Current Roles:
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Evolving Ideas:
From birth, humans naturally engage in creating through their emotions, movement, sound and play. If we nurture this ability then, self-confidence, connecting with others, problem solving to name a few, will continue as life long skills. However, we tend to lose this ability when we are told to not feel or trust our emotions and how, what and why to think. Improvisation and play - physically responding to the world around us without the mind leading all the time, brings us back to the world of imagination and an embodied way of being present with all of our relationships within us and with others.
As a movement artist, I make physical acts with the body as originator and instigator for ideas. I love the risk of improvisation and how it leads to revelations. The human/animal world, objects, natural spaces and interior shadow world where emotions are hiding (or waiting) are my partners in bringing out my full awkward, ugly, timid, surly, raging, sad, joyous, vulnerable 360 degree self to share. As Carl Jung says, “I’d rather be whole than good.” As a teacher, I hope to expand people’s perceptions of their body’s potential for movement and help them access the wisdom of their inner allies. I encourage exploration of our vast range of motion as a way to discover our vast range of emotions. Ways I might do this: combining everyday actions - walking, turning, kicking, reaching, sitting with elements from modern dance, asana, physical theater, nature, science, theatrical clown, breathing and sounding exercises and so on. I work with forms of perception like interoception, haptic, and proprioception as well as teach how to feel the weight, space and shape of movement. Playing with with these elements in the body while asking questions is one way to build a felt understanding of our emotions. Also, imagination is central to developing this dynamic embodied intelligence. By playing out new ways of perceiving a situation, we can finally step out of our looping thoughts and generate new meanings. To help access our imagination, I often work with objects and borrow their energy to learn these new movement qualities like scarves, balls, paper, walls, fabric, chairs, etc. Humor often emerges with object play along with deep insights on how we currently interact with ourselves and "other." |
Bio:I have been performing, teaching and choreographing improvisational dance and physical theater for over three decades. I have presented work in various New York City venues and have performed with artists, Banana Peel Dance, Dana Salisbury, and Julia Ritter and toured to Czech Republic, Germany and Toronto. After an intensive clown program at the well-known Dell' Arte International School of Physical Theater in Blue Lake, CA, a passion for theatrical clown emerged which eventually brought me to Kendall Cornell's training and Clowns ExMachina, an all-women clown troupe in NYC.
My interdisciplinary interests developed from a five-year collaboration with Liberty Science Center (LSC), a hands-on science museum in Jersey City, NJ. At the museum and in schools, I created and performed dance works that illuminated scientific concepts and celebrated the body by intertwining dance with kinetic sculptures. In 1999, I founded Rhombus Dance and during a three-year dance residency at LSC, Rhombus Dance created three dance works, M/Sec, City Inside and Velocity 0 funded by Exxon Corporation, AT&T Foundation, New Jersey Department of Health and Liberty Science Center. From 1999 -2010, I was a teaching artist for Young Audiences of New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania offering creative movement and science integrated classes. From 2003-2008 I was the movement instructor for The Artist/Teacher Institute at Rutgers University and have taught all over the tri-state area in schools, art centers and museums and from 2013- 2017, I was an educator for Girls Leadership (GL). Currently, I am the Associate Director for Groundwork Retreat, a unique program that curates interdisciplinary experiences for small yet diverse groups of people to share their process of creativity and cross-pollinate ideas. I am also a Licensed Dynamic Emotional Integration® Trainer from Empathy Academy where I offer workshops to learn about the gifts of our emotions. I hold a dance degree from Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University and a certification in Soma Yoga. I continue to clown train with the Nose to Nose organization whenever they are in the U.S and whenever I can, I perform. |