About our online workshops

Our introductory workshops, whether offered in person or online, are specially designed to help trained dancers and dance instructors adapt their expertise to work effectively and comfortably with the Parkinson’s population under the guidelines and methodology of the Dance for PD® program. You'll cover special modules that focus on class structure, pedagogy and exercise design, and participate in a practicum class to develop class content and teaching techniques with founding teachers and other trainees, in addition to covering general modules about safety and working with Parkinson’s participants. Online workshops include a special module on remote teaching. Download our complete training guide here for more information.

Although these workshops are specifically geared toward dance teachers, we welcome a diverse group of individuals who may be interested in the workshop for Educational & Professional Enrichment (EPE). The EPE program is designed to provide a comprehensive and intimate look at core components of the Dance for PD® program so that a wide variety of individuals without dance training or dance teaching experience can learn about our methods and benefit from our resources.

Prerequisites

All trainees must satisfactorily complete an asynchronous 8-module online training program before attending the live synchronous online workshop. The cost of this 8-module course is AUD $113. It is expected that the self-directed course and assessment will take 8-10 hours to complete. You'll receive a link to this course when we approve your training application.

Workshop details

Facilitators:
Erica Rose Jeffrey PhD, Director and Lead Teacher for Dance for Parkinson's Australia with David Leventhal, Program Director, Dance for PD, Brooklyn, USA.

Schedule: Thursday 15 September through Sunday 18 September, 2022 from 9:00 a.m. - 1:00 p.m. AEST (Brisbane time) each day.

Location: 100% online via Zoom

Highlights: Comprehensive training modules, interactive teaching practicum, demo class, safety best practices, networking. You'll also be invited to attend a regional half-day workshop to enhance your training with a live, in-person experience with local Dance for Parkinson's teachers.

Credits: Earn up to 30 training credits toward the 50 credits required to be eligible for Dance for PD certification.

Tuition: Standard rate: AUD $299
Ausdance, DTAA or Dance for PD Member rate: AUD $269

Tuition includes:
* all printed materials and sessions
* a one-year Dance for PD® program membership with special access to continuing education materials and tools (AUD $60 value), and access to our international teachers' listserv.
* digital instructional media resources (5 videos and 5 music albums)

Please note that workshop tuition does not include the pre-requisite online course (AUD $113), which must be completed before the workshop.

To join us:

Enrollment is extremely limited, and workshop places are available on a first preregistered first reserved basis. Our workshops tend to become fully subscribed very quickly.

No payment is required to apply. Please click below to complete our application. We will notify you upon acceptance into the training program. At that point, we will let you know about accessing the online course and provide more information about workshop registration.

Erica Rose Jeffrey PhD is the director and lead teacher/trainer for Dance for Parkinson's Australia. Since 2001, she has been working to connect dance, empathy and peace. The first professional dancer to be selected as Rotary World Peace Fellow, she completed a Masters in Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Queensland with a research focus on dance connected to conflict transformation and peacebuilding. Her PhD (Queensland University of Technology) further investigated the connections of dance, empathy and peace.

Originally from Missoula, Montana, Erica Rose studied dance at the Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre School, graduating as valedictorian before joining Ballet Internationale. After dancing professionally for several years, she attended Indiana University on full academic and artistic scholarships as a Wells Scholar and graduated with degrees in Ballet and Mediation & Conflict Resolution. Involved in multiple communities, Ms. Jeffrey taught for the San Francisco Ballet Dance in Schools and Communities program in public schools, Luna Dance Institute and directed Marin Dance Theatre’s Let’s All Dance! Outreach program.

She was instrumental in launching the Parkinson’s Dance Project, Marin County’s first Dance for Parkinson’s program affiliated with the Mark Morris Dance for PD program. In addition to performing, she ran the dance company COUNTERPOINTE. Ms. Jeffrey has created the dance and conflict resolution education program, Moving Toward Peace and worked with the California Lawyers for the Arts youth education programs to integrate conflict resolution education and the arts. She has been the driving force behind successful Dance for Parkinson's programs in all major Australian cities, and has conducted more than a dozen teacher training workshops in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia, Japan and China.

David Leventhal is a founding teacher and Program Director for Dance for PD®, a program of the Mark Morris Dance Group that has been used as a model for classes in more than 300 communities in 25 countries. He leads classes for people living with Parkinson's disease around the world and trains other teaching artists in the Dance for PD® approach. He's co-produced five volumes of a successful instructional video and helped conceive and design Moving Through Glass, a dance-based Google Glass App for people with Parkinson's.

He has written chapters about the program for Moving Ideas: Multimodal Learning in Communities and Schools (Peter Lang), and Creating Dance: A Traveler's Guide (Hampton Press). He is in demand as a speaker at international conferences and symposiums, and has spoken about the intersection of dance, Parkinson's and health at the Lincoln Center Global Exchange, Edinburgh International Culture Summit, University of Michigan, Rutgers, Penn State Hershey Medical Center, Brown, Stanford, Columbia, Georgetown, Tufts, and Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Liège (Belgium), among others.

He has received a 2021 Pioneer Dance Educator Award from IADMS, the 2018 Martha Hill Mid-Career Award, the 2016 World Parkinson Congress Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Parkinson's Community and was a co-recipient of the 2013 Alan Bonander Humanitarian Award from theParkinson's Unity Walk. He serves on the board of the Davis Phinney Foundation, is an advisory board member for the Georgetown Lombardi Comprehensive Cancer Center's Arts and Humanities Program and the Johns Hopkins University/Aspen Institute NeuroArts Blueprint, and is a founding member of the Dance for Health committee for the International Association for Dance Medicine & Science (IADMS). As a dancer, he performed with the Mark Morris Dance Group from 1997-2011, appearing in principal roles in some of Mark Morris' most celebrated works.

About Dance for PD®

The Mark Morris Dance Group's Dance for PD® program invites people with Parkinson's and their families in more than 300 communities and 25 countries around the globe to experience the joys and benefits of dance while creatively addressing symptom-specific concerns related to balance, cognition, motor skill, depression and physical confidence. Through its innovative, internationally-replicated classes, acclaimed teacher training program, and high quality media resources, Dance for PD​'s fundamental working principle is that professionally-trained dancers are movement experts whose knowledge about balance, sequencing, rhythm and aesthetic awareness is useful to persons with PD. In class, teaching artists integrate movement from modern, ballet, tap, folk and social dancing, and choreographic repertory to engage participants' minds and bodies and create an enjoyable, social environment for artistic exploration.​​ Dance for PD has been featured in The New York Times, USA Today, Dance Magazine, The Guardian and hundreds of other publications,​and has been honored by several local, national and international awards, including the Parkinson Awareness Award, Alan Bonander Humanitarian Award, and the Sapolin Public Service Award from the New York City Mayor's Office for People with Disabilities. Peer-reviewed research from the United States, United Kingdom, Japan and Germany suggests that dance provides a range of benefits, including improved walking and short-term mobility, enhanced quality of life and self-efficacy, and improvements in mood and social inclusion among people with Parkinson's. Dance for PD, which began in 2001 as a collaboration between MMDG and Brooklyn Parkinson Group, leverages technology—live streaming, a popular instructional At Home DVD series, and an experimental App for Google Glass—to make the program more available to its diverse and expanding network of constituents around the globe. Evidence from 45 peer-reviewed scientific studies serves to underpin the effectiveness and benefits of the Dance for PD teaching practice.