Perri Institute Expands

So far, 2014 has been an exciting year for TaraMarie Perri and her company, Mind Body Dancer (MBD). In January, they unveiled their new name, The Perri Institute For Mind and Body, and now in February have proudly announced that they are one of six founding partners collaborating to create the newly expanded Gibney Dance. (The other partners include Movement Research, Trisha Brown Dance Company, New Dance Collective, The Playground and Gibney Dance Center’s Contemporary Forms program.)

Perri founded MBD in 2009, combining her dance and choreography background with her yoga studies to create a unique yoga-based curriculum for performers that has now reached students from NYU to London. She has always been on an insatiable quest for knowledge and research is a strong component of the institutes mission. Perri says, "my teaching of yoga integrates philosophy, history, and supportive practice methods with creative influences from academia, movement studies, arts, and sciences".

She was thrilled when she was approached by Gina Gibney to bring her classes into Gibney Dance's new space at 280 Broadway. For the past 23 years the space belonged to Dance New Amsterdam and the dance community was devastated when it was forced to close its doors last fall.

Gibney will keep its original space up the street at at 890 Broadway and, thanks to a 20-year lease and $3 million from the Agnes Varis Trust, plans to renovate the new space to create a performance and learning environment that will include combining two of the studios to create one large, sky-lit space for classes and performances and the addition of a digital media room so that artists can go straight from rehearsal to a tech-equipped space where they can view and edit their work, just for starters.

One of Perri's goals with the transitioning of MBD into The Perri Institute was to "better represent the organic growth we have experienced with our students, teachers, researchers, collaborators since our origin. The partnership with Gibney Dance helps support this growth while giving our NYC community a home base."

She is excited about the opportunity to enrich their signature educational offerings and expand the breadth of programming in connection with the larger network of class and event activities happening at Gibney Dance.

In addition to a daily class schedule open for drop in to all students, they have two in depth paths for yoga and mind/body study: pedagogy and practice. The pedagogy courses are for serious practitioners who have an interest in following a teaching path within the yoga tradition. (Weekend and daytime courses begin Sept 2014 – application period starts end of February). This path is for serious practitioners who wish to dive in beyond the open class experience into deeper study but do not have a desire to teach. (Summer Intensive begins mid-June 2014).

They are also generously offering three periods of community quiet space each day when anyone can stop in to sit for 5 or 20 minutes and will be having monthly workshops to learn how to sit with mind relaxation techniques to support participants in those community quiet times. Other workshop topics will include topics in physiology, teaching methods for children, mental fitness for performers, principles of breathing coordination, Ayurvedic studies, business workshops for artists and teachers.

All pedagogy and practice trainings are taught by Perri and their Teachers and Training Coordinator, Maggie Gavin Ronan. A sampling of workshop guest lecturers include Rebecca Dietzel, Ethan Nichtern, and Cara Surico.

All classes, events, and training programs can be taken alone or in combination so that the variety of learning opportunities are multi-faceted, yet integrated not only within The Perri Institute for Mind and Body’s programming, but at large with the other partners at Gibney Dance.

Renovations are currently underway and classes will begin at the new space on March 31st. Check out The Perri Institute or Gibney Dance to follow the latest updates including plans for community action programming which will incorporate MBD teachers and curriculum in connecting to special projects and our Lower Manhattan neighbors.

-- Allison Richard

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