Core Dance
Morning Class
Led by established, progressive dance artists, Morning Class is offered to the community for $15 per class. Registration and payment must be made online before class time. Any questions or concerns, please contact outreach@coredance.org.
Morning Class for Fall 2026 includes:
Tuesdays:
9/8 & 9/15: Musicians and Movers with Luciana Arias
9/22-12/8: Collaging Movement: Guided Improvisation & Contemporary Technique with Jodie Jernigan
Thursdays and Fridays:
Contemporary & Traditional Modern Dance Moves with Kristin O'Neal
Special guest instructors are noted within the calendar.
Click on the class shown on the calendar below for the registration link.
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NOTICE : Advance registration is required. All attendees must follow the instructions of the class leader with regard to masking. Hand sanitizer is available in the studio and each studio is equipped with a high-powered air cleaner. The HVAC system has also been upgraded to clean and sanitize the air.
Core Dance Morning Class Faculty
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Jodie Jernigan
Collaging Movement: Guided Improvisation & Contemporary Technique
Jodie Jernigan is an interdisciplinary movement artist, choreographer, and educator based in Atlanta, Georgia. In addition to pursuing freelance performance and creation opportunities, she is a company dancer with Monica Hogan Danceworks and Graham Shelor Dance. She spent three seasons as a company dancer with Atlanta’s physically integrated company, Full Radius Dance, and was a company dancer with SOMOS for their second season. In 2024, she traveled to Italy with Staib Dance, where she trained, performed, and served as their resident videographer. Jodie’s work has been presented at the American College Dance Association Festival, the Modern Atlanta Dance Festival, Alabama Dance Festival, Fall for Fall Dance Festival, MixtapeATL Film Festival, and through DanceATL’s AM Collaborative program. She debuted her first self-produced evening-length solo, On Guilt & Clementines, at the Atlanta Fringe Festival in 2025. Jodie’s artistic research is influenced by morality, mortality, absurdity, and is driven by the universal weight of wanting. Her work is an invitation, “You can come in if you want to.” And then, “I’d like you to come in, but only if you want to.”
Class Description: This class approaches movement as a living collage, allowing participants to layer sensation, impulse, structure, and imagination into a continuously evolving composition. Blending guided improvisational scores and technical exercises, dancers will explore how interdisciplinary elements can be assembled into a cohesive, dynamic whole, all while sharpening their ability to direct focus, make choices, and drive their impulses through curiosity and play.
Luciana Arias
Musicians and Movers
Luciana Arias (b. 1988, Buenos Aires) is an Argentinian-Mapuche-Italian Butoh performer, somatic researcher, improvisation conductor and composer working in intersections of dance, sound, visual arts, staging and costume. First learning Bellydance and Tango as a child, they later attended the National University of the Arts in Buenos Aires, studying in Choreographic Composition with a major in “Expresión Corporal Dance”.
They worked as a dancer in the company Grupo de Experimentación en Arte del Movimiento, (GEAM) 2010-2015, where they were introduced to Butoh from their first mentor Rhea Volij. Later mentors include Butoh masters Katsura Kan (Kyoto, Japan), Mari Osanai (Aomori, Japan), Meshi Chavez (Portland, OR) and Julie Becton (Asheville, NC). Through years in the Salish Sea Butoh Festival in Port Townsend, Lucy studied under Yuko Kaseki (Berlin, Germany) Jacquelyn Marie Shannon (Brooklyn, NY), Joan Laage/Kogut (Seattle, WA), Yukio Suzuki (Tokyo, Japan), Tadashi Endo (Germany), Eugenia Vargas (Mexico City), Kota Yamazaki (Tokyo, Japan), Anastazia Louise Aranaga (New Mexico) and Sheri Brown (Seattle, WA).
Luciana currently teaches composition and improvisation in dance in Atlanta, and annually with Butoh Curious Chi in Chicago / Move Move Collective in Baltimore. Continuing their decades-long journey of
working with improvisation musicians and performers, Luciana created Musicians & Movers in 2022, developing workshops and performances for building collaboration between dancers and musicians.
Class Description:
Musicians and Movers is a community-based performance platform that brings together musicians and dancers for collaborative, live performances. Our programming focuses on creating space for interdisciplinary exchange, where artists work together in real time to explore and refine relationships between movement and sound. Practicing deep listening.
This series of workshops, held in a master class setting that integrates music theory concepts, butoh poem imagery, somatic practices, and improvisational exercises to examine the intersections of improvisation and composition between sound and movement, both trained and untrained musicians and movers welcome, guided by Movement Artist, Luciana Arias, founder of Musicians and Movers.
Photo by Christina J. Massad
Kristin O'Neal
Contemporary & Traditional Modern Dance Moves
Kristin is a Dance Lecturer at Emory University (Atlanta) and teaches contemporary modern technique at Core Dance (Decatur, GA) for intermediate to professional dancers. Kristin is an avid practitioner of Contact Improvisation and organizes CI workshops, classes and jams for the Atlanta Community. Kristin also assists in the operations of National Water Dance under the direction of Dale Andree (Miami, FL)—a movement choir that activates artists and their communities to spread water awareness across the nation. Kristin creates and performs solo dances based on the lives of her Grandmothers and Great Aunts, and also co-teaches Contact Improvisation at Emory University with her husband, Greg Catellier, with whom she also collaborates in curious dance-making.
Class Description: Considering the weight of our bones to activate deep core muscles, we will invite ease and efficiency into our movement phrasing while conditioning thoughtfully and readying the body for the myriad physical relationships that contemporary modern dance asks of us. We will sense all surfaces of our bodies in contact with the floor, noticing anchor points of stability to find freedom of movement in our joints and in space with others, while sliding, swinging, suspending, falling, pouring, gliding and all the things that inspire us along the way. This class is geared for the intermediate to professional mover. Kneepads and long pants recommended.
Guest Faculty
Coming Soon
Directions: Our back entrance is accessible by way of North McDonough Street, at the intersection of Trinity Avenue and the Decatur Square. Look for the entrance past Waffle House.
Parking: The Core Dance Parking lot is a public, paid lot. If you are visiting the Core Dance Studios, there are instructions in the studio for a stipend toward that payment. A portion of your Parking Fee is donated to Core Dance. Core Dance does not have any control over the lot or parking fee enforcement.
MARTA’s Decatur Station will plop you down right next to us in the Decatur Square. Visit itsmarta.com for details on Decatur Station and for train and bus schedules.