As artistic director of LaneCoArts, Lane Gifford’s mission is to share her vision and working practice with students in universities, colleges, and schools throughout the country.  In our current technologically driven world, the importance of aesthetic education and the role it can play in students’ lives is central to Lane. Together with LaneCoArts company members, she offers an inclusive, collaborative environment in which the individual strengths of each student are emphasized, and cross-pollination is encouraged. Though technique-based and improvisational exercises, LaneCoArts workshops provide a view into a professional dance company experience. 

The company’s movement practice, called “successive rebound”, stresses a sound connection with the ground and the organic mechanics of a body in motion.  Through discussion, sharing, technique, and creative tasks, LaneCoArts classes become a forum for individual, expressive articulation combined with group cooperation.

 

A key component of the LaneCoArts classroom is the celebration of all participants’ different backgrounds, countries, genders, and races.  As separate entities all students are compellingly individualistic, but when placed together in one studio, they provide an inspired canvas exemplifying one unified message of “cooperation.” LaneCoArts partnering and group exercises instill lessons in negotiation, with a goal to deconstruct division and instead move towards intersecting creative pathways and laboratories for rich communication.

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- Lane Gifford / Artistic Director