The Return to Embodiment: consciousness, culture, creativity and flourishing

In this conversation, I am speaking with Amelia Burns. I found Amelia through her masters thesis article, Embodiment and embedment: integrating dance/movement therapy, body psychotherapy, and ecopsychologyAs a body worker, a dancer and a somatic therapist/dance therapist, Amelia has gathered threads of a myriad different experiences and inspirations to create a tapestry of her work exploring embodiment in relationship with onself, others, and the more than human world. "In writing and reflecting on the themes of embodiment in my life, I feel inspired and excited about continuing to follow the embodied threads of deep listening and embodied conversing through attuning with my body, with others, and with the more-than-human world. Improvisational dance skills of embodyingly following the yes’s have long influenced my ways of being, and I’m sure will persist in guiding me in the future as I cultivate more and more embodied presence in my life and work." ~Amelia BurnsFor more information on Amelia's work and writings, visit: https://movingstillnesshealing.com

In this conversation, Kristina traces ways her own body and development interfaced with limitations of the dance world, and how she has found home in practices of intenttionally dismantling harmful conditioning and building movement from a posture of love and seeking pleasure in the body. Kristina talks about the therapeutic dance certificate offered through EEIC and the honor of facilitating the unique artistry of each person's unique and changing embodied expression. Kristina states, "we will never know everything about the body. We have to come in here with respect for the mystery of, of all the processes that are always happening that we may never understand and still be with ourselves deeply without knowing why."

Ashley Fargnoli is a dance/movement therapist, a licensed psychotherapist, a dance performer, a choreographer, a film maker, a researcher, and a Fullbright scholar. In this conversation, we explore the multicultural origins of embodiment and the ways in which parts of ourselves and are accessed and healed through different styles of dance. Ashley describes working with a performance as therapy model, the importance of creative process in the life of a therapist and also reflects on belonging as a function of participation within a dance community. For more information, visit Ashley's website: https://ashleyfargnoli.com/

In this conversation, Dr. Amber Elizabeth L. Gray asks a series of questions, which deepen us into the question of embodiment and its function to sensitize us to one another and cultivate respect and reciprocity within the more than human world. Dr. Gray is a Dance/Movement Therapist, Somatic & Human Rights Psychotherapist, and long-time yoga and Continuum teacher. She works with survivors of war, torture, human rights abuses and historical trauma and oppression, in the US and in active and post conflict zones, refugee camps, and disasters. Equally activist, artist, advocate, author, mystic and therapist, her clinical, healing, educational and organizational work endeavors to promote reciprocity and empowerment and incite meaningful change. She brings her Polyvagal, Heart & Spirit-informed Right to Embody somatic human rights framework and Body of Change eco-somatic regenerative retreats to communities of therapists, artists, global citizens and change maker world-wide. Amber originated Polyvagal-informed Somatic & Dance/Movement Therapy through 25 years immersive mentoring and exploration of Polyvagal Theory. This work is a survivor-centered, multi-cultural & social justice framework that reflects many years of co-inquiry with her clients to understand how Polyvagal Theory promotes restoration and healing in the body-heart-mind-spirit for survivors of egregious human rights violations. She has been teaching this work globally since 2003 and is the inaugural member of The Polyvagal Institute’s Editorial Board. https://ambergray.com/ Gray, A.E.L., Kennedy, J.R. Marian Chace Foundation 2022 Lecture & Introduction from the 57th Annual American Dance Therapy Association Conference, Heartlines: Gathering Wisdom from Many Streams; Montreal, Canada. Am J Dance Ther 45, 88–108 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10465-023-09384-7

In this conversation, I am speaking with Román Baca. Román is a U.S. Marine Iraq war veteran as well as the co-founder and artistic director of Exit12 Dance Company in New York City. Román was invited to do a TEDx talk in San Antonio in 2013 (⁠https://youtu.be/EjwFMgsQmBI⁠). When I learned of his work, I took the opportunity to visit New York to see his company rehearse and talk with him about his vision. Since then, Román has been a recipient of a Fulbright Award, completed an MFA at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in London and is now a PhD Candidate at York St. John University in York, UK. His most recent work was called Truths Colliding, an eight week series of workshops at the Intrepid Air and Space Museum in New York brought military veterans, victims of war and civilians together to move and create a final dance performance on the aircraft carrier. I am delighted to share the exciting work Román is doing bringing dance to the stories of soldiers and those impacted by war.

In this conversation, I am speaking with Selena Coburn BC-DMT, LMHC, LCPC, who is currently serving as the ADTA Standards and Ethics Chair. We discuss the challenges the ADTA is facing as an organization and how the change and growth often involve discomfort and negotiating difference. Selena is a mental health and dance/movement therapist in Great Falls, Montana and an adjunct professor at Lesley University. She is a descendent of Blackfeet, Klamath, Cree, and Pitt River tribes. She earned her BFA in Dance from SUNY Purchase College in Purchase, NY. Selena's dance/movement therapy training includes the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, NY, and Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. As a registered dance/movement therapist, she believes in the importance of decolonizing dance as therapy, and culturally inclusive processing as the primary therapeutic principle. Selena has worked with adolescents in the residential treatment center setting and experienced the power of incorporating cultural healing elements in helping adolescents navigate social, emotional, physical, and relational developmental changes. Coburn has presented on Blackfeet cultural dances, Native American perspectives, and participated in panel discussions locally, regionally, and internationally. Selena founded the Native American Affinity Group as part of the Multicultural Diversity Committee of the ADTA and received the Leader of Tomorrow Award in 2020. She has previously served on the Texas Chapter board.

In this conversation, I am speaking with Lauren Elise Peterson, a dance therapist and body image coach who uses beginner friendly dance to help people feel confident in their own skin. She combats the messages that emphasize the need to change the body: to tighten, to diminish, to take up less space, to be more like the virtual avatars we are often bombarded by in our social media. Instead, she invites folks to inhabit the body with a focus on what feels interesting, pleasureful or curious. She offers gentle, easily modified movements that build a vocabulary for movement in the body that helps to build an appetite for movement as play, thereby transforming the possibilities found moving and relating. www.laurenelisepeterson.com. instagram: laurenelisepeterson

In this conversation, I am speaking with Julia Rae Antonick and Jonathan Meyer, executive & artistic directors of Khecari (https://www.khecari.org/). Khecari ‘creates dance works furthering the transformative power of live bodies witnessing live bodies and advocates for the essential role of art within society, of dance within the arts, and of all artists working within the dance ecosystem.’ Please, visit their website, see the images and videos, and read about their vision. Better yet, experience them perform. And in doing participate in art that engages and transforms.