Julian utilizes teaching to further understand the potentiality of movement, performance, improvisation and choreography. He has taught internationally for over 15 years, both academically and professionally, and continues to see teaching as a way to deepen, enhance, and strengthen the practioner/student, as well as his own choreographic and pedagogical investigations.
Julian has been a teaching artist guiding, lecturing, and mentoring at numerous institutions including Princeton University, NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, Middlebury College, The Juilliard School, SUNY Purchase, California Institute of the Arts, classclassclass, Gibney Dance Center, Hunter College, and more. Internationally, he has also been a guest teaching artist at: B12 Festival (Berlin), Dance Ireland (IE), ArtEZ (NL), Dance Italia (IT), Kassel Staatsteater (DE), Hong Kong Performing Arts Academy (China), Architanz (Tokyo), and K3 Tanzplan Hamburg (DE). Additionally, he has taught at the Florida, West Virginia, Bates, and Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festivals, as well as CityDance Ensemble in Washington D.C., University of Minnesota - Minneapolis, University of Nebraska - Lincoln, Bryn Mawr College, Philadelphia, PA, University of Florida - Gainesville, FL, University of Colorado - Colorado Springs, Earl Mosey Institute for the Arts (NY/CT), and New Orleans High School for the Arts, amongst others. Julian is an Assistant Professor and Resident Choreographer within the Dance and Theatre Department at The University of Vermont in Burlington.
Current Pedagogy:
PERSONAL POETICS: a workshop on talking, singing, moving, performing and other matters that matter
Over the last few years, I have been busy exploring the intersections between the voice and body, language and movement, meaning and abstraction, form and content. The workshop will place these areas of research within the context of performance, through the lens of practice. What happens first? What motivates one or the other? What are we talking and moving about? What are the possibilities? What is at stake? I'm interested in the mechanisms that fuse these components together, ultimately shaping a personal subjectivity and materiality that can cultivate a type of performativity. With this workshop, I'll share specific methodologies that prioritize modes of perpetuation and seek to build practical bridges between the voice and body, honing spaces for discovery, choice and personal poetics.
BUSY BODY
This class focuses on a practice that has been developed throughout Julian's choreographic body of work, which has many iterations, but can be distilled into the term 'busy body'. Influenced through his collaborations with Steve Paxton and Jeanine Durning, the class looks at and prioritizes the subjective body as an active and changeable compositional form. In the class, which functions as a multi-layered preparatory, performative and choreographic practice, the individual is asked to harness a body of constant impulse, one that can draw relations to and sustain the immediate moment. Using this approach as the main fulcrum of the class, different ideas and frames are introduced that shift focus to variant possibilities. The class aims to challenge the mover to push beyond conventional realms of what is dance and emphasize the process of how, as way of better understanding the what.
OPP: opening practice potential
This workshop embraces and explores how our perception can be a way of unlocking our physical imagination and act as a guide towards conceptual and intuitive movement and performance. I focus on the individual’s unique ability to discern action, space and time amidst collective energy and a world of multiplicity and possibility. The workshop will ultimately confront conventional methods of dealing with the body in performance, such as analyzing virtuosity and finding ways for performance to be a state of phenomenal presence, yet will always remain an opportunity for curious movers and thinkers to explore ways of seeing, articulating and cultivating authentic movement and performance through improvisation and composition.