I prefer not to think of myself as a teacher. I am a facilitator, a guide, a space-holder, a specialist, a lead investigator, but I don’t believe I teach anything. I invite people into spaces – into their bodies and into their awareness. I share ideas and instigate possibilities. I ask questions and introduce obstacles. I offer a mirror and I help to focus a lens. But the experience is the teacher. This leaves room for the reality that each individual’s learning is their own and not something that I have any interest in controlling. What a person gathers from an experience, how it connects to the rest of their experiences and understanding, the conclusions they draw from it, and how this shapes their unique perspective of the world is entirely theirs. The process of learning is incredibly personal – in sequence, timing, and trajectory – and can be amplified within a sense of community, as the conversation, negotiation, and reconciliation between experiences and perspectives is where individual and shared awakenings occur. My work is in creating and holding this space for learning through experience within community; to offer students support, guidance, and challenges as they deepen inward and expand outward; and encourage them as they explore, fail, persist, and grow.
Practically speaking, my pedagogy, creative process, and embodied research are all grounded in Somatic practice, process, and theory, filtered through the lens of the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System. I have a particular interest in the nature of relationships and communication, specifically the cyclical and simultaneous dialogue between awareness, perception, intention, and action. I am fascinated by how this dynamic shapes the way we navigate self and other and creates concepts of understanding and perspective.
As an educator, this focus manifests in a student-centered rather than a discipline-centered approach. When teaching a specific discipline or technique, such as Contemporary Modern, Jazz, or the Laban/Bartenieff Movement System, I invite students to explore and investigate the core ideas and/or values of the particular form, allowing the movement to be discovered, unearthed, and honed as a part of themselves that already exists in some way. When teaching more open-ended subject matter such as Somatics, Improvisation, Creative Process, or Movement Integration, my approach is much the same – facilitating individuals in exploring, mapping, and learning the language of their own body and experiences – offering them the possibility of discovering understanding through themselves rather than reaching for it as something outside of themselves to achieve. The result is an active and conscious practice of decolonizing the body while simultaneously developing personal agency, perspective, and voice.
*It is important to note that when I use the word “body” I am also referring to the head, the brain, and the mind, as these are all parts of the body, of our bodies. Our thinking is a bodily process just like all other bodily processes. Therefore, our thoughts, our cognitive processes, are sensorial, embodied experiences just like any other. I embrace the reality that the mind/body duality is a fallacy and I begin from the place of acknowledging and centralizing each human being as an interconnected, interrelated, integrated whole.
