Creative Reset: The Practice of Making with Audacity

Creative Reset: The Practice of Making with Audacity

Education Frame | Work News & Updates

What: Seven sewing classes in which you will make a dress and learn to adapt that basic dress pattern to work for different bodies and styles. 

When: Tuesday evenings, 7-8 PM, October 6, 13, 20, 27, November 3, 10, and 17, 2020

Where: Right in front of your very own sewing machine in the comfort of wherever you have room to make a dress. Yes, you need to provide your own sewing machine. We will help you learn to use it. Classes are held online.

How: Register here. Classes are $10 each, and you must sign up for all seven classes in order to finish your dress.

Why: Once, I tried to make a dress. I put a square pocket on the chest, and I sewed all four sides of that pocket to the bodice. It was not great. If only I’d had Ashley Horn Nott to help me.

Ashley would have had a plan for my inexperience, my ignorance, my besotted love for the fabric and my overconfidence in “figuring out” a sewing machine. The first time Ashley took on a costume-making project for a dance company, her sewing experience was straight lines and stuffing. Pillows. She knew she could sew a pillow cover, and the rest she had the audacity to make up.

And it worked! Today, Ashley has made costumes for most of the modern dance companies in Houston, including her own productions. Absolutely hundreds (possibly thousands?) of dresses and other costumes gorgeously crafted. Why did Ashley’s gamble worked and mine didn’t? I’m guessing that Ashley had more tenacity to match her audacity than I did. She also made the compelling decision to promise other people that she would complete her project. No one cared when I folded up my half-dress with its unusable patch of a pocket and never unfolded it again. Ashley had a commitment to people she cared about, people who were counting on those costumes, and that accountability motivated her through the “now I have to seam-rip the whole damn thing” moments.

Let us be that accountability for you. Maybe you’ve been saying that you want to sew your own clothes. Maybe you found the most amazing fabric. Maybe you found that fabric years ago and you’re ready to give it form. Maybe you are a dancer and you want to be able to make costumes for yourself and others. This is a chance to create beside a self-made professional. Grab your audacity and make it into a dress. Your dress.

 

How is making a dress a creative reset? Um, can I answer that tomorrow? It’s kind of a whole thing…

 

 

 

The World is Our Dance Studio

The World is Our Dance Studio

Education Frame | Work News & Updates

Outdoor Fall Programming from Frame Dance

Quarantine and social distancing has taken away many habits and practices, but sometimes the things we replace them with are so very sweet. We’ve been forced out of the dance studio this fall, but when we walked through that door we found ourselves on the grass, under the sky, breathing deeply among the trees. Frame Dance has a lot of practice using the city as its stage, an now we are using it as our studio, taking our dance classes into the parks and green spaces of Houston.

 

Like other dance programs, we offer online dance and dance-related content. Unlike other dance programs, we have not gone hybrid or into taped-off personal areas in a studio in order to dance together.* Instead, we offer you the uncommon joy of dancing outdoors. 

 

Three outdoor classes happen on the weekends: Creative Movement and MultiGen on Saturday mornings, and Beginning Modern Dance on Sundays. The first two are are grassier versions of the classes we’ve offered season after season, but Beginning Modern for adults with Jacquelyne Boe is all new. To us. Jacquelyne had taught modern dance to adults for many years at various studios, and we are proud and pleased to offer this first ongoing adult class with a member of our prestigious company. I personally take classes with Jacquelyne whenever I have the chance because her classes are thorough and inventive and good for one’s physical and mental health. I mean, all dance classes are, or should be, but these have an extra layer of goodness. Our girl is insightful and efficient. Give yourself the gift of experiencing it. Register here.

 

Creative Movement is for families to dance together at a park, which is exactly what I thought parenting would be before I became a parent. Lydia leads this idyllic interval of sweetness. Each family will purchase a bag of dance accessories to use at class and at home during the week where the learning and joyful activity can continue. Register here.

 

MultiGen is the epitome of Dance for All. Every body can dance and every mind and spirit can grow from the practice of dance, and this happens with uncompromising quality of instruction and abundance of heart at MultiGen dance class. For everyone, all ages, all abilities, even babies worn by a dancing adult are welcome (those special pairs of people are also welcome in Creative Movement along with their dancing child). MultiGen is about radically inclusive community, which means that you, all of you, automatically belong there. Register here.

 

See you on the grass, under the sun, surrounded by living things, dancing outside like the happy, wild artists we are.

 

*No shade. If we had our own studio, with rent to pay, we’d be taping those floors for sure.