35th Annual BMCA Conference
Re-Joining the Circle:  
Somatic Agency and Social Justice

Program, Schedule & Presenter Bios

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Featured Presenters:
Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (Virtual)
Bebe Miller (In Person)

Schedule 

All times presented below in Eastern Daylight Time (New York).
Each session runs 1 hour and 15 minutes.
You can convert the offering time to your local time by adding your city here.

Click here to dowload Program (PDF)
Click here to download Presenter Bios (PDF)

Jump to:  Wednesday, June 22 | Thursday June 23 | Friday June 24 | Saturday June 25 | Sunday June 26 | Anytime | Presenter Biographies

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 22

1:00 - 1:30 PM

Hanna Takashige and Board of Directors                                             OPENING CIRCLE
The Embodied Voice
The conference participants will listen for and resound their singular vibration within the ancestral chorus. Hanna will bring her embodied voice and interactive storytelling as part of the ritual opening of the 2022 BMCA conference.

2:00PM

Bob Lehnberg                                                                                               Workshop/Practice
Integrating the Kwa in Qigong
Qigong may be defined in several ways, with one being embodiment. Principles of BMC^SM apply to the practice of qigong. The process of practice can support intelligent and integrated cellular being in relationship with the earth, space, self, and others. The simple relationships of up-down, forward-back, and side-side are paramount in everyone’s lives. How people presence these more fully gives more range in internal and external space. Simple weight-shifting activities support the fluid flow of qi (vitality) through physical and energetic three-dimensionality. One key skill is by engaging the kwa. The kwa is an integrative power center in the area of the hips. Some go as far as including the whole area between the knees and the solar plexus. Either way, it is central in connecting the lower body to the trunk, and one’s center to the earth. No experience is necessary to participate in this experiential session.

Pat Ethridge, Martha Eddy, Kate Tarlow Morgan                                  Workshop/Practice
Somatic Writing: A Path to More Whole Awareness
Writing has always been a vehicle for knowing oneself more deeply. What does it mean to write from the body-mind or to move from the word? Since 2014, The Somatic Writing Collective, growing out of Currents, Journal of the Body-Mind Centering^® Association, has developed on-and-offline symposia, workshops, and publications. From guided exercises, somatically-inspired texts, and languages, this session will invite participants to explore these questions in multi-disciplinary ways, with the intention of expanding individual and collective experience of what somatic writing can be and can do. Time will be provided for participants to dialogue from their experience. Excerpts from this event may be included in the Somatic Writing Collective Chapbook, Vol. III.

Toni Smith                                                     Workshop/Practice-cannot be accessed remotely
Hands on, Vagus Nerve
Participants will be shown a brief video providing an overview of the 10th Cranial Nerve: form, function, texture, and development. Hands-on BMC palpations will be demonstrated and practiced on self and others. Participants will work in pairs or trios and guided in specific hands-on explorations. The intension is to sense, feel, isolate, and receive feedback from the Vagus Nerve.

Remo Rostagno                                                                                             Workshop/Practice
The Suspension of the Heart on the Midlines Related to the Earth, Human, and Sky Horizons
Participants will briefly review the primal and fluid midlines and the 3 horizons involved (earth, human, and sky). This workshop will also explore the heart. Between the midlines and the horizons, it seems natural for the heart to explore the depth between them. The heart, as a first and huge perceptual tool, has a suspension quality inside the body that can open landscapes, which are more like soulscapes, with its longing for different horizons (earth, human, sky), between the very near and the very far of things, between the known and the unknown. The suspension quality of the heart mirrors the suspension of the physical body inside the biosphere and inside the natural space which the human being inhabits. The earth is suspended inside the solar system, which is suspended inside the Milky way, which is suspended in the universal space ... like the electron is suspended around the proton and neutron. “We are enfolded within it, permeated, carnally immersed, in the depth of this breathing planet.” and “Depth implicates the all of our animal body (this carnal density of muscles and skin and breath), situating us physically within the animate landscape.” -- Becoming Animal by David Abram.

4:00 PM

Maruma Rodriguez                                                                                      Workshop/Practice
The Inner Trees
The imagery of trees meets the imagery of the human body’s anatomy. This is an invitation to embrace the body as part of nature from the poetry of the relationships between human and non-human beings. A movement meditation: To explore affinities between some structures of the body and trees; to revisit the breathing process from the space in between the branches of the trees, the lungs, and the brachial plexus of the nervous system; and to allow dance to emerge in consonance with earth, space, and trees.

Suze Smith                                                                                                     Workshop/Practice
Intent, Embodiment, and Imagination
Cultivating a sense of fullness, grace, elasticity, and impermanence, this workshop will be an exploration of storytelling using body, voice, and mind. What makes a good story? How to give voice to the bold, the bitter, and the beautiful of life? Participants will play, exploring ways in which the body speaks, words reveal moments in time and space, and mind and imagination create atmosphere. Beginning with evoking internal imaginative states through somatic practice and a writing task to uncover words, the middle will provide time and space to play with distilling physical language, gesture, spoken language, and words. The end will culminate in sharing snippets of the stories generated, reflecting together on what is enjoyable, moving, and life-giving in the story-telling.

Kim Kaufman, Margaret Guay                                                                  Workshop/Practice
Art Making and Somatic Experiences
The body experience revealed through image creates a new vision of living tissue, cells, and systems. How is somatic awareness expressed through the visual arts? This workshop is an exploration of how the encounter with alive and conscious tissue is given voice and communicated. Join in an experience of somatic art making and discussion of process and practices.

Debra Wales                                                                                                  Presentation
‘One Size Fits All’ Shoes ...
This presentation will examine how life is so much more than this set of rules and guidelines called ‘functioning,’ which is agreed to from birth until death. It’s an endless web of knowledge, felt experience, essence, simplicity, and love. Yet, humanness applies equally to vocations, relationships, social paradigms, loves, likes, suffering, and joy. What makes people sanely human is understanding the path as also so much more than this grand version of love – it’s about meeting humanity in the struggles and differences -- coming together, not turning away. As a (now proud) Autistic, the presenter will engage in this conversation as a reminder, reflection, and exploration on how allowing others to feel safe enough to be ‘themselves’ decreases the cycle of shame, risk of suicide, and dis-ease within marginalized groups, and, in fact, with all people in general. Participants will discuss ways to increase compassion and workable empathy with different groups; understand how drawing on sensory experiences common to all enhances both therapeutic and everyday relationships; and learn how to achieve justice internally through somatic agency and personal responsibility until ‘One’ is achieved in humanity.

8:00 - 9:00 PM                                                                 VIRTUAL CONCERT

Annie Brook                                                                                                  Live Performance
The Amygdala, Hippocampus, and Caudate Nucleus Perform!
How do we possibly stay emotionally regulated and sane in these times? Enjoy this playful exploration of brain function presented as performance.

Serafima Mehhovits                                                                                     Performance
Mover Falling and Flowing
In this video piece, the camera is a witness that sharpens the mover’s awareness of moving. A mover loses balance to find a graceful and raw moment. Reflexes surface where self-perception and self-presentation peel away, playing with a physical language of automatic reaction, to integrate an ease of being witnessed.

Erika Berland, Wendell Beavers                                                                 Performance
Tissue States: A Collage of Movement Studies Based on Anatomical Systems
During the pandemic Fall of 2021, the presenter and collaborator Wendell Beavers did a series of “basement tapes” to keep the juices flowing and to experiment with putting somatic research into space and time. The studies were inspired by the qualities and mind of the bones, reflexes, righting reactions, toning spirals, and vibration. The intention was to trust the images and sensations engendered by the research and to allow the movement to manifest naturally without an expressive agenda. At the same time, the artists viewed the camera as witness and sought to “compose on the spot” with space and time as the container. Presenters will share a montage of different states. Can you guess their inspiration?

Yu-Ling Liao                                                                                                 Performance
Being fluid: A fading process
What is the process during the final moment of life? Almost everyone has had an experience of losing an object, a pet or even a person. From the presenter’s experience with his grandfather, who had a severe injury from a traffic accident. During the period of a long and high-attention condition, something happened through his body. There was a bodily connection in a sensation way between him and his grandfather. Something like fluid was vanishing though his body. Combining the method of Experiential Anatomy to explore the fluid system and the treasurable resource from the book The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, the process of bodily vanishment can be described sequentially. The image and bodily sensory are also consistent with each other. In this work, to find out the relationship between visual images and embodied movements, there is a fluid stage installation between the performer and itself, expressing the idea of space as created through the growth of being a being.

Natasha Alhadeff-Jones                                                                               Performance
Becoming -- Reflection (2021)
In this dance made for the screen, Natasha Alhadeff-Jones explores the confluence of her struggle living in a land not of her birth and her coming home to herself. Not only a collage of visual images, “Becoming – Reflection” is a collage of movement vocabulary, her attempt to form a whole and coherent picture of the scattered nature of her experience living away from her family and sense of security, her attempt to address feeling displaced, foreign, and other. Like the layering of the images of the video, she layers her INTERPRETATIONS of different movement vocabulary meaningful to her: the Dimensional Scale of Rudolf Laban, the traditional Haitian dance of Yanvalou as taught to her by Djola Branner, and the technique of Rosangela Silvestre as taught to her by Luanda Mori and Dominique Rey. “Becoming – Reflection” is a part of an ongoing series of eco-somatic dance explorations, engaging with the question: Beyond assimilating to a place, how can one be at home, in the body?

THURSDAY, JUNE 23

9:00AM

Annie Brook                                                                                                  Workshop/Practice
Supporting Embodied Emotional Clarity When Working with Social Justice
Presence, not Skin Color ... how not to polarize when communicating. Standing clear in difficult conversations from an embodied approach. Ability to listen, not get reactive. Explore this playful performance of brain support to help reactivity transform into deep and open listening.

Tal Halevi                                                                                                      Workshop/Practice
Dynamics of Density
This guided movement journey will explore the condensing and expanding movement rhythm of cells, the pulsating wave-like movement of jellyfish and starfish, as the primal experience of whole-body unity that underlies and integrates differentiated movement. In particular, participants will consider the different states of density in the connective tissue as a portal to unique qualities and dynamics of movement, states of consciousness, and modes of perception and expression. From fluid to solid, undifferentiated to concrete, by embodying different states of tissue density one can embody a continuum of states of being, different states of density, different states of mind.

Kim Kaufman, Sylvia Maes                                                                         Presentation
Principles and Practices of BMC
The underlying principles of Body-Mind Centering are rooted in the study of anatomy, physiology, embryology, and developmental movement. The exploration of these ideas has led to many practices and techniques. This presentation of BMC principles demonstrates how an exploration of ease, movement, space, energy, and time can become practical applications in somatic movement therapy. Explore the path from BMC principle to practice; how BMC translates embodied experience into techniques for healing.

Heike Kuhlmann                                                                                          Presentation
Blood – Menstruation -- Taboo
Menstrual blood continues to be a social taboo. Is blood and menstrual blood differently perceived in the quality and expression of movement? There are many negative attributions, such as: women who are bleeding are impure or poisonous. Women had to isolate themselves during menstruation. Menstruation blood is still something hidden even now: Women have “visits from Aunt Rosa,” or are in “strawberry week,” or they are “PMS-driven menstruating monsters.” Period shaming is creating many restrictions. But how much does historical and social proscription interfere in sensing and perceiving? How much can Body-Mind Centering support going underneath these inscribed perceptions through a specific framing? Presenting actual research and a personal approach to find ways to sense, perceive, move, and talk about this taboo.

11:00AM

Christine Cole                                                                                               Workshop/Practice
Gelation – a Developmental Pattern?
The sea of water in the body has the ability to dynamically change; it can determine its own flow state. Somatic embryological exploration reflects early cell division as a way to hone in on initiations of the different cell fluids, the cellular oceans within, as well as the chorion and amnion. So, it is not only the membranes that have the ability to make decisions and guide fluid. Therefore, in the last 6 years, SomaticBODY has been applying this state as a Developmental Pattern. Participants will be introduced to bodywork, which supports clients to release toxins and holding in the tissues’ fluid gel to flow states. The body relies on this changing gel-tone to move fluids through the body.

E.E. Balcos                                                                                                     Workshop/Practice
Global Connections through Soma and Earth
This movement workshop will invite participants to be led into somatic agency through guided somatizations in stillness and movement. Improvisatory movement will be facilitated to participate independently and with others. Metaphors of body systems with elements of nature will help discover agency in relationship to soma, earth, and other participants. Incorporating somatic knowledge about the body is important in this relational process as proprioceptive awareness of different systems of the body will be metaphors with different aspects of natural elements such as the earth, water, and air. In the soma, metaphors can be made such as the earth’s crust with skin, the mantle with muscle, the liquid outer core with fascia, the solid inner core with bone, and the world’s water resources with the body’s fluid system, which makes up more than 60% of the human body. Diversity of experience is welcomed into the discovery of somatic relationship in environmental and social equity and justice.

Lola Gonthier                                                                                                Presentation
BMC Circle as an Inclusive Pedagogic Tool
The topic for today is: “How the BMC Circle has been inclusive for me and how it could be for others too.” The presentation will be a discussion and sharing time after a testimony coming from the presenter’s own experience of social injustice, especially in her scolarity, mainly caused by narcolepsy-cataplexy disabilities as well as an un-adapted educative system. During a somatization, each participant will be invited to contact and invite body memories, reminding how The BMC Circle has been inclusive in each person’s professionalization process and personal development and how the shape creates a secure space. For students but also for teachers, by setting up membranes, boundaries, and limits, which promotes communication and self-expression as well as building a community mind that cares about the group and others. Giving place to individuality and singularity, encouraging self-presentation, confession, sharing personal experiences and experimentations in a benevolent climate.

Lilian Vilela, Diego Pizarro, Marila Velloso, Patricia Caetano,             Panel
Luciana Barone
Links between BMC and University Education in Brazil
In Brazil, the Body-Mind Centering somatic system is propagated in university courses in dance and theater and articulated to different curricular components through disciplines that are taught in a plural way, depending on the focus of each certified professional, their performances, and the contexts of each course and university. In this session, professionals from the Northeast, Midwest, Southeast, and South regions of Brazil will present an overview of their teaching activities, which articulate BMC with university education. These Brazilian universities offer free public education, at state or federal levels, and this allows for democratic access by covering different socio-cultural layers of the population. Some challenges and achievements will be shared about the integrations of the BMC system in the university environment, its singularities and agencies, the pedagogical and research issues, as well as the artistic and community developments arising from outreach projects.

2:00PM

Mary Ann Rund                                           Workshop/Practice-cannot be accessed remotely
Fluid Moves
This experiential workshop will take place in the pool(s) of the aquatic center where immersion in the water offers a sensory return to the embryonic environment and an integration of the fluid and nervous systems. Through buoyancy and support, interfacing and connectivity, merging and flow, the mind is given the opportunity to rest while the body releases, recuperates and revitalizes.

Amanda Comstock, Dr. Gill Wright Miller                                               Panel
The Changing Landscape of Somatics in the Academy:
A Live Interview with Dr. Gill Wright Miller
In this live interview, Amanda Comstock will interview Dr. Gill Wright Miller, with a focus on her experience teaching somatics in the academy and on how her teaching content and methods have shifted to meet the students of the cultural and political moment throughout the 40 years since she began her full-time teaching career in 1981. This interview will include an historical inquiry of somatics teaching methods in the academy vis-a-vis the research ‘on the ground,’ specifically BMC; a philosophical inquiry on how concepts of the body (and agency) have changed for instructors and for students; how the priorities of students have shifted; how cultural/political shifts have influenced the content and methods, with a specific interest in how the need for social justice is (or isn't) present; and lastly, what lies ahead. The interview will last 45-60 minutes. The remaining time will be facilitated for other teachers to share their stories/experiences.

Mariko Tanabe                                                                                          Workshop/Practice
An Experiential Journey Through Memory, the Body, and the Natural World
This exploration is an invitation to dive through different layers of memory, time, and space, and to journey through the blood, bones, fluids, and DNA to awaken a sense of belonging that moves beyond the isolation and loneliness that many feel. The exploration will touch upon the wisdom of the natural world as a continuum with the living human body. Be prepared to be held with spaciousness, and to move, draw, write or vocalize following a sense of ease and curiosity. All are welcome.

Amelie Gaulier, Sarah Johansson Locke,  E.E. Balcos, Nicole Bindler, Martha Eddy,
Wendy Hambidge, river jackson-patton, Roxlyn Moret                                                    Panel
Engaging with Decolonial Practices to Nurture the Future of BMC
In this conversation, panelists will share how they integrate BMC and social justice practices. Some questions to sit with: How does one experience and engage with concepts of “rejoining the circle” and “somatic agency” – as the BMC community, and as individuals with varying intersectional identities? Everyone has positionality and social location that influence how we see/hear and are seen/heard. How can participants hold accountability, individually and collectively, for actively decentering whiteness, heteronormativity, ableism, and other ways people disconnect from their full humanity? The invitation is to engage with decolonial practices: noticing and questioning internalized assumptions, embodied stories, experiences of belonging and not-belonging. Can one inhabit different truths and inquire collectively about what kinds of social transformation one wants to nurture? The goal is to notice who sits in the circles and who isn’t present, in order to co-create a BMC culture that includes all who wish to engage.

Amanda Comstock                                                                                       Workshop/Practice 
Exocrine Glands: Passageways of Agency
In the body, exocrine glands create substances that are exuded into the surrounding world. These fluids, comprised entirely from the individual’s own cells, are a unique and authentic expression – unable to be ignored and unhealthy if suppressed. The smell of sweat, the pain of tears, the hunger of saliva, the nourishment of milk, the pleasure of sex -- all of these are connected to the raw experience of being human. These fluids mediate the interaction with others and the surrounding environment. They communicate who one is, how one is feeling, and what one needs. In this way, they are the most vulnerable expression of the core being. These glands and their fluids offer great support for somatic agency – taking up space and being present in the world in an authentic way. Can seeing others, too, in their exudations help make space for the principles of social justice? This workshop will be a combination of anatomical study, discussion, embodied movement, and writing/drawing/creating.

4:00 PM

Cathy Boyce                                                                                                  Workshop/Practice
Begin Moves
“The power of first year of life movement.” Begin Moves is a movement practice that revisits these primary movements. The presentation explains the following: Why are these movement patterns so powerful throughout life? How do they relate to the STRESS response from a movement and posture perspective? How can they change people in a manner that respects the individuality of life experiences?

Brae Onna Weil, Rosana Barragan, Natasha Alhadeff-Jones                 Panel
Three Views on Social Somatics and What Decolonization Means in Our Practice
The presenters have trained with Dr. Martha Eddy and work as Dynamic Embodiment Practitioners with different populations and in various settings: higher education; dance performance and choreography; social justice and transformative healing. Brae leads a social somatics forum. Natasha and Rosana are active members of the forum. The panel will offer the presenters’ experience with the forum and their perspectives on decolonization. Rosana’s focus comes from her own history as a Latina, following theories by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Bolivian/Aymara scholar, activist, and renowned decolonial thinker. Rosana will break down the concept of decolonization, applying Cusicanqui’s view and in relation to her own work of connecting to her native roots using eco-somatics. Brae will share their perspectives on gender and body size in the context of decolonization and embodiment practices. Natasha will offer a Black woman’s perspective on social somatics and the power of African-influenced somatic dance.

Odile Seitz-Walser, Annick Putz                                                                 Panel
Professional Communication Outside the Somatic Field
For the second time, and in the frame of the Conference 2022, the presenters would like to offer an online community discussion around the communication about BMC. Since May 2021 the presenters have met and discussed the way to support BMCA members in professional communication outside the somatic world. How do BMC Professionals communicate efficiently and clearly with institutions about a process-based work? After the rich and exciting experience from last year, presenters will invite two BMC professionals to share their experiences of how they successfully communicated to convince people, especially directors of institutions, of schools, of professional training institutes, etc., to make BMC part of their offer. Furthermore, the working group will share the research and discussions, work in progress, and proposals worked out and on during the last months. The goal is to open the discussion to all interested members of the BMC community in order to allow sharing of experiences and ideas.

Susan Bauer                                                                                                  Presentation
Our Bodies Know: The Interface Between Authentic Movement and Somatic Movement Therapy

In the practice of Authentic Movement, people learn to listen to the impulses for movement in their bodies and to give them voice. As a somatic movement therapist, Susan similarly encourages people to seek self-awareness through movement expression that arises spontaneously, such as in a simple gesture or movement phrase. Yet as she has discovered, many clients tend to jump from movement to cognitive ‘story-telling’ quite quickly -- such that although the movement is expressed, it is not necessarily received by the self. In this presentation Susan shares methods she has developed, based on principles of Authentic Movement, to support people to hold space for their movement knowing to be heard. Through examples of multiple clients, Susan illustrates the transformative power of these simple somatic interventions to help people listen to the voice of their own bodies. Participants will also be invited to experience components of this process and share their experiences.

8:00 - 9:00 PM                                             LIVE AND VIRTUAL CONCERT
 

Amanda Benzin                                                                                            Performance
Terra: Oh, the Places ...
This screen dance, co-directed by Amanda Benzin and Matthew Schlief, features an original music composition by Jesse Manno and explores places and spaces where tap dance is not usually seen or performed. It is a digital adaptation, due to Covid-19, of a larger Project “Terra” that explores solo tap dance, surfaces, and bone conduction headphones.

Lale Madenoglu                                                                                            Performance
639 Hertz
“639 Hertz” is a video performance created by Lale Madenoglu as her senior year choreography project at MSFAU Contemporary Dance Department. It is inspired by her felt senses regarding vibration. 639 Hertz is a Solfeggio frequency that is said to be related to the heart center of the body. This performance was created by the relationship of the choreographer with this frequency and its vibrational responses in her heart center.

Miranda Rashelle Zapata                                                                            Performance
Dance as Social Activism
This work focuses on the conditions and treatment that many women and families endure while being held in ICE detention facilities.

Mary Ann Rund, Dawn Karlovsky                                                             Performance
Gravity Rising
We gather our weights, wittingly or unwittingly... sinking down to saturation... floating up to new shores.

FRIDAY, JUNE 24

9:00AM

Wendy Hambidge, Jorge Samuel Faria                                                     Presentation
Stand Up, Show Up, Own Up: A Duet Over Time.
Film and Discussion with the Collaborators
“Where does identity start? With oneself, with ancestors? The generational cycles of one's people, should one continue them? Can one break with them?” This film documents Wendy and Samuel over 4 years as they ask themselves these questions through the lens of choreography, as they dared to acknowledge their histories to one another. The process started with Samuel translating a solo of Wendy’s with spoken text. In the first version, it was offered that Samuel reacted to what he was translating, which paved the way for this “solo” to become a duet. Engaging somatic agency-created wisdom, which became patterns for relating that brought together two people who are common and also different, two people learned to appreciate and be patient with one another, being where everything starts, In The Body, Living Body, Colorful Body. Two people of different countries, social and ethnic groups, coming together, reflecting about identity, having different conversations through a common language: Movement.

Trude Cone                                                                                                   Workshop/Practice
Moving Thought: Thinking in Movement
This workshop explores early organizing forces/movements as the foundation for progress. Physicalizing these actions through somatic experience helps to tap into potential, come into motion, and find balance while moving, and encourages participation in the choreography of life, eventually fostering progress in the world. The long-term goal is to apply this progression to facilitate understanding while creating situations and environments for growth. A few concepts introduced in the workshop are the interfacing between host/guest roles in experience; transitions and transformation underlying moving forward; and the gradual ability to take increasing responsibility in participation to tackle the complex problems in the world.

Paula Josa-Jones                                                                                           Workshop/Practice
Dismantling Dominance: An Interspecies Perspective
There is something profound about entering the mystery of connection with another species that has everything to do with the deep bodily alignment of relationship and what composer Pauline Oliveros calls Deep Listening. All living beings are an interconnected, bio-similar, cross-pollinating network in a constant flux of adjustment, response, and transformation. Awareness of this ongoing, improvisational movement matrix can begin to connect to the richness and permeability of the bodily, animal selves. The presenter will share 25 years of learning to be a “movement speaker” with horses. The intention has been to dismantle the usual dominance model of human/horse relationships and to find a more improvisational, co-regulated, collaborative relationship with these extraordinary beings. In this workshop, participants will explore embodied ways of dismantling the often unconscious, embedded architecture of hierarchical perspectives and behaviors.

Amanda McCorkle, Kaysie Seitz-Brown                                                   Workshop/Practice
Building Blocks: A Foundational Approach to Creating a Socially Just Society
This presentation will be an interactive experience in which the audience participates in a short class, centered around introducing social justice through somatic agency to young children through creative movement. The content will explore connecting to breath, listening to the body, using intuition to guide movement choices, and building community through non-verbal interpersonal connections. These ideas are inspired by the children’s book Antiracist Baby by Ibram X Kendi, and will be presented in two age-appropriate lessons for preschoolers and elementary-age children. The class leaders will also show how to continue the work of addressing social justice through somatic awareness and agency beyond the lessons presented. The session will end with engaged group discussion and time for questions.

11:00AM 

Amelie Gaulier                                                                                              Workshop/Practice
Earthing Our Voice: The Energetic Threads of Bringing Our Whole Self to the World
In a lot of traditions and cultures, the placenta, after birth, is considered with great respect and rituals are made to honor what supported the future being: an ongoing exchange to be nourished and protected when developing as an embryo. This interspecies organism weaves a relationship to time and a particular position and location regarding our ancestry and the unfolding world, co-creating breath by breath. In French, voice and path are almost the same word with different spellings: “voix et voie.” Through a somatization/visualization, combined with movement and vocal sound, participants will explore: How can returning to the foundation of paths and ancestry, remembering embryologic gestures, revisiting the earlier steps where belonging occurs help to retrieve the threads of lineages and ancestry? What somatic agency is intended when people anchor their whole selves within the cracks and roundness of earth? How does that support response-ability regarding the socially-constructed realness of what people are called to voice out? What does this placenta -- as in-between inter-species, have to teach?

Tami Joy Hindin, Michelle Cohen                                                              Workshop/Practice
Developing Embodied Sacred Witness to Hold Sacred Space
In this presentation/practice there will be the opportunity to explore the relationship between self and space as preparation for holding sacred space for others. Participants will share personal and shared experience around the questions: What is needed within self to create sacred space for self? Where or what bodily places allow the meeting of others in sacred container? Where do sacred self and sacred space meet? Offering the breath, senses, front/back/middle body, and heart through embodied movement and meditation as a pathway to explore these questions and invite further understanding of what supports the relationship between earth and cosmos as an embodied sacred witness.

Colleen Jorgensen                                                                                         Workshop/Practice
The Vagal Tone Tango - 
Learn to Dance with Your Nervous System
"When you feel safe enough, you can dance at the edge of risk" Dr. Arielle Schwartz 

Exploring playful movement while offering a sense of safety  and connection allows you to ‘dance at the edge of risk'. This empowers you to edit your own story and LIVE life with joy rather than feeling like a spectator who has no control. 

The vagus nerve, known as ‘The Wanderer’ originates in the brain, exits the skull and takes a long and winding path on its journey down through the body innervating many key structures and systems along the way. 

The vagal system is intimately connected to the nervous systems and integral in whether the body chooses to activate the: 
1. The Ventral Vagal (Social Engagement System)  
2.  The Sympathetic System
3. The Dorsal Vagal (Shut down or freeze system)
4. Or a hybrid of the above

Through bringing awareness to NEUROCEPTION participants will learn how to connect & communicate with their nervous systems through: 
• Breath 
• Self-release 
• Vagal tone practices 

Join me and teach your system how to fluidly dance back and forth between ALL of these states and learn to regulate from a place of safety and connection.

Dawn Karlovsky                                                                                           Workshop/Practice
The Alexander Technique^®: Opportunities to Observe
F.M. Alexander described his work as “the study of human reaction.” By working through the principles of The Alexander Technique and body mapping, participants are invited to discover the interconnectedness and internal communication of mobility and intention. This thinking and sensing practice allows for opportunities to observe the dynamic balance, action, and reaction within oneself. As a pioneer of somatic education, Alexander regarded the “Self” as the Unity of Being. Participants will work through his method as a means to gauging interferences in proprioception caused by overuse and/or underuse of tensions, and by discovering where, when, how, and why these reactions occur. Participants will listen for movement impulses that precede an action and make a conscious choice on how to respond. Participants will be guided and encouraged to explore the dynamic relationship and integrated use of thought, movement, inhibition (non-doing), and sensory awareness to discover easeful and harmonious movement.

12:45 - 2:45 PM                                                                   
ANNUAL MEETING

 

3:00PM

Martha Eddy, Bebe Miller                           Workshop/Practice-cannot be accessed remotely
Mending and Bending Through Racialized Challenges
After investigating Resmaa Menakem’s book, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies, Bebe and Martha invite a participatory-moving-vocalizing-talking dialogue. In call and response style, they will share discoveries and then invite each other and participants to embody responses. Springboard concepts for creative practice can be: anchors for self-care and dealing with ‘the long-haul,’ somatic abolitionism, Bodies of Culture, intergenerational trauma, white-bodied supremacy, VIMBAs, body-centered activism, to name a few. Ideally, group participants will have read the book, or a synopsis or critique of it, before the conference. As interactive somas, this time provides a space to feel how cultural forces, both oppressive and liberatory, impact every-day and unique somatic experience. Dive into choices of creative movement processes, recuperation, performative feelings, intersubjective sensing, and play, while accessing courage and safety.

Margery Segal                                                                                               Workshop/Practice
Moving In and Out of Connection: Weaving Attachment Principles with Developmental Movement Therapy
Working in the interpersonal relational field, students may become experientially aware of their earliest attachment tendencies. Attachment behaviors are mostly developed (hardwired according to the literature) in the first 18 months. A somatic movement approach allows an opportunity to unfurl earliest tendencies and learn how to honor and, perhaps, repair the earliest bonding needs. This work is applicable to adults as well as children and infants.

Hazal Selculc                                                                                                 Presentation
Singing Through Grief
This presentation will explore the grief process through the use of movement, singing, composing, arranging, and video making. The presenter will share her own experience of using the arts as a tool to allow the flow of grief as a way of re-connecting to self, life, and beyond. The presentation will also include original musical work and poetry presented through videos that will explore metaphors and images of the grief process. In the videos there will be collaboration with dancers.

Sara Vogeler                                                                                                  Presentation
The ABC’s of Swallowing 
Do you know where your tongue goes when you swallow?  Participants will trace sucking, swallowing and breathing patterns from infancy to mature established jaw and  tongue movements in swallowing and phonation. The workshop will explore early patterns by tracing the bones, identifying specific muscles, and the use of tongue when swallowing and speaking. Activities will explore the connections to life, survival, nursing, taste, reflexes, proprioception, smell and desire. Participants will revisit patterns from in the womb, emersion from  the womb:  reaching with the mouth, surrendering and attaching to the love of mother and father and caregivers.

5:00PM

Bebe Miller                                                                          Workshop/Practice cannot be accessed remotely
It’s Simple, Really: Movement, Awareness and Dancing with your Eyes Open
How we move is how our body speaks: person to person, thoughtful practice to intuitive response, spontaneous action to focused consideration. We’ll begin with a somatics-based warm up to tune the body’s physical and expressive scale, and continue with improvisation and movement scores, working with full-bodied attention to detail, a range of dynamics and drive, finding the dancing that’s ready to go.

Susana Prado, Laicine Barbosa                                                                  Panel
Amana: A Dance for Babies
The general purpose of the research focuses on the play AMANA, which aims at sharing another way of the infinite possibilities of movement. Amana uses affection, touch, and movement as essential elements for the bond to be established. It grabs the public gradually, with subtlety, and reverberates into the relationships that are keen to the universe of the baby. Technical visits were carried out for observation experience in public and private day care centers in the Federal District. In addition, a workshop on movement was developed for educators and caregivers from the exchange with babies, in a way to provide a PAUSE for a look at themselves and, henceforth, for opening channels of communication with the sensitive world in order to develop better listening conditions with each other.

Amaia Mugica                                                                                               Presentation
Somatic Warm-ups in Actor Training
This presentation focuses on the actors’ experience when engaging with somatic practices and emphasizes the importance of this type of work in an actor’s preparation, especially during the warm-up. Offering a warm-up that prepares the actor to possess a greater sense of connection to themselves, to others, and to the space is paramount. Besides, a somatic warm-up prepares the actor to work within a richer palette of moves and to be aware and in control of the creative process before the final product -- life on the stage. Many times, theatre training and, even more, physical theatre training focuses on the physicality, but as an information that comes from the outside in and not from the inside out. When engaging in somatic work during the warm-ups, the actors become more aware of their own bodies through anatomical exploration, as well as an increased alertness of time, space, and others.

brooke smiley                                                                                                Presentation
A Study: BMC, American Indian Communities, and Ways of Relating Body with Land
This informational session shares a study of how BMC is in present-day relationship within American Indian individuals and communities. It identifies and contextualizes places of commonalities between BMC and Native, non-English ways of relating bodies with land, while tracing where and how they diverge and counter. Reciprocally, this shares sensitivity in navigating a patient permission process in receiving indigenous knowledge for use in non-Native BMC spaces of learning. While this could be highly anecdotal, this session commits to highlighting informational in-roads between BMC and Indigenous ways of relating body with land. It shares a generative, ongoing study in relationship building, emphasizing accessibility to land and body-based pedagogy and collaborative spaces of learning. It concludes with a deepening study of how indigenous language is functioning in relation with BMC-grounded pedagogy for cellular sensation within new movement possibilities.

8:00 - 9:00 PM                                                         VIRTUAL CONCERT
 

Mariah Maloney                                                                                           Performance
A Visitor’s Intimacy of the Now
As the pandemic began to shutter people in their homes, Maloney found herself dancing alone in her living room with the camera as witness. Months later, she located her choreographic process outdoors, working with natural light and landscape in collaboration with composer JoAnne Maffia, creating A Visitor’s Intimacy of the Now, which is a part of the documentary film: The Making of Hammer and Rain. This work explores improvisation in dialogue with choreographic structure, unearthing the articulate, sensing body in response to the natural environment.

Katiane Riberio Negrao, Ricardo Alvarenga                                            Performance
Coração Valente – solo em decomposição
(Brave Heart – solo/soil* in decomposition)
This performance investigates the interaction of bodies departing from the porous quality of the cellular membranes and what reverberates in movement. The Sponge Pattern, Cellular Breathing, and the Fluid System were accessed during the process. A flowerpot clay sculpture in heart form was the inspiration that names the work. The beginning of the process was to put oneself in position with the sculpture (in (de)composition) in different environments. The sand environment was chosen as the soil to put oneself in a porous presence, having as the inner argument to be nourished from what is decomposing, contextualized as the pandemic condition, that brought so many subjective and concrete deaths. Evoking the ancestors and the condition of being back to dust, stardust. Key words: Porosity. Cellular Breathing. Vibration. Fluids. (*Translator’s note: the word solo in Portuguese is used to designate soil and a solo.)

Miranda Rashelle Zapata                                                                            Performance
Sueños Replaced by Sacrificio
This work encompasses the impairment and healing while honoring the legacy of our past, present, and future migrant farmworkers, both documented and undocumented. The process behind this piece explores how storytelling through movement is a form of spiritual activism.

Andromeda Graziano                                                                                  Performance
Leap of Faith
“To see the world, things dangerous to come to, to see behind walls, draw closer, to find each other, and to feel. That is the purpose of life.” -- James Thurber. In a quest to change the future by understanding the past, to shine a light on self-knowledge, shared vulnerability, and kindness -- a leap of faith is often required -- this film explores and shares that leap of faith. [Filmmaker: Jack Elliott Hobbs]

SATURDAY, JUNE 25

9:00AM

Michele Feldheim                                                                                         Workshop/Practice
Working with the Chronically Ill:
A Movement Exploration, Discussion, and Self-Reflection
This presentation will take a short look at how people with chronic illness are viewed and the tools used, or needed to know, to effectively work with this population. Through a movement exploration, the presenter shares tools and the experience she has had working 8 years full-time with this population.  Along with discussion and self-reflection, the group will take an honest and detailed look at working with this difficult but very gratifying opportunity of work. All experience welcome.

Cynthia J. Williams                                                                                      Presentation -cannot be accessed remotely
Molecular Consciousness: Gaga as a Somatic Experience
Ohad Naharin’s Gaga movement language has clear parallels to somatic methodologies such as Alexander Technique, Body Mind Centering, Feldenkrais^®, and Release Technique, yet treads a unique path, not easily catalogued as a somatic practice. Gaga shares with these other orientations an emphasis on internal sensations, of listening to the body, and of honoring physical sensations as kinesthetic research, often with the goals of re-patterning unhelpful movement habits and recognizing default habits. This presentation investigates how Gaga aligns with other somatic practices and where the similarities and differences lie. Central questions include the role of language in shaping this movement language; whether the claims of increased somatic awareness, body/mind connection, and increased “availability” can be corroborated; and what accounts for Gaga’s pandemic appeal. Gaga hosts seven classes daily across multiple time zones, drawing hundreds of people eager to find their groove.

Ivan Vukovic                                                                                                 Presentation
A Journey of Transformation
A Journey of Transformation is a sharing of Ivan’s journey as a student through the licensed Somatic Movement Education program of Body-Mind Centering, spanning from 2019 to 2022. He wants to share the richness of experience and insights that come out of the moving body-mind, as he encountered them personally on this student trajectory. Each system within the body sings its own song, its own story, and deeper principles of life start to emerge from our own bodies. And this journey is shared with many others in the context of a group, which provides support, safety, and true friendship. This presentation will include somatizations and an invitation for the viewers to share their own experiences of how being a student in the Somatic Movement Education-program enriched their lives.

Sarah Johansson Locke                                                             Workshop/Practice
Cultivating Resonance in the Interstitial:
Individual and Collective Somatic Agency and Empathy
A constellation is stars and the space between them. A weaving is threads and the patterns they weave. A river is water flowing and the riverbed holding. Each has substance and space, parts and whole, contents and container. All are made of co-existing, interrelated, dynamic relationships. This session integrates principles and practices of BMC and yoga into movement explorations that tune in to the individual and collective within bodies, between bodies, and in space/s. It invites processes that cultivate responsiveness and responsibility, integration and spaciousness, connections, and exchange, yielding, supporting, adapting. This practice calls on the inter-calibration of the endocrine system in tandem with breathing (cellular, internal/ external), fluids (substance, circulation), connective tissue (and what it connects). Here, repatterning is discovering emergent opportunities – within, around, and between – with which to co-create interdependent and integrated belonging for each and all.

11:00AM

Nina Wehnert                                                                                                Workshop/Practice
Center -- Centered -- Centering
There are many places in the body referred to as “center.” This workshop offers a somatic exploration of the navel as central hub. Its embryologic origin relates and connects to the bladder, perineum, peritoneum, and intestine, all in an area that is often referred to as “center.” It’s a place where nourishment is received and there is freedom from what was not needed. To feel “centered” is a process. It’s a balance of center and periphery, of inside and outside. A place from where one can reach out into the world and at the same time be oneself.

Wendy Hambidge, E.E. Balcos                                                                   Workshop/Practice
All Time At Once: Transparent Process, BMC in Collaboration and Creation
This workshop involves process, transparency, and agency with permission to be vulnerable and open, giving validation to direct experience. E.E. asked Wendy if she would collaborate on a performance piece that would engage their 30-year friendship, coming and going, dancing together and apart, and their shared love of BMC and the ground and sky it offers. The medium would be movement, text, and music/sound. She said yes. Here they are in the midst of their process, offering a window on investigating and creating through the lens of BMC. The participants will engage in active witnessing, observing oneself and others without judgment. What did one see? What did one feel when one saw that? Followed by moving, writing and/or drawing as both giving reflection and expression to what one witnessed. Discussion about the creative process, BMC, social justice, and activism will conclude the session.

Sara Vogeler                                                                                                  Presentation
Moving and Measuring – Shifting from Sugar to Fat: The Journey to Ketosis for a Healthier Body
Topics: Nurturing One’s Self, Saying No, and Saying Yes at “the door.” Glucose in breast milk, addiction, genetics, storing sugar or burning it. The 5 Pillars: Eating, Sleeping, De-stressing, Exercising. Connecting, measuring, and reducing inflammation. Navigating the ups and downs in life.

CoCo Loupe, Mina Estrada, Noelle Chun, Cole Garlando                      Workshop/Practice
Benevolent Instruction(s)
Benevolent Instruction(s) (BI) is a gentle, guided movement practice for anyone interested in physically engaging with language in the moment. In a given session, audio-recorded directives or prompts are offered that lead the practitioner through various tasks, images, ideas, physical states, and action potentials. Benevolent Instruction(s) are shared via weekly audio scripts of curious and kind movement instructions that allow the listener to move, imagine, play, meditate, dance, create, and discover the joys and mysteries of inhabiting benevolent worlds that are built right there in the moment. The scripts are also shared in our foursome’s virtual practice and in community zoom sessions. The intention is to provide an opportunity for people to listen and translate their own bodily experience as well as enjoying the presence of a supportive community where movement, language, listening, responding, and sharing are valued.

 

2:45PM

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen                                                                            Workshop/Practice
How do you Embody your Skin?
Our skin is our outer embracing membrane. It defines our form and is an intimate bridge between our feltsense of self and other. In this workshop, we will open our awareness to how we embody each of our three layers of skin: the epidermis, dermis, and hypodermis.
We will explore how these three interconnecting layers relate to the autonomic nervous system and to our feltsense of who we are, the environment, and who is other.
 

4:45PM

Alison Zuber, Elizabeth Caron                                                                   Workshop/Practice
Dynamic Outcomes from the Direction of Ease
Modern dance is a direct expression of creativity: no equipment, the feet bare, and the sense of creation with and through the human body, unencumbered. In Body-Mind Centering, embodied inquiry invites the mover to journey through the unknown towards understanding. In Biodynamic Osteopathy, one of the main principles is direction of ease and no barrier. This sense of ease in the whole, this willingness to be the question, leads to dynamic outcomes that can change … everything. In this lecture and movement lab experience, Alison Zuber, a long-time BMC Teacher, and Elizabeth Caron, an Osteopath, former professional dancer with Bebe Miller and Company and teacher of Biodynamic Osteopathy on Dr. James Jealous’ faculty, will explore the relationship between movement and creativity as it facilitates change.

Nicole Bindler                                                                                               Presentation
Scar Talk
Scars are often referred to as disorganized fascia that adheres tissues and disrupts movement pathways. But what do the scars have to say about this? Nicole Bindler has developed a performance practice in which she animates her scars as characters, allowing them to do the talking. Their stories and opinions can often be quite surprising. In this presentation, Bindler will share her findings from years of listening to her scars and sharing their joys, traumas, and desires with audiences. She will offer techniques for conference attendees to develop their own scar-talk practice if they wish. Even those who don’t think they have any outwardly noticeable scars can communicate with their navel where the remains of the umbilical cord fell from … And those belly buttons sure do have a lot of feelings! Attendees are encouraged to bring as much of their whole selves to this presentation as they are able, including their tender parts, wounds, imagination, and sense of play.

Marion Ramirez                                                                              Workshop/Practice
CasaCuerpa
CasaCuerpa is a somatic movement workshop for the body and soul. It invites individuals to inhabit and dance with the qualities present in their anatomy and imagination. Participants are guided through improvisations using storytelling, movement, and drawings to map out the body’s sensations and breathing habits. By deepening body-mind awareness they are guided to sense rhythms and movements within stillness and stillness within their dancing. The workshop ends with a group discussion/sharing of the experience. It is taught in Spanish and English. Body in Spanish is cuerpo, which standardized all bodies as male. CasaCuerpa reclaims the female body as home for inherent creative wisdom. CasaCuerpa is a weekly online class running for the last year and a half. It invites and makes accessible somatic movement practice to individuals from the Latinx community, both from the U.S. and abroad, and to adults of all ages moving at their capacity. It was developed as a response to the pandemic.

Susan Bauer                                                                                Workshop/Practice
The Language of Embodiment: Teaching Teens and Young Adults
Somatic practices are key to helping youth to thrive, providing an entirely new framework for understanding their bodies and the relationship between their physical and emotional well-being. But what are the essential building blocks to establishing the capacity for somatic work, particularly embodied anatomy? This workshop examines both how to use language to invite students into embodied knowing— (does it invite or inhibit an embodied response?)—and specific practices to scaffold the learning so students gain confidence by building their capacity for embodied practice. Drawing from the presenter’s book, The Embodied Teen, participants experience a sample exploration followed by a presentation/discussion to ‘unpack’ the specific language and pedagogy skills used. Crafting an accessible in-road to somatic movement practices helps to set students up for success. Come experience, explore, and discuss how to skillfully pass along our somatic lineage to the next generation!
 

8:00 - 9:00 PM                       LIVE PERFORMANCES AND SILENT AUCTION 
(Bidding ends 10:30 pm)
 

Cynthia J Williams                                                                                       Performance
Estuary
Choreographer: Paula Josa Jones
Performer: Cynthia J Williams
Music: Fred Frith excerpts from “Rivers and Tides.”

Estuary is an exploration of internal transformations and somatic responses to shifting imagery and environments. Created over the span of two years, the solo has challenged Cynthia’s movement preferences and expanded her expressive range. Cynthia wishes to thank Paula for her patience, generosity, and inspiration in this process and Hobart and William Smith Colleges for their support.

Dawn Karlovsky & Mary Ann Rund                                     
Performance
Arboreal
Inspired by wise presence and cooperative sustainment within the forest as it lives through seasons of change. This work is a continuation of the choreographer’s exploration with nature as collaborator.

LeAnne Smith, Kaysie Seitz Brown, Amanda McCorkle                         Performance
Be Still My Heart
A duet exploring the metaphorical, physical, and metaphysical aspects of the heart and heart space. This choreography is inspired by From Becoming Kuan Yin by Stephen Levine.

Paula Josa-Jones                                                                                           Performance
Cavallus
“Cavallus” explores the bio-synchrony of horse and rider in the language of hoof and foot, presence and absence, movement and stillness. It is inspired by the death of Paula’s beloved stallion Capprichio and the poem “My Hunger” by poet Jane Hirshfield: “The way the high-wire walker / must carry a pole / to make her arms longer /you carried me / I carried you / through this world.”

Sarah Ebert and Stephanie Schaaf                                                         Performance
Play/Pause
Play/Pause is a duet created with the intention to be performed live and is grounded in questions regarding ability, showing up, meeting one another authentically, and embracing non-fruition. In particular, one collaborator’s struggle with a chronic health issue presents a new rhythm within a creative process. Instead of continuing on ingrained paths of moving and responding, the work seeks new regulation and challenges ableist expectations surrounding virtuosity. A fundamental query: How can the work reflect the integrity of the collaboration despite the very real potential of one performer’s physical absence during the performance? Can it still be a duet? Without leaning on video or other forms of representation, can the presence of the ‘absent’ performer still play a critical role in the live performance of the dance? How does one person perform a duet?

SUNDAY, JUNE 26

9:00AM

Eva Maes                                                                                                       Presentation
Transmitting the Body
‘Transmitting the Body’ is an artistic research project, which Eva Maes has conducted since Fall 2020 at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp (B). The aim is to investigate how certain tools of communication support processes of transmission in diverse dance and movement realms, with the practice of Questions and Answers in the BMC curriculum, but also Lisa Nelson’s Blind Learning-score, for example, as soluble containers around questions posed. The research specter slowly but steadily reverses: How to translate a very specific and profound research methodology, a methodology of listening, an incorporated methodology, anchored through years of collective learning and communicating through diverse somatic approaches, at the moment of entering in an institutionalized field? What to preserve, what remains, how to translate? How to ‘transmit the body?’ This presentation thus starts from a personal account, but engages with questions that somatic inquirers share … wherever they move to.

Adel Andalibi                                                                                                Presentation
Somatic Agency; Lineage/counter-Lineage, Certification/counter-Certification
This line of inquiry explores how different takes on the idea of somatic agency translate into various models of teacher-student relationships in the somatic world. How are these teacher-student relationships crystallized in formalities, rituals, procedures, certifications, lineages, branches, etc.? To what level is the question of agency central to the discourse of various somatic disciplines? In this inquiry the presenter would like to explore these questions regarding contemporary disciplines of Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, Feldenkrais Method, etc., in parallel with living practices from Taoist tradition.

Pegge Vissicaro                                                                                             Presentation
Relating Self and Other: Intersubjectivity Through Dance-Nature Interaction
This presentation offers insights from research conducted between 2020 to 2021, involving semi-structured interviews with twelve professional, contemporary movement-based artists from the United States, Canada, Greece, and Japan, whose work is inspired and/or shaped by the natural world. It focuses on how affective relationships between humans and more-than-humans diminish the culture-nature binary to more evenly distribute agency that may counter planetary destruction, health crises, and social injustice caused by imperialist exceptionalism. Framed by phenomenological theory, this study investigates dance-nature interaction to explore the intersubjectivity of the body’s lived experience, which is always in relation to and with others. It also builds on relational ontologies that promote non-hierarchical alliances, affirming both human life and its environments as intertwined. The inquiry has transdisciplinary applications and contributes to the anthropology of situated embodiment.

Sylvia Maes                                                                                                   Workshop/Practice
Recognizing Water in Everyone
Humans are moist and slippery inside. The internal environment is primarily water. Within the cellular, tissue communities, interstitial, vascular, and nervous system fluids; the fluid base is water. Participants will explore water within the many bodily forms. The goal is to come to recognize more fully this common bond. Water is life -- life lives in water.

11:00AM

Lani Nahele, Daniel Kinsey                                                                         Workshop/Practice
Unwinding Cellular Racism -- for White People
Racism came into people’s bodies through ancestry, family culture, and society. It came in through the senses and the emotional and conceptual pathways. Messages of separatist values, superiority/inferiority, and fear were entrained. These imprints came in both consciously and unconsciously. To open the weave and unwind requires willingness, time, guidance, courage, and each other. In this workshop, external catalysts will be offered to be felt in the body at a cellular level, such as a piece of writing, a story, visual media, etc., to elicit memories, emotions, sensations, and ancestral history. Through touch, presence, and witnessing, these memories, cells, and tissues can be shifted, unwound, and made more whole. It is essential to recognize how long the road toward healing may be, that this will be a shallow dip into deep and wide waters of white peoples’ complicity in maintaining systemic racism. Participants may feel aware of these issues, but the body can carry it deeper than is known.

Hannah Park                                                                                                 Workshop/Practice
Developing Presence through Heart-Centered Movement
In light of the pandemic, it has become more imperative to be aware of the organs, especially the heart, the body’s main tool for grounding and conscious, physical reflection during challenging times. In this interactive experiential workshop with safe, easy-to-follow activities, participants explore an integrated approach to movement, the body, and consciousness, using breath, visualization, and touch to attune to the heart -- its anatomy, role, and function in the body, and interactions with other organs -- so that through the phenomenology of presence, participants can develop movement possibilities that embody resilience. The workshop concludes with a few suggested heart-focused rituals, a culminating movement improvisation, and a discussion about the implications of this experience in different movement practices and contexts.

Miroslav Petrovic                                                                                         Presentation
Embodied Teaching, Speaking, and Facilitating
Relationship is THE FOUNDATION for embodied speaking/teaching/facilitation, which allows people to create flow states within their crafts. It creates more engagement and retention and allows for students to begin to own the information as their own. Creating mastery within teaching, speaking, and facilitation is not something people are born with. Creating one-to-many relationships as in teaching/speaking is not running a process or a technique but an enlivening experience of meeting in the present moment. Many people can do this when working with people one-on-one, but it is a whole different dynamic when they stand before others. This obviously brings up unconscious patterning, habitual behaviors, etc. In this session participants will explore the pitfalls and virtues of working in this way with tangible takeaways to be applied in the next group engagement. Dissolve old patterns and stagnancy in teaching. Enliven teaching and create more engagement with students and listeners.

David Hurwith                                                                                              Workshop/Practice
Sourcing Inner Rhythms
The presenter’s work in the studio and with students has led him to a practice of listening and moving from the rhythms and qualities of the body’s functions. Breathing and blood circulation and then CSF flow and peristalsis functions have led him (present state of consciousness) to a vital and grounded place. Of course, it is the relationship of these functions and the witnessing of them that leads him to a resonant and useful embodiment. He would like to share his practice and explore the material together.

12:45 - 1:15 PM

Hanna Takashige, BMCA Board of Directors                                        CLOSING CIRCLE
The Embodied Voice
The conference participants will listen for and resound their singular vibration within the ancestral chorus. Hanna will bring her embodied voice and interactive storytelling as part of the ritual closing of the 2022 BMCA conference.

***Anytime***

Kim Sargent Wishart                                   Soundscape link -- ear buds recommended
See Where You Are: A Somatic Approach to Contemplative Photography
Contemplative photography is a somatic practice, attending to perception and presence. It invites synchronizing of body, mind, camera, and place, trading expectation for fresh experience. This workshop invites participants into a proprioceptive and visual exploration of their current location through somatization and contemplative photography practice, attuning to what BMC names the ‘pre-sensory motor focus’ -- how one’s perception is influenced by the choice of what to attend to. A link to audio instruction will be given, which can be heard on individual devices, allowing participation from anywhere. Guided somatic meditation will draw on BMC practice with a focus on dynamics of form and space, which leads into a guided photo walk. Participants will need a camera/phone to take photos and are welcome to upload images to a shared gallery.
 

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Presenter Bios

Amélie Gaulier (she/her, white-bodied) works as a BMC Practitioner, MNDFL mindfulness instructor/facilitator and is a member of ISMETA. On Lenape-Canarsie indigenous land, Brooklyn-based, her native country is France. She is engaged in Somatic Anti-Racist approaches with the group ‘In Our White Bodies.’ As a somatic artist, she has been teaching improvisation for 14 years. She recently completed a Masters Research Degree at the National Institute of Professorship and Education in Paris; her research focuses on enactive pedagogy and embodied cognition. She is inquiring about intergenerational and racialized trauma, co-creating individual and collective protocols through embodied listening, and collecting stories to foster empathy, compassion, self-agency, and collective thriving.

 

Adel Andalibi, PhD (ABD), is an Iranian anthropologist, somatic psychologist, movement educator, and a Taoist priest. He explores the exchanges between somatic practices through history and among contemporaries. Adel is a board member of the Commission on Visual Anthropology at International Union of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences (http://cva-iuaes.com ), Member of Asia committee at International Association for Creative Arts in Education and Therapy (IACAET, https://www.iacaet.org/board-and-committee), and has been teaching movement practices via the lenses of Contact Improvisation, Authentic Movement, and the Feldenkrais Method^® since 2000s. Currently, he is a resident scholar at Qian Yuan Taoist temple at Mt. Qian Fo in China, facilitating occasional retreats for visitors.

 

Alison Zuber has maintained a somatic private practice since 1982, where the primary focus of her work is facilitating developmental, cognitive, and movement integration for infants, children, and adults. She has sung the morning, danced the moonlight, and companioned wanderers as they traverse the great mystery we call Spirit. She is a BMC Teacher and Practitioner, an Infant Development Movement Educator, the co-founder, spiritual director, and Mashpiah Ruchanit of Zimrat Yah, (a small, post-denominational shul), and a Senior Practitioner and Advanced Instructor of Ortho-Bionomy^®. Her ongoing inquiry centers around specific moments of transformation and how we prepare ourselves.

 

Amaia Mugica is a theatre artist and researcher specialized in physical theatre and movement. Her work is in the intersection between physical theatre practices such as Suzuki, Viewpoints and Composition, and somatic movement practices (BMC). Her research interests have inclusivity and accessibility as the basis, and currently, she is researching gender-inclusive practices in Actor training. She also applies her movement and theatre skills as a performer and Movement director in cross-collaborative international projects alongside other artists from diverse artistic disciplines. Amaia has taught and performed internationally in countries such as Spain, UK, Australia, and Mexico.

 

Amanda Comstock is a BMC Somatic Movement Educator earned from Moving Within, in Loraine, Oregon. Her interests lie at the intersections and connections between the body and the world around, and exploring the intimacy of these connections.

 

Amanda McCorkle, MFA, is an award-winning choreographer, performer, and teacher from Austin, Texas. Her work has been commissioned and performed in many different settings, including Bedford, England; The Scotland Fringe Festival; Bangkok, Thailand; the 92nd Street Y in New York City; the American College Dance Festival; and many more. She is currently a Lecturer in the Dance Division at Texas State University and is the Head of the Bachelors of Arts program in Dance. Amanda’s research interests are centered around teaching movement integration from a somatic perspective. She is committed to celebrating the value and beauty of every person, and to facilitating movers in their experiential journey through the body.

 

Amanda Benzin is a somatically conscious, rhythmically and passionately driven educator, an Emmy-Award-winning performer, choreographer, and scholar artist originally from Buffalo, New York. She holds an MFA in Dance from CU Boulder with concentrations in performance, choreography, somatics, women and gender studies, and pedagogy. Amanda graduated summa cum laude from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a BFA in Dance and minor in Business Administration. Her current research exists at the intersection of pedagogy, ethical practices, somatic techniques, and vulnerability. She is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Dance and Dance Program Coordinator at Colorado Mesa University.

 

Andromeda Graziano trained in classical ballet at the Royal Ballet School and Merle Park Studios. She furthered her education with a BA (Hons) in Dance, Drama, and French at Middlesex University, and a One Year Special Certificate in Contemporary Dance and Choreography at London Contemporary Dance School. A Prince’s Trust Choreography Award with the Ballet of Zaragoza started her career as a professional dancer and choreographer and her dance company ‘White Monkey Trip’ toured the London contemporary dance circuit. She was the administrator for Palace Opera and the London Concertante Orchestra for performances at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, a U.K. tour, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. As a close friend of the Kubrick family, she was project co-ordinator for the ‘By Means of Music’ memorial concerts highlighting the music chosen by Stanley Kubrick in his films, with concerts held at the Barbican Theatre, London, and the Auditorium di Milano, Milan, Italy. Her ongoing desire to be further educated brought her to study Pilates Based Body Awareness and Body-Mind Centering. A BMC Somatic Movement Educator, Practitioner, and Teacher, her desire is to share how an integration of these methods can enable, enhance, encourage, and support both body and mind.

 

Annick Pütz is a freelance dancer, choreographer, and contemporary dance teacher at the Conservatoire du Nord, Luxembourg. She is a BMC Practitioner (2012) with Soma, France and was part of the 2018/19 Teacher Training program. In 2020 she started to teach BMC-based development principles to teachers from primary schools.

 

Annie Brook, PhD, is a somatic author/educator, therapist, and BMC Teacher. Her books share practical application practices that awaken embodied intelligence for play, learning, and in-depth inquiry. Annie started her somatic journey in 1978 and has never stopped exploring and sharing. She has an advanced online training program for therapists and specializes in trauma resolution from a pre-cognitive inquiry, directed to the cells and one’s life experience. Annie teaches in a playful weave of intelligent theory, movement, touch, and curiosity, and lives in Boulder, Colorado. Annie has performed several one-woman shows at the Boulder Fringe festival, at Studio Moves in Taos, NM, and for the Interarts concerts at Naropa University. In addition, Annie was guest artist in residence for the BFA in Dance for Naropa University (where she taught BMC and performance), directed a group improvisation using BMC for the Somatic Arts Performance, and performed in a student choreography group piece of the “satisfaction cycle” from her book, From Conception to Crawling. Annie brings together BMC and performance, improvisation, and dialog into interesting vignettes that share relevant topics of life.

 

Bebe Miller has a vision of dance and performance that resides in her faith in the moving body as a record of thought, experience, and beauty. Her aesthetic relies on the interplay of a work’s idea, its physicality, and the contributions of company members to fashion its singular voice. Since forming Bebe Miller Company in 1985, she has created over 75 works that have been performed in the U.S., Great Britain, the European Union, South Africa, Eritrea, and Peru. One of the inaugural class of Doris Duke Foundation Artists, she also a United States Artists Ford Fellow and has been named a Master of African American Choreography by the Kennedy Center. Bebe is a Distinguished Professor Emerita in The Ohio State University’s Department of Dance. A native New Yorker, she currently lives in Columbus, OH.

 

Bob Lehnberg received his certification as a BMC Practitioner in 1990, and in 2002 as a BMC Teacher. Bob has received teacher certifications for BMC Yoga, Integral Yoga, and Supreme Science of Qigong. He has been teaching in schools of massage therapy and programs of somatic training since 1990 and has had the good fortune to teach BMC and somatic practices throughout the U.S. and internationally in Europe, Canada, China, and Taiwan. Bob is a co-founder of Kinesthetic Learning Center in Durham, NC and has been on the faculty teaching and coordinating the BMC Somatic Movement Educator (SME) and Practitioner certification programs since 2007. He is coordinator of SME courses for Esprit en Mouvement in Canada and is co-director of the SME program in Taiwan.

 

Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen (OTR/L. RSMT, RSME) is a movement artist, researcher, educator and therapist, She has been working with movement, touch and the body-mind relationship for over 50 years. As innovator and leader in developing the Body-Mind Centering® approach, her work has influenced the fields of bodywork, movement, dance, 
yoga, body psychotherapy, childhood education and many other body-mind disciplines. In 1973, she founded The School for Body-Mind Centering which offers certification programs in seventeen countries.  Bonnie’s current publications include: Sensing, 
Feeling, and Action, The Mechanics of Vocal Expression and Basic Neuocellular Patterns: Exploring Developmental Movement 

 

Brae Onnah Weil, (CMT, CTBMD), theatre artist, somatic movement educator, and massage therapist, with a certification in Somatic Movement Education from the Moving On Center, certified as a BodyMind Dancing^© teacher, and with a background in ecology and systems science. They are presently completing training as a Dynamic Embodiment™ practitioner while moderating/ facilitating the Socially Conscious Somatics Forum as part of Dr. Martha Eddy’s programs. Brae is part of the somatic abolitionist movement with experience working to focus attention on the somatization of the trauma and the impacts of systems of oppression. They have been co-facilitating workshops to continue breaking down barriers and foster curiosity about a new cultural context for living into the transformation of these patterns.

 

brooke smiley - Rooting in risk and love, brooke smiley’s work enlivens public art experiences as both diplomacy and education. She re-centers public spaces and whom they serve by guiding creative processes with Native and non-Native communities, National Parks, and institutions worldwide. brooke uplifts the complexity of Contemporary Native Identity across generations through the collaborative creation of embodied earth markers and multisensory dance performances to re-map our worlds. A Wah-zha-zhe (Osage) body and earth artist and educator, brooke invites collaborative spaces of remembering to tell stories of the land and the bodies that live here. brooke smiley is honored to be in the inaugural BMC SME class at Moving Within, continuing as a practitioner, studying SE and trauma work from Western and Indigenous perspectives.

 

Cathy Boyce, BSc., is a Kinesiologist Osteopathic Practitioner and Founder of Begin Moves. Cathy has been helping people of all ages recover their ability to move better and improve their health for thirty years. She combines a passive and active approach with her clients. Her passion for human movement and its impact on one’s state of wellbeing was motivation for her continued post-graduate studies in the field of Pediatric Biodynamics, Primary Reflex Movement Patterns, Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, Somatics, and Qi gong. Cathy presently sees patients at the Natural Health Clinic of Halton and YogaMama’s (Pediatric Clinic) in Toronto and teaches Begin Move classes on-line to therapists, actors, and adults of all ages.

 

Christine Cole, RSMT, the founder and director of a somatic body training program, is an expert in the embodiment of human development. On the leading edge of research about somatic movement education and therapy, she displays a radical trust in embodied experience as the primary way for groups to co-create knowledge. As a result of 30 years of engaging deeply in learning and teaching the somatic body practices of Body-Mind Centering, dance/movement, and bodywork, Christine clearly embodies the material she has evolved and models a deep understanding of how the body’s systems change in various developmental stages. A BMC Teacher and practitioner of integrative acupressure and infinity healing, she has taught at the School for Body-Mind Centering in Amherst and Amsterdam and runs her own trainings in Boston, Vermont, Montreal and Northampton, MA. She also maintains a private practice in developmental bodywork in downtown Northampton. Christine has long-term practices in contact improvisation, post-modern and improvisational dance, authentic movement, improvisational theater, writing, and vocal training.

 

Cole Garlando is a maker based in Columbus, Ohio. Interested in learning through movement and somatic experiences, Garlando’s work focuses on collaboration; imagination, and intuition; cosmological inquiry; philosophies attending to self as a relational pattern of being; phenomenology and the noumenon; abolition and change – with a belief in creative process as inquiry and as a space for internal and societal r/evolution. Absorbed in the concepts and non/material (or process) of LIGHT and TIME in all its ripples of form, Cole loves inquiry and the promise of existence, and believes we as beings are like projectors aimed at one another. We project our story and it lights all that we see. How do the inner workings of our individual “projector” and its processes interact with that of others and what reality is thrown/known? What do we see? What do you see as me? What are your layers of experience that light your way? How has living in this society created who each of us feels to be. How is it that when we communicate, we understand something, even if an understanding is not in the language you speak or precisely what you mean, we understand something. May all beings feel love. May all beings feel peace. May all beings feel joy. May all beings feel safe. How do we take action/what actions do we each take to make “may it be so” a reality?

 

Colleen Jorgenson is an Osteopath, a graduate of Pain Care U’s Professional Pain Care program, a Pain Care Aware Trainer and a therapeutic Pilates, yoga, and somatics teacher. She started dancing at the age of 3 and has not stopped exploring movement since! A deep fascination with how the body moves led Colleen to a B.Sc in Exercise Science with a specialization in Athletic Therapy from Concordia University in 1995 and a Rehab Pilates certification in 1996. Colleen uses palpation and curiosity to explore how the body, mind, and spirit are interconnected. She holds an Osteopathic degree from Le Collège d'Études Ostéopathiques de Montréal (CEO) in 2005 and completed yoga teacher certification in 2018. In 1997 Colleen founded CORE BASICS - Centre d’Osteopathie et Pilates.

 

Coco Loupe - Ask the body. As a dance artist and educator, CoCo is continuously searching for new pathways in the body/brain that lead to greater physical and expressive fluency and more nuanced ways of presenting, through choreography, interior landscapes, and platforms of the human experience. Make the world. CoCo works to bring herself and others closer to the joy of moving in connection to space and time by facilitating dance practices for all who are interested. She also strives to make compelling and evocative dances that point to the many ways in which we create and hold our individual and collective worlds together. Move. Connect. Create. Be well.

 

Cynthia J Williams, MFA Connecticut College, BFA University of Utah, is a Professor of Dance at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, teaching composition, dance history, improvisation, modern dance technique and FY Seminars. She is a certified teacher of Bill Evans’ Laban Bartenieff dance technique and is co-coordinator of the Somatic Dance Conference and Performance Festivals since their inception in 2013 and the Bill Evans Teachers Intensives (Northeast). A choreographer, lighting designer, and dance scholar, she is currently writing about contemporary choreographers, working on a commissioned solo from Paula Josa-Jones, and is pursuing certification in Body-Mind Centering.

 

Daniel Kinsey (he/his, cis male, European American) is a social worker, counsellor, tutor of writing, group leader, a writer, mover, peace corps volunteer, community citizen, body worker, and theatre practitioner and enthusiast. He is proud of his many aquarian planets that he blames for his steadfast enthusiasm for the beautiful world that is here always, and is arriving in all ways.

 

David Hurwith made a life dancing and performing for three decades. His performance work has been seen at venues large and small around the world. In the midst of that exploration, the study of the body’s natural expression and health supplanted an art career. For the last 25 years, he has been offering Authentic Movement and Experiential Anatomy. Mr. Hurwith enjoyed teaching at the University of California, Santa Barbara, The California Institute of the Arts, Movement Research in New York City, School for New Dance Development, Amsterdam, NL, Institute for Art Therapy and Transpersonal Psychology, Bern, Switzerland, SUNY Purchase, Purchase, New York, and The Penland School for Crafts, Penland, North Carolina. Now, Mr. Hurwith helps people understand how the body functions and expresses itself in movement. He offers private sessions and teaches a breath and movement class online, every Tuesday at 9:30 am Pacific Standard Time. The class is free or by donation. David is thankful for his teachers, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen as a healer, Steve Paxton as an artist, and to Janet Adler for being instrumental in creating the form of Authentic Movement. The examples of Alison Zuber, Gail Turner, Vera Orlock, Erik Beeler, and Lisa Nelson inspire me. All the students and clients who join me on the path of understanding and embodiment propel my work with their readiness. Mirah Love, my wife, leads by example, and Elon, my son, is my sun.

 

Dawn Karlovsky is the Founder and Artistic Director of Karlovsky & Company Dance, a St. Louis-based contemporary modern dance company and 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization. Karlovsky’s movement language is somatically inspired, emphasizing the detailed use of touch and spatial and sensory awareness. Dawn maintains a private teaching practice in the Alexander Technique^® and teaches Modern Dance and The Alexander Technique at Washington University and in the Departments of Dance and Music at Webster University in St. Louis. Dawn holds a MFA in Choreography from the University of Utah, a BA in Dance Performance from Northern Illinois University, and is a nationally certified teacher of the Alexander Technique (AmSAT) since 2004.

 

Debra Wales has experienced twenty-five years professionally, a life-time experientially, seventy-eight countries, and counting - They say the journey is as important as the destination - it surely is for Debra. She is a certified Post Traumatic Growth, Enneagram and mBIT coach; Yoga therapist, Energy healer and Bodyworker, and currently SME student. She’s worked on cruise lines and owned a successful studio in Lake Como working with high-end fashion designers and athletes. Diagnosed Autistic, Borderline PD, and Complex trauma, she’s loved and hated her life, lived it and almost lost it, yet she believes the liberation and empowerment that have come from taking complete responsibility for her life, regardless of what has been thrown at her, from whom and where, have modelled her into the resilient, compassionate, and inspirational person she is today. Thank You for being here.

 

Diego Pizarro holds a PhD in Performing Arts and has been a professor at the Instituto Federal de Brasília since 2010. He is a dancer, choreographer, researcher, and BMC Teacher as well as a practitioner of Articulation and Muscle Chains Method GDS. Currently, he is a BMCA board member and editorial board member of Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices.

 

E.E. Balcos, MFA, RSDE, from Minneapolis, Minnesota, is a Professor of Dance at UNC Charlotte and has led a professional career as a dancer and choreographer for over 35 years. He was introduced to Body-Mind Centering-based dance classes with Margie Fargnoli in the late 80s and studied Body-Mind Dance with Martha Eddy at Bates Dance Festival in the early 90s. In 2014, he began BMC coursework for an SME certification at the Kinesthetic Learning Center with Maryska Bigos and currently studies at Espirit en Mouvement with Mariko Tanabe and Sonder Movement Project with Amy Matthews. In 2021 he became an RSDE with ISMETA and began training as a BMD teacher with Martha Eddy. He has presented his work in dance and somatic practice conferences and festivals internationally.

 

Elizabeth Caron, DO, is the founder of Osteopathic Healthcare, a traditional Osteopathic Practice based in Talent, OR, treating all ages, including pregnancy and children. This is both an Osteopathic educational center and a medical clinic. The arts inform Dr. Caron’s work; the roots of this approach are from a 10-year professional career in modern dance, mostly with Bebe Miller & Co. She is on the Biodynamic faculty founded by James Jealous, DO, since 2010 and was a student of his from 1997 until his death in February 2021. She has three board certification specialties: Neuromusculoskeletal/Osteopathic Manipulative Medicine, Pain Medicine, and Integrative Medicine.

 

Erika Berland, a BMC Practitioner, is a nationally Registered Movement Therapist and licensed Massage Therapist. She has an extensive background as a teacher and performer and has taught workshops throughout the U.S. and Europe. Erika was a founding faculty and co-creator of the unique movement curriculum of the MFA Theater: Contemporary Performance Program at Naropa University (2004-2020). She is a long-time teacher of meditation and her research includes the integration of meditation practice and view with performance techniques and holistic support for the performer. Her publications include her book Sitting: The Physical Art of Meditation, and chapters in the books Movement for Actors, 2nd ed. and Physical Dramaturgy: Perspectives From The Field.

 

Eva Maes - After obtaining a Master in History at the University of Ghent, Eva Maes studied dance at the International program at Cunningham Dance Studio (NY) and at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. In 2003 she met the work of Lisa Nelson and started her studies at the School for Body-Mind Centering (USA), where she graduated in 2006 as Practitioner. In 2018-2019, she also completed the BMC Teacher Training (IT). Other collaborations in dance include Chantal Yzermans/Radical Low and Anouk Llaurens. Sharing movement classes with children, adolescents, and adults, fluctuating continuously between educational, artistic, and research environments, she explores embodiment as the core theme of dance.

 

Gill Wright Miller, Professor of Dance and Women’s and Gender Studies, has been at Denison full-time since 1981. Dr. Miller earned her PhD from New York University in Dance and Women’s Studies, her MA from Wesleyan University in Movement Studies, and her BFA in Performance from Denison University. Dr. Miller’s written research concerns public constructions of the pregnant body, healing from a developmental movement base, and body politics in general. She is highly involved in the world of experiential anatomy, especially Body-Mind Centering. She has received several grants for her work. Dr. Miller teaches coursework in somatics, movement analysis, and cultural studies. Besides teaching somatics and movement analysis every year, her recent courses include topics in dance’s cultural studies.

 

Hanna Takashige, RSME Registered Somatic Movement Educator, brings playful, embodied language to traditional storytelling. She has created programs for pediatric, early childhood, and long term care populations. Hanna’s influences range from her artist parents, growing up in the woods, and activism in movements for social change, to the study and practice of Qi Gong, Yoga, touch therapies, dance, song, theater and somatic movement. She is intrigued by transmission of the singular, embodied voice of an individual within the community field. Laura Paull, for The Huffington Post, described Hanna’s interactive vocalization as “a kind of jazz rift of connected sounds and expressions, spanning a wide spectrum of possibilities, entirely nonverbal -- and deeply emotive.”

 

Hannah Park is an associate professor and director of the dance program at Iona College, NY, where she also serves as the artistic director of the residential dance ensemble. Her current research interests encompass dance and creative processes—the application of somatics in dance and social justice education, community engagement, and arts entrepreneurship education. She holds a PhD in dance education from Temple University, an MFA in dance performance and choreography from Tisch NYU, and a BFA in dance performance and choreography from the SUNY Purchase, and is a somatic practitioner certified in Laban Movement Analysis/Bartenieff Movement Fundamentals and Body Mind Dancing.

 

Hazal Selçuk, MA, MFA, LMFT, is a licensed psychotherapist, musician, and performer. Hazal received her Master’s (MA) in Counselling Psychology from the California Institute of Integral Studies. Before becoming a therapist Hazal performed as a singer and movement theater artist in Turkey and Europe. She has taught movement for actors and the relationship between healing and the arts in various universities and art centers in Turkey, Canada, and the U.S. She holds a BFA from the Boston Conservatory and an MFA from York University in Toronto. Hazal has received credentials in the following specializations: Registered Expressive Arts Therapist (REAT), Registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (RSME/T), and Registered Drama Therapist (RDT). She now lives in California.

 

Heike Kuhlmann (she/-), dancer, choreographer, RSDME, BMC-SME, MA Choreography, Diploma IBMT, choregraphed and organized the Global Water Dances in Berlin from 2010-2021, is a teacher in the education program of the Somatische Akademie Berlin and in the field of cultural education. For her art, movement, somatics, and activism are aspects of the same thing -- expressions of being alive. Being alive is being in cha(n/r)ge.

 

Ivan Vuković is a Yoga of Heart teacher, a musician, and a movement artist from Zagreb, Croatia. He is currently undergoing the final stages of BMC SME program, on his way to becoming the first BMC professional in his country of Croatia.

 

Jorge Samuel Faria is a multifaceted artist. His artistry is a heritage left by his grandparents, people involved with the first school of Samba of his hometown. That was the place that sparked his love and interest for movement, fashion, and music. His first dance class was at the age of 6; as a young adult he went on to study dance at the Paraná State University (Brazil), expecting to graduate July 2022. Samuel has been overseas twice to study Body-Mind Centering with the mentoring support of Wendy Hambidge. Samuel and Wendy met in 2018, when his professor, Marila Velloso, asked him to translate for Wendy while she was a guest artist at Paraná State University. From the moment of their meeting there was interest in doing work and building bonds, and there has been a creative friendship ever since.

 

Kate Tarlow Morgan, dancer, writer, is managing editor of Currents Journal of the Body-Mind Centering Association and consulting editor of Lost and Found: Poetics Document Initiative at Center for Humanities (C.U.N.Y). Kate, a Teacher of BMC and The Rhythms Fundamentals^©, has created a synergistic approach to the body through natural movement, choreographic practices, and writing.

 

Katiane Negrão, body and voice artist, BMC Somatic Movement Educator, graduated in Performing Arts Teaching at UFOP (University of Ouro Preto), completed the Bio-Psicology Course with Susan Andrews at Future Vision Institute. Co-director and co-founder of Tato Company that researches physical dramaturgy in the animation theatre. Founder of Psoas & Psoinhas group that investigates dance for babies and toddlers, departing from somatic principles. Teaches workshops; advising, artistic direction, and movement orientation for various other groups, artists, and projects in Brazil and abroad.

 

Kaysie Seitz Brown is an award-winning educator, choreographer, and dancer based in Austin, TX, and an Associate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Dance at Texas State University. Before returning to her home state of Texas Brown resided in New York City, where she studied with Dance Education Laboratory and danced, choreographed, and taught with organizations including LEAP, Young Audiences New York, and Notes in Motion. Brown is also the director of the arts education outreach program Creation in Motion, a multi-faceted program that includes Creation in Motion Touring Ensemble for Young Audiences or CIM TEYA, an ensemble made up of dance majors who learn repertoire and create new interactive works based on academics and social and emotional topics for youth.

 

Kim Sargent-Wishart is a movement educator, artist, researcher, and writer with an interest in dialogue and exchange between somatic, creative, and contemplative practices. She has a BA in Dance and a PhD in Performance Studies, is a BMC Teacher and a Registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (ISMETA). Based on the Bellarine Peninsula in Australia, Kim is the co-director of Somatic Education Australasia, offering the Body-Mind Centering licensed Somatic Movement Education program in Melbourne.

 

Kim Kaufman is a BMC practitioner, Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator, embodied anatomy teacher, and has an M.A. in Expressive Arts Therapy. She has had a private Movement Therapy Practice for over 30 years. She has taught embodied anatomy workshops and classes for massage therapists, yoga teachers, dancers, and other interested adults, as well as classes for children and teenagers. Kim is a poet and an art quilter currently working on a series called Landscapes of the Body.

 

Lale Madenoglu - Born in 1996 in Izmir/Turkey, Lale Madenoglu graduated from Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, Istanbul State Conservatory, Contemporary Dance Department. She performed her own choreographies in Izmir, Istanbul, St. Petersburg, Budapest, Debrecen, and Moscow. In 2019, she attended her first workshop with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and volunteered at the 34th BMCA Annual Conference. Since then, she has been involved with BMC and has been integrating dance and BMC practices.

 

Lisa Lani Nahele-Schmidt (she/her/hers, cis female, European American) has been a lifelong movement educator, bodyworker, choreographer, and performer. She received her BFA from SUNY Purchase, and performed with the Trisha Brown Dance Company for seven years. During her tenure teaching and performing in Europe, she was awarded a commission to make work in Germany. Collaborators in Europe and the United States have included Frey Faust, Deiter Heitkamp, Ka Rustler, Eva Geueke, Catherine Musinsky, Olivier Besson and Jen Polins, among others. Professor of dance and anatomy at Springfield College, she has guest taught at Bard, Marlboro, Smith, Julliard, and Keene Colleges. A BMC Practitioner since 1994, she is also trained and certified in Gyrotonic, Gyrokinesis, Pilates, Circulatory Massage and Reiki. She is the director of Studio rEvolution in Florence, MA, where she runs Embodied Healing, her private bodywork practice.

 

LeAnne Smith holds a MFA Degree from Case Western Reserve University and is a Professor of Dance at Texas State University, where she has been a faculty member since 1983. In collaboration with the Erick Hawkins Dance Foundation, she works to maintain the Hawkins archives as a founding member of Hawkins West Institute. In July 2016, LeAnne served as the on-site coordinator for the Body Mind Centering North American International Conference held at Texas State University. A recipient of the Texas State Presidential Award for Scholarly/Creative Activities, LeAnne has actively choreographed and performed nationally and internationally throughout her 4-decade career. Somatic Studies continue to be a vital part of her ongoing practical research.

 

Lilian Vilela is a dance artist and professor in undergraduate and graduate programs of the Performing Arts at São Paulo State University (UNESP-BRASIL). She holds BAs in Dance performance and Dance Education and a PhD in Dance Education. She graduated as a BMC Somatic Movement Educator and is the author of several articles and books in dance, arts, and education. She is a creator and researcher in dance and contemporary performing arts body practices.

 

Lola Gonthier, Founder of Vital Cuerpo BMC Laboratory, is a dancer and Somatic Movement Educator. She offers dance and movement theatre performances. Lola is disabled because of narcolepsy-cataplexy social incompatibility, notably all along her scolarity. Due to mistreatment to harassment passing through judgment, Lola suffered from social injustice in the education world due to her inability to adapt to her particular sleeping, rare disease needs. She claims it is difficult to blame anyone, even the teachers or the pedagogic team coordination. Narcolepsy is too rare to understand and there are no trainings that address adaptation. Lola has found her own way to become ‘somebody’ in this society. When she met BMC and was welcomed to join the Circle, then she started to become someone again.

 

Luciana Barone is a Brazilian researcher, professor, actress and theater director. She has a Bachelor in Performing Arts, a Masters and a PhD by the Multimedia Department of the Arts Institute (UNICAMP). She is a specialist in Jungian Psychology and a Somatic Movement Educator by the Body-Mind Centering(R) program. In 2019 she did her post-doctoral research on Body-mind centering(R) as a support to Michael Chekhov’s Acting Technique. Since 2008, she is an undergraduates Professor for the Performing Arts program at UNESPAR. She  directed her own written plays  Isadora, the dance of destiny and Ophelia in Off, beyond others, she performed in the dance solo Desvio and also in her own written theatrical solo, Iminência. In 2010 she took part in an observation internship with Robert Lepage / Ex Machina (Metropolitan Opera House, New York).

 

Margaret Guay is a BMC Teacher, Practitioner, and Massage Therapist with a private practice in Northampton, MA. She is an artist whose illustrations are in The Basic Neurocellular Patterns by Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen. Creating art has been an essential part of her learning, developing, experiencing, and expressing the many and varied somatic experiences of life!

 

Margery Segal - Before becoming a licensed professional counsellor and a movement therapist, Margery Segal was a professional dancer, choreographer, and theater artist who founded a dance company and directed a yoga and advanced bodywork studio. She is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist with a specialty in development and Pre and Perinatal Birth Attachment Therapy. Margery has a Master’s in Counselling Psychology. Her certifications include: Licensed Professional Counsellor, BMC Practitioner and Teacher, Masters in Counselling Psychology, Registered Somatic Movement Therapist w/the International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association, Infant Developmental Movement Educator, Certified Pre and Perinatal Birth Attachment Practitioner, Somatic Experiencing^® provider.

 

Mariah Maloney, originally from Homer, Alaska, is a New York dance artist presenting choreography nationally and internationally. Mariah’s somatic movement practice spans over thirty years learning inside Trisha Brown’s choreography, the Alexander Technique, Improvisation, and Body-Mind Centering. Recently, over the past ten years, Mariah has engaged in workshops with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, where she has delighted in her experiences. Mariah is a former Trisha Brown Dance Company soloist and ensemble dancer (1995-2002), who works in re-staging projects of Trisha’s work and serves as TBDC faculty in teaching workshops at universities and dance companies in the United States and abroad. Mariah has toured her work throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and South America.

 

Mariko Tanabe is the Director of the BMC Licensed Training Program in Quebec, a Certified Teacher of BMC, and adjunct professor in the graduate studies of the Dance Department at the Université du Québec. Much or her life’s work has been as a dance artist and choreographer, collaborating with composers and filmmakers. She enjoys working as a mentor and artistic consultant with musicians, dance companies, choreographers, and artists and at universities, art centers, and schools throughout the world. She has been performing and presenting her choreographic works for over 35 years in Asia, Europe, and North America and for 12 years she worked with American dance master Erick Hawkins in NYC as a principal dancer and teacher.

 

Marila Velloso is a dance artist and professor at the dance department of UNESPAR-BRASIL since 1991. She directs the Research group in dance and holds a PhD in Performing Arts from UFBA. She is also a BMC Teacher and graduated from the School of Body-Mind Centering.
 

Marion Ramirez - Puerto Rican dance artist, is dedicated to the art of improvisation as a tool for experiencing bodily agency and empathy. She holds a BFA from The Laban Center London and an MFA from Temple University. Currently, she offers Somatic Movement Education and Therapy as a Dynamic Embodiment practitioner, after studying with Dr. Martha Eddy, and is in training in Craniosacral Fascial Therapy. She founded and directs caracola-somatic movement for the whole family, facilitating movement sessions online and in-person to individuals and family members of all ages to support the bonds across generations. She teaches Contact Improvisation and Somatics at Temple University and Drexel University, as well as in numerous international festivals in Cuba, Puerto Rico, Germany, and the U.S.

 

Martha Eddy, RSMT/E, CMA, DEP, BMC Teacher since 1984, is a performer, researcher, first Geraldine Ferraro Fellow of Social Justice at MMM.org, world-wide lecturer and author. Her book Mindful Movement: the Evolution of the Somatic Arts and Conscious Action speaks to the history of the somatic field. A new book, Dynamic Embodiment of the Sun Salutation, is full of BMC neuroendocrinology. Her work centers in eco-somatics (www.GlobalWaterDances.org), social somatics (www.MovingOnCenter.org), and peace education/violence prevention. She is best known for applying somatic movement, dance, and exercise to programs for children with diverse learning and physical challenges (www.WellnessCKE.net), and adults overcoming the side-effects of treatment of life-threatening diseases and trauma (www.MovingForLife.org).

 

Maruma Rodríguez is a Venezuelan artist based in Madrid. She explores relationships between art, body, and nature. As an artist and educator, she facilitates processes that refine sensitivity, expanding awareness and integrating attention, intention, and action. She has a BFA in Performative Arts from the Central University of Venezuela. She serves as an artist researcher at the Centro del Movimiento Creador, an international organization for the developing of consciousness through Art. Maruma is a professional registered by ISMETA and is a BMC Somatic Movement Educator, Practitioner, and Teacher. Maruma teaches BMC in Madrid and in several BMC official trainings in Spanish.

 

Mary Ann Rund (aka Reis), MFA, SME, IDME, is an educator and dance artist in the fields of dance and somatic studies whose work is greatly influenced by her BMC training with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Maryska Bigos. She has been teaching for several decades in institutions, including Washington University and Webster University in St. Louis, MO. Mary Ann serves on the Membership Committee of the BMCA.

 

Michelle Cohen, MA, is a registered somatic movement therapist/educator and currently in the IDME program directed by Amy Matthews. She helps children through seniors connect to their bodies and deep knowing through movement, ritualized practices, and embodied spirit coaching. She began her BMC training with Dr. Martha Eddy in 2007 and is a certified Dynamic Embodiment Practitioner and Body-Mind Dancing Teacher and in 2014 became a BMC Embodied Yoga Teacher.

 

Michele Feldheim has been working in the field of somatic therapy for over thirty years, as movement professional, bodyworker, educator, and pioneer/researcher. She is a BMC Practitioner and Teacher, Massage Therapist, Pilates Trainer and Movement Therapist, with training in Polarity Therapy and Energy Work. Michele is an experienced meditator in the Buddhist tradition and a professional-level pianist and composer. Since Covid, Michele has been learning and exploring the Energy teachings of the Eden Method and Prune Harris and has found that to be a great adjunct and addition to working with the physical body and mind.

 

Mina Estrada has been known to say things like “I care deeply about dance and community” and “dance is my best friend,” and she means it… she really means it. Mina attempts to commit a substantial amount of time to teaching, creating, and facilitating some kind of dance experience for herself and those who care to join. She received her MFA in Dance at Temple University, and her choreography and workshops, which are rooted in contemporary movement concepts and improvisation, have been commissioned by colleges, high school and studio dance programs, and professional companies around the country. Mina currently resides in Wichita, KS, where she is the Managing Director of the Regina Klenjoski Dance Company; teaching and making dance; and working on Benevolent Instruction.

 

Miranda Zapata was born and raised in San Juan, Texas. She received her BFA in Dance from Sam Houston State University. Zapata then moved to Los Angeles, California where she danced professionally and taught at a Charter School for underprivileged children for three years. Zapata is a dance artist who draws on personal experiences and current social-political issues to reflect how storytelling through movement can be a framework for social change. She is currently pursuing her MFA in Dance and certification in Multicultural Women’s and Gender Studies at Texas Woman’s University. She focuses on creating empathy and awareness towards humanitarian and social justice issues through her artistic voice.

 

Miroslav Petrovic is a TedX speaker, teacher, facilitator, and founder of The Enlivened Speaking Institute. He has worked with over 5,000 people across the world, supporting them to bring their message to the world. He teaches how to go beyond didactic teaching to create transmission in an embodied way that is enlivening and engaging for audiences. Last year he completed a thesis on the topic of embodied teaching and learning and how it creates more engagement within teaching dynamics. His message and ‘off the beaten path’ approach speaks to thought leaders, future visionaries, progressive educators, and transformational leaders who are empowered to move away from traditional teaching methodologies and embrace a deeper embodied approach.

 

Natasha Alhadeff-Jones holds a Masters in Dance Education from Teachers College, Columbia University and is a Certified Movement Analyst from the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies. She is currently training to become a Dynamic Embodiment Practitioner. She has taught dance to children and adults in schools and non-profit organizations in the U.S and Switzerland. In her current roles as Artistic Director at the Sunkhronos Institute and steering committee member of Global Water Dances, Natasha promotes individual and collective transformations by teaching movement workshops, producing site-specific dance, and facilitating professional development, informed by principles of dance education, eco-somatics and her contemporary engagement with dances of the African diaspora.

 

Nicole Bindler is a dance-maker, BMC Practitioner, writer, and activist. Her work has been presented at festivals, conferences, and intensives throughout the U.S., Canada, Argentina, and Europe, and in Tokyo, Beirut, Bethlehem, Mexico City, and Quito. Recent projects include teaching about consent culture and disability justice in contact improvisation; somatic research on the embryology of the genitalia from a non-binary perspective; collaborations with Diyar Theatre in Bethlehem, Palestine; teaching experimental classes such as Embodying Neuroqueer/ Neuroqueering Embodiment and Polyvagal Theory and Protest through freeskewl; and presentations about rebuilding in-person dance and somatics communities in ways that tangibly address the inequities laid bare by the pandemic.

 

Nina Wehnert is a BMC Teacher, dancer, Yoga and CI Teacher and a core staff member of moveus, the licensed BMC Training Program in Germany. She offers her own BMC Trainings in Germany and teaches workshops and classes around Europe and intensives at CI Festivals.  Since 2020 Nina has taught regular online classes.

 

Noelle Chun (she/her) is a Seattle-based dance artist specializing in the performance of improvisation and choreographies emerging from ideas grounded in: collaborative authorship – sharing the labor of making dances and creative products with all participants; somatic inquiry – creating space for sensing and articulating the awareness, attention, and intention of our bodily experience; efforts to deconstruct boundaries between practice and performance - expanding ideas about the context and conditions of where and when the event of performance happens. Her work has been presented at parks, intimate gallery/studio spaces, and traditional theater venues. In Seattle, she continues to search for ways her dance practice crosses over into other realms of work and life.

 

Odile Seitz-Walser, born in France, has lived for 21 years in Berlin, Germany. She studied in Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique et de Danse in Lyon and danced in different dance companies and with many choreographers in France and in Berlin. Since 2011 she has worked as a BMC Practitioner, dancer, and choreographer, as well as Heilpraktiker for Craniosacral Therapie. She teaches internationally at diverse dance schools in Berlin, in Potsdam and high schools for Dance and Choreography in Berlin (HZT). Since 2019 she is a Teacher of BMC and works regularly for Soma, the French BMC School, and is part of the pedagogical team of moveus, the German BMC school.

 

Patricia Caetano is a Somatic Movement Educator – SME/BMC® and an artist of dance field. She is currently Professor in Instituto de Cultura e Arte, at Universidade Federal do Ceará - UFC (Fortaleza-Ceará), where she teaches in Master in Arts and in the BA in Dance. 

 

Patricia Ethridge, BMC Practitioner, is on BMCA’s Journal Editorial Board, a member of the Somatic Writing Collective, and a co-editor of Exploring Body-Mind Centering (2011). She was President of BMCA’s Board for 10 years and has served on various committees. She is also an acupuncturist, massage therapist, daily dancer, and avid bird watcher who resides in New York City.

 

Paula Josa-Jones is a dance and performance artist who brings an improvisational perspective to all of her work. She is a Certified Laban Movement Analyst (CLMA) and a Registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist (RSMET). She is a Guild-certified Tellington TTEAM practitioner and a Somatic Experiencing practitioner. Her writings on movement and dance have been published in Contact Quarterly for the past 30 years. Her book, Our Horses, Ourselves: Discovering the Common Body was published by Trafalgar Square Books in 2017. As the creator of Embodied Equine Experiencing™, she teaches an intuitive, improvisational approach to the human-horse bond with movement and touch, as well as riding and performing with her horses Izarra, Amadeo, and Blue.

 

Pegge Vissicaro is Artistic Director of Terra Dance Company, Executive Director of Cross-Cultural Dance Resources, Inc, and Professor Emerita of Dance at Arizona State University. Since 2018, she has served on the faculty at Northern Arizona University teaching courses focused on somatic practices, creativity, and anthropology. Dr. Vissicaro -- a Fulbright Scholar and Fulbright Specialist -- facilitates seminars and classes as well as presents research at universities and conferences throughout the world. Areas of expertise include community dance -- especially working with refugees and the elderly, nature-based expressive arts, and dance cultural study. Her newest publication, the second edition of Studying Dance Cultures in Dynamic Contexts: Discourse and Dialogue, will be available in fall 2022.

 

Remo Rostagno, born in 1953, is an Italian dancer, choreographer, BMC Practitioner (1999), Craniosacral Biodynamics Therapist (2021), and an Instructor with the Italian Biodynamic Craniosacral Association (A.C.S.I.). Remo’s seminars offer and share a deep rooted knowledge and embodiment of the interior microcosmos and of the relationship between internal images and metaphors, using the expression of movement and dance in the space. Remo has a great passion for all the different stages of human development, from the moment of conception (and even before), through embryonic and fetal development until adult life and the last moment of transformation in death. Remo is dedicated to cultural ecology and the work of David Abram. Together with Rosella Denicolò, he founded “In Flow“ a cultural association and school for Craniosacral Biodynamics Training. Remo is the founder of “In Flow Biodinamica Torino” E.T.S. Remo lives part of the year in Italy and part of the year in South England, where he has a little house with a garden, together with his long-term partner Henry Montes.

 

Ricardo Alvarenga Artist of the body and image. He is a native of the Triângulo Mineiro, where he currently works as a professor in the Dance Course at the Federal University of Uberlândia. He has a degree in Biology from UFU and a Master’s degree from the Postgraduate Program in Dance at the Federal University of Bahia. In his artistic-academic path, he manages questions and compositions that permeate knowledge of the arts and philosophy, the practices of sensoriality and the politics of insurgency that rise against the normative white hetero cis patriarchal project. His works take place in the transit between contemporary dance, performance, photography, video, and installation.

 

river jackson-patton river is an embodied artist, educator & ethnoautobiographer. they live on stolen Comanche & Caddo land in dallas, texas, and are a non-binary transgender person of mostly Celtic ancestry. their creative practices prioritize the body, thus, “work-of-body”: being trans; cross-cultural ecology extending the body to where we live; a traumatic brain injury survivor; a Covid long-hauler; and a student of somatics for 10 years. river's healing practices repattern, repair & remember our bodies & where we live. their events are participatory, embodied, performative, d(eco)lonial, & relational. river has a ph.d. in human science. they co-authored a college textbook on ethnoautobiography, have other books in process, and have had several performative art shows in dallas.

 

Rosana Barragan (MFA, RSME, CTBMD), dance and movement artist and educator with a Master’s degree in Dance Studies from the Laban Centre, certified as a BodyMind Dancing teacher and registered through ISMETA as a Dynamic Embodiment practitioner. She is currently in the Body-Mind Centering training program at Esprit en Mouvement. Rosana has worked as a professor of dance at universities in her native Colombia and is an Associate Professor at Saint Mary’s College of California, where she founded and directed an MFA in Dance program with a strong focus on somatics and social justice. An advocate of dance and somatics on the West Coast; has publications in Spanish; is a peer reviewer for journals; guest faculty for Dr. Martha Eddy’s programs; and active participant on ISMETA committees.

 

Roxlyn Moret BIO TO COME

 

Sara K. Vogeler graduated from NYU in Dance Therapy after beginning a life-long study in Body-Mind Centering in 1973. She danced professionally in the U.S. and abroad after apprenticing with the Erick Hawkins Dance Company. She taught BMC in Amsterdam, Munich, and NYC where she founded The NeuroMuscular Center, Inc. in 1990 for natural pain relief using hands-on techniques, nutrition, and somatic movement therapy. Certified in the first class of BMC teachers, she is an ISMETA Registered Movement Therapist, an ACE-cert. Personal Trainer, an Orthopedic Exercise Specialist, a TMJ Myofunctional Therapist, a NYS-licensed massage therapist, and a Moving for Life -- Dance Exercise for Health^® Cert. Instructor. She teaches anatomy, exercise, and movement therapy, and how to eat well for life.

 

Sarah Ebert is a Senior Instructor in the School of Music and Dance at the University of Oregon, and director of the contemporary dance curriculum at the Eugene Ballet Academy. As a performer, she has worked with numerous choreographers, including Alito Alessi of DanceAbility International, Asimina Chremos, Cynthia Gutierrez, Linda K. Johnson, Gabriel Masson, Shannon Mockli, Mary Oslund, and Minh Tran, among others. As a choreographer, she has been commissioned by organizations across the Pacific Northwest, including the Eugene Ballet Company, Eugene Ballet Youth, Columbia Dance and the University of Idaho. Ebert is a BMC Somatic Movement Educator and Embodied Anatomy and Yoga Teacher. She holds a BFA from the University of Illinois and an MFA from the University of Oregon.

 

Sarah Johansson Locke (she/her, white-bodied) engages with individuals, groups, and organizations across many contexts as a catalyst for creativity, inquiry, and vitality. A graduate of the BMC Embodied Anatomy and Yoga program and an ISMETA RSME/T, Sarah holds an MA in Dance Education and has extensive training and certifications in several forms of dance, yoga, meditation, and somatics. Her research and practice – as an educator, facilitator, program designer, performer, choreographer, and scholar – explores the inherent and integral role of embodiment in personal transformation, collective cultures and communication, and social justice. It centers the emergent and generative potentials of creative process, experiential learning, contemplative practices, and collaborative exchange.

 

Serafima Mehhovits - From her studies in visual art at Edinburgh College of Art to today, Serafima Mehhovits inhabits a cross-discipline space, somewhere between sculpture, live performance, video, action painting, and participatory practice. Since finishing her studies, she worked with an artist (from here on referred to as V) who has MS. The work involved enabling V to paint with her mouth, as well as personal care. Some aspects of this experience that translate into Serafima's creative practice are, firstly, the gentle balance of giving and taking weight, and the necessity of creative expression through movement, as a self-care practice. In the autumn of 2020, Serafima started studying in the Somatic Movement Education program with Embody Move, UK. She finds deep inspiration in the subtle awareness and rich contents of this work.

 

Stephanie Schaaf - As an avid student of the body in motion, Stephanie W. Schaaf brings her life-long love and fascination for movement to her work as an artist and educator. She has performed and created dances for 50 years, holds a Master’s degree in dance and movement education from Stanford University and is a graduate of the BMC Embodied Anatomy and Yoga program. She taught therapeutic movement at the Sports Medicine Center at St. Francis Hospital in San Francisco in the mid-1990s, has had a private movement teaching practice since 2000, and currently teaches somatics for the Oregon Ballet Theater summer intensive program. Her most recent performance work will be with Takahiro Yamamoto in his 2022 “Opacity of Performance” at the Portland Art Museum.

 

Susan Bauer, MFA, RSME/T, RSDE, is a dance and somatic educator, author, and Fulbright scholar who has taught for over 30 years in the U.S and Asia, informed by her extensive background in dance, Authentic Movement, and Body-Mind Centering. She has a private practice as a somatic movement therapist in the San Francisco Bay area and is the founder of Embodiment in Education™, offering workshops and a Teacher Training Certification Program for professionals. With a passion for introducing somatics into 21st Century education, Susan is the author of The Embodied Teen: A Curriculum for Teaching Body-Mind Awareness, Kinesthetic Intelligence, and Social and Emotional Skills, published by North Atlantic Books.

 

Susana Prado, dance artist and educator. Since 2016, she is manager of a school in Ribeirão Preto - SP, Brazil. It works as a facilitator of processes and actions aimed at an education that is increasingly coherent with the emergency demands of our planet and humanity. Psychologist, mother of 3 children, co-founder of Grupo Psoas e Psoinhas, who researches and works in early childhood art. Since 2016, she circulates with Amana -- dance for babies and promotes workshops, experiences, and training for educators. Her research approach involves education, somatic movement, art, nature, and self-perception. She attends the BMC Somatic Education Movement training and is part of the training of yoga and meditation teachers.

 

Suze Smith (BA, PGD, GradCert) works at the intersection of art and health. She is an experienced Event Manager and Art and Cultural Facilitator, bringing fifteen years of knowledge and professional networks in community arts leadership and practice. Suze creates adventurous experiences, with and for community. She has extensive experience coordinating festivals, events, performances, tours, and workshops of all sizes and scales. Suze works in community engagement contexts delivering workshops in dance improvisation, somatic movement practice, theatre making, and story-telling. She provides a sophisticated interpersonal space that brings forth the spirit of collaboration. Suze creates platforms for people to connect to self, other, and place in ways that are life-giving and joyful.

 

Sylvia Maes is fascinated by the body. From her first class with Bonnie in 1984, she has continued to explore the body. She finished the BMC Practitioner Program in 1994 and has assisted in many BMC Trainings since. She has presented in BMCA Conferences her own explorations of connective tissue, mitochondria, glistening subcellular molecules, and autophagy. Over the past year she has been one of the chat faeries on Bonnie's zoom classes.

 

Tal Halevi is a choreographer, dancer, and BMC teacher based in NYC. She has performed and taught in the U.S., Europe, Israel, and Canada. For the past 30 years she has maintained a private BMC practice exploring awareness in the body as a source for physical well-being, personal insight, and creative expression.

 

Tami J Hindin, LAc, Dipl.OM, is a sacred space holder and incorporates a variety of tools including acupuncture, herbal and Traditional Chinese medicine, craniosacral therapy, BMC, stone medicine, homeopathy, sacred ceremony, and earth-based spirituality. She helps mothers and children (from in utero up) transition through the many sacred moments we find on our journey in this lifetime as a means to find their way back to their inner truth and knowing. She began her BMC study in 2014 with Yoga and Embodied Anatomy at the Breathing Project and then completed her IDME training in 2019 through Embody Move.

 

Toni Smith, M.F.A., is a choreographer and dance activist in the Capital Region of New York. She served as the Artistic Director of the National Museum of Dance and was dance faculty for Skidmore College for over 3 decades. She currently teaches BMC, movement, and yoga to all ages and abilities. Toni is a BMC Practitioner and Infant Development Movement Educator with a private practice in upstate New York and online. Toni is the Chair of the BMCA Conference Committee and regularly offers BMC classes online.
 

Trude Cone is a BMC practitioner (1989), dancer, choreographer, dance educator, and coach recently retired from the Amsterdam University of the Arts. She developed the framework, Moving Thought, based on physicalizing the actions of early organizing forces/movements to facilitate progress. She works with adults, stuck in life/work/study, to come into motion, find balance while moving, and foster participation in the choreography of life. Incorporating insights from dance training and realizing choreographies, Moving Thought offers another perspective in how perception, thinking, and actions are linked in somatic experience. Embodiment of this potential is crucial for understanding and meeting the challenges facing the world today to move forward towards a more viable future.

 

Wendell Beavers, an early student of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and BMC, has created somatic-based curriculum for NYU’s Experimental Theater Wing, Naropa University’s MFA Theater program, and many performance programs globally. He has also choreographed extensively, using vocabularies derived from developmental movement and experiential anatomy. He teaches and choreographs separately and together with Erika Berland as a member of their company SomaticPerformer. He has been a featured presenter and organizer of previous BMCA Conferences.

Wendy Hambidge is an artist, somatic therapist, and BMC Practitioner and Teacher and teaches both in the U.S. and internationally. She is active in the BMCA and served on the board and as board chair. Wendy holds an MFA in choreography and performance and has received grants from the Metropolitan Arts Commission, RACC, and a fellowship from the Oregon Arts Commission. She is currently guiding and collaborating on a project “Standing Together” with Jorge Samuel Faria and Damaris Webb, incorporating online sharing and performance. Wendy’s primary focus in her life is decolonizing her mind and body through the somatic practice of BMC, collaborating with others through performance and friendship, and meditation with the intention of bringing that all out into world.

 

Yu-Ling Liao is a dancer, dance maker, and somatic movement educator who was born in Taiwan. She finished her dance professional education in graduate school of TNUA. Her work is concerned with the quality from inner bodily dynamic to the outside world through embodied movements. Her recent work “Being Fluid” (2021) was supported by Thinkers’ Studio.

 

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