Master Classes
Free & Open To The Public!
All CDF master classes will take place in the Gund Dance Studio in the Idea Center at Playhouse Square.
Pre-registration is strongly encouraged. Walk-up’s are welcome!
PLAYHOUSE SQUARE, 1375 EUCLID AVE, CLEVELAND, OHIO 44115
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Level: Advanced 18+
SESSION 1 - FRIDAY NOVEMBER 13TH
Finding your center (of mass)
11:30 am - 12:45 pm
Teaching Artist: Elliot Reza Emadian
Rock Solid - Weight Sharing and Balance
1:30 pm - 2:45 pm
Teaching Artist: Joel K. Linebach & Bird Thurman
Chinese-Contemporary Moves
4:00 pm - 5:15 pm
Teaching Artist: Zihao Yuan
SESSION 2 - SATURDAY NOVEMBER 14TH
Contemporary Improvisation
9:00 am - 10:15 am
Teaching Artist: Miranda Nichols Braseth
Modern & Contemporary Dance Forms
10:30 am - 11:45 am
Teaching Artist: Lucy Vurusic Riner with RE|dance group
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Level: Ages 12-18, Intermediate/Advanced
SESSION 1 - SUNDAY NOVEMBER 15TH
House
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Teaching Artist: Madison Burris
Contemporary
2:00 pm - 3:00 pm
Teaching Artist: Melissa Ajayi
SESSION 2 - SUNDAY NOVEMBER 1TH
Contemporary
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Teaching Artist: Melissa Ajayi
House
4:00 pm - 5:00 pm
Teaching Artist: Madison Burris
**AUDITION CALL: Students attending the youth master classes will be considered for placement in TMP’s annual Pre-Professional Summer Intensive 2027. Dancers will be notified of acceptance into the program by January 2027. To learn more visit our website HERE.
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Join Cleveland Dance Fest artists for a free public panel discussion exploring timely topics, current issues, and ideas shaping today's dance field. Designed to foster conversation, connection, and professional exchange, this session offers audiences and artists the opportunity to engage with a diverse group of festival artists and hear perspectives from across the dance community.
The panel is free and open to the public. Topic and participating panelists will be announced by mid-September.
Register via the “Pro Master Class & Artist Panel Registration” button below.
Register
Pre-Registration is strongly encouraged. Walk-ups are welcome!
If you are a youth artist performing in CDF, you do not need to register for class, as you are already pre-registered through your studio or school.
Class Descriptions
Professional Master Classes
Finding your center (of mass)
Elliot Reza Emadian
11/13/26
11:30 - 12:45 pm
The Stability Ball provides a rare opportunity for exploring your body's center of mass while experimenting with exchanges of weight, the dynamics of force, and reverberations of unexpected redirection. Using all available limbs, dancers will partner with these bouncy companions through fundamental principles of contact improvisation in order to establish confidence with gradients of weight sharing and to insert some randomness into the conversation about contact. As we become more confident and clear with our own center, we know how to shift and where to stand firm in relation to others.
About the Artist: Elliot Reza Emadian is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Their work occurs within dance and choreography, video art and editing, sound and music, and light and photography. Elliot holds a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from W&L University (2017), a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Elliot is a 2021 recipient of the Anne and Weston Hicks Choreographic Fellowship from Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival. Through a lifetime of dancing, they have accrued influences from tap and jazz styles, contemporary releasing forms and modern dance, ballet, popular music video dance, and experimental performance art. Elliot has performed and toured with Sara Hook Dances and David Parker, and presented collaborative performance work across the US. Most recently, they devised an improvisational performance with composer Paul Leary “Is this who we are? Or, what we have become” which debuted at Vision of Sound 2025 in Ithaca, NY. Currently, Elliot is incubating an extensive audio project and devising a network of collaborative, anti-capitalist, embodied installations under the umbrella “HOOK.LINE.SINKER.”
CDF Show 4 Artist - Elliot Reza Emadian, Photo Credit: Black Valve
Rock Solid - Weight Sharing and Balance
Joel K. Linebach & Bird Thurman
11/13/26
1:30 - 2:45 pm
This master class explores simple partnering and weight-sharing through an accessible, physical approach to connection and balance. Drawing from excerpts of Cairn, participants will investigate how bodies can stack, counterbalance, and shift like stones, building and dismantling shared structures in real time. Emphasis is placed on trust, timing, and responsive listening between partners. The class invites dancers of all backgrounds to engage with grounded, sculptural movement that is both collaborative and dynamic.
About the Artist: Bird Thurman is a Chicago native with a passion for both movement and mechanics. They earned a Bachelor’s degree in Aeronautical and Astronautical Engineering from Purdue University, where they also minored in dance. After graduating, Thurman switched gears from engineering to join Inlet Dance Theatre as a company member. Their love of physics spills into their dance space, especially during partnering, as the human body can do amazing things with the right mechanical advantage.
Joel K. Linebach is a choreographer, performer, educator, and PhD candidate in Plastic Engineering based in Northeast Ohio. Since earning his MFA in Contemporary Dance from CWRU, he’s created and presented new work across the Midwest and beyond, including PHASIC at the 2025 Cleveland Dance Festival and en vie après in Chicago. He is currently a company member with Inlet Dance Theatre.
Linebach and Thurman met in 2024 and instantly clicked. They’ve been creating work together since 2025, showcasing their athleticism, tenderness, and humor in Cleveland, Akron, and Columbus. Notably, Thurman and Linebach performed their premiere duet, Cairn, in New York City this past February as part of the 2026 SoloDuo Dance Festival.
CDF Show 1 Artist - Joel K. Linebach & Bird Thurman, Photo Credit: Kiersten Conway
Chinese-Contemporary Moves
Zihao Yuan
11/13/26
4:00 - 5:15 pm
This contemporary movement class integrates Chinese dance techniques with contemporary practices. It creates a space where tradition meets innovation, inviting dancers to explore how individual voices can emerge and resonate within shared temporality and spatiality.
About the Artist: Zihao Yuan | 袁子豪 is a "Kuer 酷儿" (or queer) Chinese dance artist-scholar. He is also a second-year PhD Student | Graduate Fellow in Dance Studies at The Ohio State University, pursuing a minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Dance from the Shanghai Theatre Academy (2016) and a Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Washington (2024).
CDF Show 4 Artist - Zihao Yuan
Contemporary Improvisation
Miranda Nichols Braseth
11/14/26
9:00 - 10:15 am
In this contemporary improvisation class, participants are encouraged to take cues and imagery from the facilitator to explore familiar and emerging movement pathways. Class charts the course from floor, to standing, to moving about the space and across the floor. Scores and short movement phrases are offered as scaffolding for participants to be with and enjoy their bodies and their movement. Playful images, explorations of wording and definitions, and short partnered discussions will drive the scoring of the class. Brief movement phrases will be taught and then manipulated through changes in orientation and quality. Participants will be able to determine their level of comfort with touch; it will be offered as an option, but not compulsory for participation in class. Class will culminate in a group score for participants to delve into ideas shared throughout class, and foster a brief, but hopefully fulfilling, spirit of community.
About the Artist: Miranda Nichols Braseth is a Pittsburgh based choreographer, dance educator, and performer. Her work looks at the repetitive, athletic nature of dance and performance, and attempts to display the rigor of creating the performance act. Miranda is an adjunct professor at Seton Hill University and Point Park University, and teaches at several studios in the Pittsburgh area. Since 2018 she has danced in several works with Attack Theatre, and continues performing with the company today. Miranda holds an MFA in Dance from UW-Milwaukee, and a BFA in Dance and English Literature from Marymount Manhattan.
CDF Show 1 Artist - Miranda Nichols Braseth, Photo Credit: Jake Braseth
Modern & Contemporary Dance Forms
Lucy Riner with RE|dance group
11/14/26
10:30 - 11:45 am
Lucy's contemporary class takes movers through a series of exercises and combinations that focus on strong core stability, fluid movement in and out of the floor and longer phrases for sequencing. Lucy brings her love of Chicago House music to her classes and provides a rich, athletic, movement experience!
About the Artist: RE|dance group was established in 2009 by creative partners, Lucy Vurusic Riner and Michael Estanich. Focusing on dance theatre works that explore personal, intimate human relationships, the company has received critical praise from audiences and critics throughout the country. The company enjoys an open process where all ideas are shared, investigated, and then crafted into dances that embody a heightened physical experience rich with emotional content and dramatic imagery. Our work reflects a rigorous inquiry into the body's capability for expression through motion and movement—from the subtle to the immense. The creative process is an ever evolving dynamic between intention, honesty, intuition and play. Though Chicago is home base for RE|dance group, the partnership is supported through long distance collaboration. Estanich lives in Stevens Point, WI, while Riner is a Chicago based independent artist. We became fascinated with the idea of creating work in a new way—generating movement material while we were together and developing characters or deepening our personal understanding of ideas while we were apart. Through conversation and dialogue we establish physical memories that enrich our dancing and the relationships created in the works. RE|dance group is celebrating our 18 year anniversary this year with two new premieres at the Columbia College Dance Center in March of 2027! We continue to travel to cities in the United States to share our work and have been honored to travel internationally to both Canada and South Korea.
CDF Show 4 Artist - RE|dance group, Photo Credit: Matthew Gregory Hollis
Class Descriptions
Youth Master Classes
House
Madison Burris - The Movement Project
11/15/26
1:00 - 2:00 pm & 4:00 - 5:00 pm
House is a form of street dance that focuses on footwork, groove, and a light torso. Dancers will explore the core grooves of house dance, finding your own personal rhythm within the movement.
About the Artist: Madison Burris(she/they) is a performer, dance instructor, and choreographer from Northeast Ohio. She received her BFA in Dance from The Ohio State University (2023). There she closely researched how human connections can be cultivated through dance. Madison's thesis examined how the process of facilitating a close-knit community of dancers to create work takes shape. In her time at Ohio State, Madison has had the chance to work with artists such as Charles O. Anderson, Abby Zbikowski, and Edward Taketa. These artists in particular have paved the way in which she perceives and approaches dance and dance making. Post graduation she has been a company member with The Movement Project. There she has the opportunity to perform, teach, and choreograph with the company. This past winter her piece, “Contained Chaos,” had the opportunity to take the stage at Playhouse Square. Madison also spends her time teaching at Spotlight Dance Center in Mentor, Ohio, her childhood studio. Madison has had the opportunity to perform, assist, and teach around the country with organizations such as Dancemakers Inc. and Independent Lake Camp.
CDF Show 1 Artist - The Movement Project, Photo Credit: Black Valve
Contemporary
Melissa Ajayi - Ajayi Dance
11/15/26
2:00 - 3:00 pm & 3:00 - 4:00 pm
This class consists of a blend of somatic practices and modern dance techniques. Melissa leads a warm-up to prepare the body and mind for a fun and dynamic choreographed phrase during which participants may explore momentum, self expression, performance quality, and improvisation.
About the Artist: Melissa Ajayi received a BFA in dance performance and BS in Therapeutic Recreation from Kent State University. Living in New York City then Lexington Kentucky before returning to Ohio in 2015, she has performed in works by Antaeus Dance, Travesty Dance Group, Marquez Dance Project, Annika Sheaff, Elizabeth Pollert, Emily Jeffries, Sarah Holmes-Villanueva, Leanne Schmidt and Company, MWest and Company, and Blackbird Dance Theatre. Locally, she has been a guest lecturer at CSU, and guest artist at Cleveland School of the Arts and Bard High School Early College. Since founding Ajayi Dance in 2021, Melissa has created more than a dozen original works including 3 self-produced site-specific immersive experiences as well as a commissioned work with No Exit New Music Ensemble. Additional works have been presented at Playhouse Square, TMPS’s Cleveland Dance Fest and SummerWorks, CPT’s DanceWorks, Blackbird Dance Theatre, Tridea Dance, Maelstrom Collaborative Arts, CDP Company Community Collab, Borderlight Festival, Ingenuity Fest, Pandemonium, and MicroTheater CLE. As a Certified Therapeutic Recreation Specialist, Melissa worked in a variety of settings utilizing dance as an intervention to bring about physical, cognitive, social, emotional and behavioral change. Her writing has been published in the National Therapeutic Recreation Journal, and she has presented at the National Dance Education Organization Conference and multiple therapeutic recreation conferences. While she no longer works in a clinical setting, she draws on this experience to consider the impact and outcome of her educational and choreographic work on an individual, collective, and societal level.
CDF Show 3 Artist - Ajayi Dance, Photo Credit: Matt DeGrand
