TEACHING
Hearts at Lions Jaw Festival 2019
Portier’s teaching practice is rigorous and vivid, grounded in ongoing exploration and care. Her approach is expansive, serving varied—yet overlapping—objectives and producing equally layered forms. These range from instructional aims, such as focused skill-building or comprehensive semester-long curricula, to immersive engagement through experiential choreographies like Geologic Body. Portier’s teaching practice contributes to creative scholarship by activating generative, imaginative, and connective capacities within and between pedagogy and choreography.
PRACTICE
A meticulously crafted invocation, experiential choreography calls forth visceral imagery and dynamic swells of action, reflection, sweat, challenge, persistence, spirit, stillness, texture, color, imagination, conjuring, cheering, support, deep exploration, flight—and, when summoned, unapologetic, propulsive dancing. It is practice-forward: class-like, amplifying the sensorial movement experience. Here, choreography becomes both form and function—a creative apparatus that shapes a guided yet agentic, immersive, collective, embodied event.
Vital Studies and Geologic Body are two such choreographies.
EXPERIENTIAL CHOREO- GRAPHIES
LINEAGE+ LEARNING
This approach has been generously shaped by many voices—teachers, friends, families, and students—who continue to shift my perspective and deepen my inquiry. I offer special gratitude to Kathleen Hermesdorf and Albert Mathias, whose classes revealed how craft could bend time and ignite catharsis.
Gibney Dance Center (NY), Reconnect Festival (International -online), freeskewl (USA - online), New Dialect (TN), The Field Center (VT), The Wooden Floor (CA), Lions Jaw Festival (MA), University of Alabama, The Ohio State University, Ohio University, SUNY Brockport, SUNY Buffalo, Wesleyan University (CT), Zenon Dance (MN), Dance New Amsterdam (NY), Mark Morris Dance Center (NY), Peridance (NY), Broadway Dance (NY), Praxisspace (NY), James Madison University (VA), Virginia Commonwealth University, Unidancehub (Midwest consortium), ACDA - multiple locations (Seton Hill University, Western Michigan University, University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, University of Maryland), Emory University (GA), Salem State University (MA), CORE Dance (GA), Dance Education Laboratory at 92Y (NY), Bates Dance Festival (ME), Connecticut College, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Barnard College (NY), Oakland University (MI), University of Nebraska, Bates College (ME), University of Utah, Hunter College (NY), Pennsylvania State University, national and international tours with David Dorfman Dance (American South, Greece, Tajikistan, Armenia, Turkey, etc.), and DSA at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver, BC).