Past event: Spiral Body Techniques™ Alone-Together Guided Practice (Zoom)
I’m currently offering Spiral Body Alone-Together practices on Wednesdays, Fridays, and Saturdays 10:30a-11:40a (Eastern Time Zone) for an initial five-week session November 9-December 10, 2022. A la carte sessions are $10; a session pass is $125 with access to recordings.
These are 40-minute guided movement sessions held on Zoom offering a supported deep dive into your body, your movement on that day, and considerations of action and reaction. I provide verbal support, image-rich prompts, and gentle structure while de-emphasizing the role of an external gaze that observes and/or determines “right” or “wrong.” My intention through this practice is to facilitate containers for dance, movement, stillness, and contemplation where individual, agency-centric engagement with body can be pursued according to each mover’s inclinations, while allowing them to change over time, rather than focused on the achievement of a particular skill, pace, level of cardiovascular output, resultant physical form, or fitness goal.
Participants are welcome—encouraged—to keep cameras “off” or aimed toward a houseplant, picture, wall, or window in order to share in the movement (virtually) without defaulting to comparing one’s practice to another mover’s response to my prompts.
I improvise each session inspired by what arises in my own body and practice. Verbal prompts are typically image-rich and open-ended, emphasizing spirals, vibrations, undulations/water, specific anatomical cues, and poetic meanderings. Sometimes you may feel like moving vigorously and other days softly and internally: choices around pacing and the specifics of action will always remain up to you.
I use a quality microphone to enhance Zoom’s already-decent sound. You will hear my cat meow.
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Additional Optional Context: Like many humans, I have a complicated relationship with my body, effort and force, strength and resistance, and with what I experience as pressure to constantly change by conforming to rapidly shifting and trend-specific markers of improvement that I didn’t necessarily choose. Equally complicated is my relationship with the myriad gazes encountered internally and externally as part of life, and how these impact how I move, comport myself and feel about and express identity. I know from decades of creating, teaching, and dialogue in and out of studios that these complications are shared, uniquely, by humans who choose movement as an intentional practice.
I spent a few key years during my PhD process digging into rhizome theory and rhizomatic writing—writing in ways that honor the nonlinearity of thought and experience. The process sparked curiosity and criticality around societal, often gender-based and media-driven pressure to achieve continuously organized, forward-going, or ascending improvement (think: in and up, always faster, stronger, higher, more structured, etc.) Much of my life in dance has been about moving away from affiliation with those gazes and those pressures; throughout, my understandings of fitness, form, and function morph, blur, and elude previous understandings. I find the dance field stubbornly shape-ist (and other -ists and -isms, to be sure). I also find that to live in perpetual resistance lodges in one’s flesh, is exhausting, and can become a lived bodily experience of stuck-ness rather than a set of actions in resistance to power-over systems of oppression. There has to be a return to flow, an option for fluidity and softness, as a counterpoint to being engaged in resistance. As a white woman I recognize my privilege and that this resistance-exhaustion dynamic carries more risk the more one’s body differs from what Sonya Renee Taylor describes as "the default body."
The last few years have not been an easy or straightforward time for anyone. Many of us have changed in ways we are still learning to recognize. This period has meant re-generating my relationship with dance and movement. I've experienced unanticipated stasis—periods when my body wants only to be moved by the visceral impulse of sensation and rarely through the kinds of spiraling, curving, and whirring through space that have been sources of pleasure, delight, and identity for most of my life. Surreally, I’ve felt this unfamiliar tug toward stasis even when I've been immersed in my almost-daily teaching, rehearsal, or my movement-in-water practices. My body has needed a type of rest that feels unfamiliar, risky, and subversive; I have felt caught between wanting to move and simultaneously stalled in a private tunnel of disbelief and disenchantment, anger-embers, and deep longing for a different way into (or through) my passion for movement without self-objectification. Recently I've started to find my way both "back" and "forward," with self-love, deep appreciation for movers of all kinds, and a renewed love for the quiet pulse of imagination through which new human-ness becomes possible and shape vibes with change, decay, and restoration.
How do we reckon with the desire for action and stillness, engagement and retreat, community and solitude?
This practice rests on a lifelong belief (and, well, scientific fact) that movement sustains, and stems from a desire to return to sustaining practices even when they don't make sense or align with the "outcomes" I spent 25+ years focused on as a young choreographer.
This is the ethos of my current inquiry through movement, and the spirit through which I invite you to join me.
My influences in no particular order:
—dancing, moving, daydreaming, water, watercolor
—Moshe Feldenkrais (writing and practice)
—Emilie Conrad's Continuum Movement (writing and practice)
—ongoing work with the Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak ensemble (Jeff Hancock, Kristina Fluty, Maria DiMarzio, Diana Stewart, Jaicee Partridge, Vaval Victor)
—French theorists Deleuze and Guattari concepts of rhizome, haecceity, the fold, and becoming
—Dr. Karen Bond (teaching/advising, writing)
—my family
—groundhogs, deer, rabbits, hawks, bats, and my cat Zemmi
—the Great Lakes, especially Huron
—Gil Hedley
—my students
—Stephen Nachmanovich (Free Play and The Art of Is)
—Sonya Renee Taylor (The Body is Not an Apology)
—David Whyte
—solitude