a production structure that works with principles of cooperation and sharing of resources, created in 2011. Nina Santes’ transdisciplinary work nurtures a strong link between movement and sound, giving birth to hybrid objects that play on genres and forms. Concert, dance piece, immersive cabaret, experimental musical... Nina Santes likes to offer experiences that engage all the bodies - those of the performers and those of the spectators. She sees art as a tool for transforming relationships and perceptions, on a personal and collective scale. She has written a number of plays that have toured internationally over the last 10 years, including Self made man (2015), A Leaf (2016/2019 - co-created with Célia Gondol), Hymen Hymne (2018), République Zombie (2020). She received the French SACD New Choreographic Talent Prize in 2018. In 2023 she created the solo Peeling Back and explored the invention of a form of ‘choreographic science fiction’. She is currently creating Wet Songs (2025), which continues this research. Nina was an associate artist of the Atelier de Paris CDCN (France) from 2019 - 2021, then at the Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans, and at the Manège de Reims (France), with La Fronde, from 2021 to 2024.