Professional Classes

These classes offer movement as a way of understanding relationships and connections within the body. Working through imagery, improvisation, and movement patterns, we will strengthen our relationship to the floor and standing; discovering softness through the joints and the head–tail connection of the spine. We will work through pathways that support greater orientation, articulation, suspension, weight, and spatial awareness. The classes encourage curiosity, offering, and space for exploration.

About:

Akshay Sharma is a choreographer, performer, and vocalist. His practice brings together contemporary dance, voice, and writing in his solo and ensemble work. Rooted in enquiry and improvisation, his work draws on imagery, musicality, and systems of organisation to create emotionally resonant performances. He has created work with the support of The Place, Yorkshire Dance, Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Dance City, Bradford Arts Centre, and funded by Arts Council England. He has worked with Scottish Dance Theatre, Hiten Patel, Georgia Tegou, Vidya Patel amongst others.

Beatrice Ghezzie's ballet classes start with simple, warm up, barre exercises to establish clear placement, core stability and movement clarity. The material then progresses and builds up in pace and complexity to prepare the body and the mind for centre work. This consists of longer combinations with a particular emphasis on coordination, timing, use of space, and dynamics. The main aim of the class is fluidity and flavour, with research and care for movement transitions as opposed to aesthetic forms.

About:

Beatrice Ghezzi is a London-based Italian teacher and dancer with an MA in Contemporary Dance from the London Contemporary Dance School. She has over 15 years of experience teaching ballet and contemporary dance in vocational and community settings, working with beginners, recreational dancers, and professional performers. She teaches with Ballet4Life® and Move into Wellbeing®, delivering classes for adults and people living with neurological conditions. In 2018, she co-founded BOTH Dance Classes, an independent organisation offering high-quality dance classes for adults in South East London.

High-intensity contemporary dance training exploring biomechanics, floorwork, and rapid transitions. Build speed, responsiveness, spatial awareness, and group connection through dynamic improvisation and physically demanding phrase work. Integrating principles from Laban, Capoeira, Flying Low, Passing Through, and Release Technique.

About:

Born in Brazil, Julia is a multidisciplinary artist, performer, photographer, and internationally recognised dance educator who has been based in London for over a decade. Her practice explores presence, relationships, and embodied expression through movement, photography, installation, and performance. She createdDissolving, a somatic dance practice investigating vital energy, storytelling, and emotional expression. Julia teaches Flying Low and Passing Through internationally and at The Place, collaborating across disciplines as a performer, choreographer, producer, and artistic director.

Akane Abe’s classes are rooted in Limon principles and release-based technique, beginning with a gentle floor warm-up that prepares the body without strain and progressing towards dynamic short phrases. Her approach emphasizes ease, breath, natural coordination, and thoughtful pacing, allowing dancers to work deeply while maintaining physical safety and freedom.

About:

Akane Abe is a London based Japanese choreographer and dance educator whose career spans more than twenty years across the UK, Japan, and Europe. After training in theatre, she earned an MA in Contemporary Dance and Choreography from the London Contemporary Dance School, shaping her interdisciplinary artistic approach. Active internationally since 2001, she has created numerous projects across contemporary dance, theatre, and cross media performance. She currently leads Dance Theatre Red, continuing her commitment to artistic exploration and cultural exchange.

The classes will flow through exploring set movement, how to come in and out of the floor, specific illusionary drills and improvisation scores. Allowing for a full-body exploration of targeted aspects, we will center the focus on isolations, sequential movements, our relationship with gravity, and how to activate or diminish movement to find textures and dynamics such as suspensions, accelerations, freezes, and imagined external forces that shape and interrupt us.

About:

Bea Bidault is a distinguished dance artist whose work intricately explores human connection and identity through captivating, fictional, visual, and sensory performances. Her multifaceted career encompasses choreography, performance, and movement research. Her choreographic creations have been performed across the UK and Spain. Bea has collaborated with an array of renowned artists and companies including Kate Tabor, Akram Khan, Teac Damsa, Max Revell, Becky Namgauds and Will Clark.

Bea Bidault will perform on Vivienne Franzmann and Frauke Requardt’sAnatomy of Survival at The Place on Tuesday 13 October. Click here for more information and to book tickets.

Classes will be led by Associate Artist Kieran Brown.

Release-based classes that cultivate awareness through movement. Through principles of Feldenkrais, we begin on the floor, awakening somatic awareness through gentle exploration of the skeleton, sensation, and breath. We gradually transition to standing and improvised crossings, exploring weight, gravity, and flow. We then learn set material, allowing the observations and sensations cultivated earlier in the class to inform choreographed phrases, encouraging presence, curiosity, and embodied movement.

About:

Kieran Brown is a dance artist, maker, and Associate Artist with Scottish Dance Theatre. He has performed internationally with Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Scottish Dance Theatre, working with choreographers including Damien Jalet, Sharon Eyal, Botis Seva, Emanuel Gat, and Anton Lachky. Alongside performing, Kieran develops choreographic and teaching practices rooted in embodied awareness, relationality, and focusing. Delivering workshops and professional classes for Dance Base, TWR, Scottish Dance Theatre, and National Dance Company Wales.

Scottish Dance Theatre, Scotland's flagship contemporary dance company, will present the London premiere of a new programme by internationally acclaimed choreographers Emilie Leriche (US/Sweden) and Edouard Hue (Switzerland) at The Place on Friday 23 and Saturday 24 October. Click here for more information and to book tickets.

Technical classes rotate through different styles, including several street styles, Bharatanatyam, and contemporary dance. These sessions build endurance, rhythm, coordination, alignment, and flow, with integrated prāṇāyāma to support body–mind connection and presence. Dancers are able to take a deep dive into Chandenie Gobardhan’s method, blending movement practice, cultural tradition, and reflective tools. The class includes exploring emotional and physical connection through breathwork, body awareness, and intention-setting.

About:

Home of Māyā. That which is not what it appears to be. And that’s where we begin. Home of Māyā is a dance performance company who move between worlds and shape new ones. Our work invites audiences to look again, to feel deeper, and to question what they think they know. We create spaces where movement blurs the lines between tradition and innovation, form and feeling, the seen and the unseen. The stage becomes our altar, a place of offering, remembering, and reimagining. Rooted in collaboration, curiosity, cultural memory, we make work that unearths, unravels, and reimagines.

Aneta Zwierzynska’s classes are based on over 20 years of research into the dialogue between Capoeira and Contemporary Dance. These classes explore dynamic release, floor work, somatic practices, and movement efficiency. Combining internal awareness with Capoeira’s precision, focus, and a martial-arts-inspired mindset, she explores biomechanics, gravity, inversions, and imbalance. Dancers will develop confidence, adaptability, and self-expression through a practice rooted in depth, playfulness, and the philosophy of Capoeira.

About:

Aneta is a multidisciplinary dancer, choreographer, researcher, and capoeira teacher with over 20 years of experience in contemporary dance and capoeira. She holds a double MA in Contemporary Dance and Movement Research and Dance Pedagogy from Anton Bruckner University, Austria. She has performed with Beatrice Allegranti Dance Theatre and taught internationally across Europe, the UK, and Brazil, where she developed her capoeira practice and research. She currently teaches at The Place (CAT), Rambert, South East Dance, and Trinity Laban Conservatoire.

Move with flow, build energy, and explore the connection between rhythm, space, and physical expression. DepiGorgogianni’s dynamic contemporary class focuses on developing movement quality, coordination and choreographic awareness. Through a progressive warm-up, technical exercises and phrase work, dancers will explore pathways through the body, shifts of energy and the relationship between intention and musicality. The class builds towards a longer choreographic sequence, encouraging dancers to develop presence, clarity and full-body engagement while exploring flow, texture and performance quality.

About:

Depi Gorgogianni is a Greek contemporary dance artist, choreographer and movement director. She holds an MA in Movement: Directing and Teaching from the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama and trained at the Rallou Manou Professional Dance School in Athens. In 2016, she completed professional development with Jasmin Vardimon Company. Her work has been presented at the Barbican Open Lab and Tate Modern Late, and she is a member of the physical theatre company Vertebra. Depi has taught contemporary dance and movement at The Place, Guildhall School of Music and Drama and London College of Music.

Stephen Pelton’s classes move from Limon’s swing, fall and recover fundamentals to ballet placement exercises and yoga-inspired strengthening practices to combinations exploring his own lyrical and idiosyncratic movement style. Movement dynamics, musicality and a passionate use of space are essential qualities of Stephen’s classes, as are his insistence upon using humour as a means of breaking through our inhibitions, unifying the group and finding new dimensions in our dancing.

About:

Stephen is artistic director of Stephen Pelton Dance Theatre and associate director for Yorke Dance Project. In 2000, Stephen moved from San Francisco to London where he is now one of the UK’s most sought-after teachers of Limon-inspired dance technique. He currently teaches at the Central School of Ballet and The Place and has taught company class for DV8, Random and New Adventures. Pelton’s work has been performed throughout the US as well as in London, Edinburgh, Amsterdam and Berlin. His most recent work This is thy hour (for Walt Whitman) premiered at O+ Festival in Kingston, NY in October 2024.

The classes will start slowly, moving through some standing exercises and floor work. We will find ways to work efficiently. Through a mixture of Cunningham, release, and floorwork techniques, we will create heat in the body, allowing us to play with activation and surrender to move through sequences. Placing importance on finding 'form and shape' and then breaking it. The class works on the principles of pace, consideration, and flow to find great physicality in phrases/form and the ability to cut and shift through space. A joyous and fun physical class.

About:

After graduating from Rambert School, Benji Knapper joined BalletBoyz. During their time with BalletBoyz, Benji has toured internationally and across the UK performing works by different choreographers such as Maxine Doyle, Thick & Tight, Xie Xin, Edd Arnold, Vidya Patel, Christopher Wheeldon, Ivan Perez, and Russel Maliphant. They have also had the pleasure of working with Katya Bourvis, Ballet d’jerri, James Cousins Company, Rambert Company, Staatsoper Unter Den Linden, Corey Baker and The Royal Opera House.

We will work alone, in pairs and as a group, practicing moving and using our voices together. Through guided explorations, games, and scores, we will explore different ways of generating material and relating that material to others. We will develop the skills of listening, noticing, and responding. There will be an opportunity to watch each other in our explorations. Seke Chimutengwende brings all his experience and humour as a performer into these classes. His teaching facilitates ease and confidence in performing and a joyful approach to improvising together.

About:

Seke Chimutengwende is a choreographer working professionally in the UK and abroad for over 20 years. His new show, The Last Quartet, imagines a “last work” or “last attempt” at choreography inspired by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. Seke is concurrently researching a new choreography set to Miles Davis’ groundbreaking 1972 album On The Corner. Alongside his choreographic work, Seke is currently presenting Long Solos, 60-minute solo improvisation performances with movement and text. Seke has performed with Forced Entertainment, DV8 Physical Theatre and Lost Dog among others.

Seke Chimutengwende will present The Last Quartet at The Place on September 24,25 and 26. Click here for more information and to book tickets.