CCDC Presentation - December 2017 A place built by dancers for dancers-16 | Page 10

Guest Artists The Cairo Contemporary Dance Center regularly welcomes guest artists from Africa, the Middle East, Europe, or beyond, to lead specific workshops as parts of its 3-year, full-time professional training program. Gerald James ('Beyond the Method') Gerald James is a Los Angeles-based actor, director, teacher, and writer. He is also a workshop leader for the Imagination Workshop, a workshop for people with psychological disabilities, people who are incarcerated, and young people in juvenile detention centers and leads them on writing scripts and then performing them, in order to transform their beliefs about themselves through art. He has studied at the Lee Strasberg School and during this time he also created his own movement technique for storytelling. The Strasberg Institute included it as a part of their curriculum, under the name “Method Movement,” due to its popularity with and usefulness for the students. James uses this technique as a base for his own acting teaching, which he has applied in the United States, Moldova, and Egypt since 2011. Click here for more information about Gerald James' bio. Kaya Behkalam ('Seeing History - The Augmented Archives') Kaya Behkalam is a visual artist, filmmaker, and writer, living in Berlin and Cairo. Behkalam’s video-, installation-, and text-based works explore the entanglements of historiography, image and media politics, as in his current long-term research project SEEING HISTORY, which explores archival practices and changing medialities of the historical in the context of post-revolutionary Cairo. For more information on Kaya Behkalam bio, click here. 10