
Wortham Presents Master Class
Contemporary Partnering Workshop with Gaspard Louis
Saturday, May 3, 2025 at 1:00 p.m.
Henry LaBrun Studio at the Wortham Center
Duration: 90 minutes
Expected age: 16+
Experience: Open Level
Max participants: 25
Cost: $15
After spending many years performing with Pilobolus Dance Theater, choreographer Gaspard Louis has developed a keen understanding of creative movement and partnering techniques. His dance workshop is playful, group-driven, physically challenging, and fun. Participants will be encouraged to work individually and collaboratively to explore spatial awareness, create shapes and gestures, and learn about weight sharing activities using base/support and balance/counter-balance techniques. At the end of class, participants will have a better understanding of dance making. By eliminating the preconception of what dance should be and exploring what is unique in each individual body, students will discover what is possible.
About Gaspard Louis
Gaspard Louis is a Haitian-born dancer, choreographer, and artistic director. His experience includes being a dancer with the cutting-edge and internationally renowned Pilobolus Dance Theater. In addition to performing, touring, and teaching globally with Pilobolus, he collaborated on nine major dance works during this formative decade with the company. He has also choreographed for Freespace Dance Company in New Jersey and Kentucky University Dance Ensemble.
Currently, he directs The American Dance Festival’s year-round creative movement outreach program, which provides free dance classes to Triangle youth.
He founded his company Gaspard&Dancers in order to create his own personal vision of dance in North Carolina. The past couple of years he has created two works as part of planned trilogy about the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which has personal resonance for him as his country of origin. With each of these works, he has explored themes of loss and aspiration on personal, communal, and national levels. He has always sought to push the envelope technically and creatively in his choreography. He hopes that his work engages the audience in a way that is emotional and visceral.
Date(s):
Time
1 p.m.Venue:
18 Biltmore Ave.
Asheville, NC 28801 (map)