Michael Spencer Phillips will lead a modern dance class anchored in the Martha Graham technique but widely influenced by his performing career with Pascal Rioult and Robert Battle. Phillips's class is musical, rhythmic, and extremely athletic using Graham's technique as the backbone to contemporary yet technically classical movement. He also focuses on varying quality and texture to build a dancer for performance on stage, camera, or site-specific locations. His belief is in utilizing the classic Graham technique in the dance world of today and beyond.

Each Modern Lab session features a different guest artist teaching a master class and sections from their repertory. This panorama of the contemporary dance field is presented to broaden the students’ awareness of potential career possibilities. Each guest artist conducts a 30-minute technique class/warm-up and then teaches repertory that is performed by the class. In the final 15 minutes, faculty coordinator Bill De Young conducts a Q & A with each artist, discussing their career; their recommendations for transitioning from student to professional, and what they look for when they audition dancers for their projects.

This event supported in part by the EXCEL Lab.