Cera teaches weekly Intermediate & Mixed level classes at DCDT's home-base, Shoebox Studio in San Francisco. Classes focus on building strength, flexibility, and musicality. Warm up's integrate Cera's training in Pilates, Gyrotonics, and multiple dance disciplines to strengthen and stretch the body. Isolations, layering isolations, and layering two and three dimensional movements build into combo's and choreographies that are built over several weeks. Student's will grow fast, learn fast, and laugh a lot!

Classes enjoy a twice yearly student recital, and plans for a student troupe are currently being developed. Cera also teaches Pilates & Bootcamp classes weekly.

Workshops for 2008-2009:

Funk Fusion Bellydance

Modern Fusion & Movement Invention for Bellydance

Conditioning for Bellydancers

"Health at Every Size" Discussion forum

Funk Fusion Bellydance

Funk Fusion Bellydance brings you Hip hop, Pop n' Lock, and Funk flava, with intense, high energy conditioning and choreography. Our warm up will focus on layered isolations including syncopated body rhythms, layering two and three dimensional movements simultaneously, and traveling shimmy layers. Then we'll move on to funk fusion combos that you can use, deconstruct, or use to create your own! Come away challenged, inspired, and with lots to work on at home.

Modern Fusion & Movement Invention for Bellydance

Modern Fusion & Movement Invention for Bellydance is all about destroying boundaries, incorporating gestural movement, and working contemporary staging, costuming, and choreographic techniques into your Bellydance vocabulary. Our warm up will focus on developing movements that start in Bellydance and then take a sharp left, exploring space and growing outward from the center. Then we'll move into modern fusion combos, and begin to develop our own movements that we can use in creating combos and choreographies. Come away challenged, inspired, and with lots to work on at home.

This workshop can be augmented with an additional "Choreographer's Module" for students who would like to focus more intensely on choreographic techniques.

Conditioning for Bellydancers

Conditioning For Bellydancers is a full body integration of Pilates, Gyrokinesis, Somatic Awareness, strengthening, stretching, and core integration for dancers. Whether your goals are to gain flexibility, build strength, develop long, lean muscle tone, improve balance, recover from an injury, or just keep your body at peak condition, this workshop will give you the tools you need. Can be taught in one or two hour formats.

This workshop can also be offered as an "Instructors Only" workshop, covering more in-depth anatomy and kinesiology, movement modifications, how to deal with students who have injuries and limitations, and how to work with students with varrying levels of fitness in one class.

Health at Every Size Discussion Forum

Self-Love at Every Size: Awareness, acceptance, and promoting "fit" over "thin.

How many times have we heard (or thought) "I'll go to the gym after I lose 10 pounds"?
How many times have we heard (or said) "I'm so fat!" in a class or locker-room - or heard someone put themselves down and wondered, "Well, if they're think they're overly fat, what must they think of me!?"

The "Size Acceptance" and "Health At Every Size" movements have emerged as powerful critiques of our culture's focus on thin as the only acceptable body shape, and weightloss at all costs. Based in both scientific and cultural critiques, these movements challenge us to look beyond an unquestioning acceptance of dieting and "the obesity epidemic."

Fitness classes, gyms, and studios can be intimidating in a world that values thinness nearly above all else.
This forum will not discuss how to diet more effectively; instead, it will discuss the "Health At Every Size" approach that affirms every person's right to break free from weightloss mandates and instead focus on body positivity and wellness.

This discussion will give instructors, students, and would-be students an opportunity what attitudes, assumptions, and practices we bring into classes.

For students: What holds you back from attending a class or gym? When you arrive there, what things will make you feel comfortable and accepted? What makes you feel threatened? Do you compare yourselves to other students or to teachers? Do you speak to yourself more negatively than you'd speak to others?

For teachers: How do you deal with a student who feels driven to lose weight for appearance goals? How do you encourage positive self-talk? Do you promote moderation and self-love above deprivation and will power?
And most importantly - Do you live what you teach? How do your own attitudes about size and fitness effect your teaching and personal practices? What assumptions and attitudes do you bring with you into classes that could prevent you from reaching every student and creating a safe environment?