Contemporary (Fusion) Classes by Paul Estabrook.
This is the melding of various visions of dance, movement and improvisation, reaching towards a unified approach for generating, analysing, and developing movement. The movement style is lush, full-bodied, and circular in its intent and eventuality; it is deeply physical, highly technical, and fully directed yet released. The style and its work-shopped manifestations require discipline, focus, and a strong willingness to take risks on many different levels.
The technique class begins with a floor preparation, incorporating Alexander, Bartenieff, Yoga as well as phrases specific to the style, which eventually bring the dancer to a standing position. A moving, full-bodied warm-up follows, building up the circular patterns that will be encountered throughout the class. With the first exercises, locomotion and the shifting of weight are emphasized, as well as moving in planes and focusing on change of direction within and leading out of the body. The exercises are not reductive in intent, but rather use all of the body all of the time. As the class develops, there is added complexity to the movement, more fully developed articulation, increased as well as varied uses of tempo, and the introduction of vocabulary individual to the style. Traditional technique elements are incorporated into the warm-up - exercises that emphasize plies, or leg brushes/degage/ronde de jambes, yet always within this full-bodied framework.
Combination(s) follow in the style, which is a fusion of different impulses and ideas of movement - modern and jazz, release and new dance work, contemporary deconstruction and pop influences. Much of the work is off the vertical –constantly falling and recovering - and the precision of the movement as well as the distribution of weight are particularly complex. While line is a strong element of the style, it is the transitions and movements from which the line arises that are the backbone of the material.
The goal of this work is to develop a free-moving and released approach to movement in the dancer that is at the same time directed and artistically aware, allowing the dancer to explore all the aspects of his or her movement language.

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