ExplO+re Class: FINDING SANCTUARY IN THE BODY

The body is a breathing reservoir of
sensation and movement, memory and dream.
Movement is the body’s language and voice.
Breath is the body’s anchor.
Earth is the body’s support.

This class asks how we can release efforting in the body and the mind. How can the possibility of letting the breath BREATHE YOU shift your experience of the body-mind? How does the rhythm of the breath support the rhythmicity of the heart, and an embodied sense of heartfulness? Where is our support in this breathful dance between earth and sky, above and below?

We will explore these questions in the moving practice of breathing in, breathing out, resting the heart, moving together. These guided, mindful movement practices help to calm and steady us, using conscious movement and stillness, breath, self-touch, and imagery. As we move with an improvisational spirit of exploration, we find greater expression, expansion, and resilience.

A recipe for entering the body:
Attention: because the body is precise.
Listening: because the body is subtle.
Kindness: because the body is tender.

Performance: THE TRAVELER (terra incognita)

“I say to my breath once again, little breath come in from in front of me,
go away behind me, row me quietly now, as far as you can,
for I am an abyss that I am trying to cross.”
W.S. Merwin, The Book of Fables

The Traveler explores how unpredictable and volatile life changes can fracture and reshape our psyches, change our bodies, and disrupt our sense of self in relation to the world. It asks what it means to be lost, to find oneself in terra incognita, not once or twice, but throughout our lives. Set to a sound score created by Paula Josa-Jones, the traveler – a Chaplinesque character – navigates perilous topographies, finding and losing balance as the physical and dream terrains shift and buckle.

PAULA JOSA-JONES, MA, CLMA, RSMET, SEP is a dance artist, choreographer, author, visual artist and movement educator and therapist known for her visually rich, emotionally charged dance theater. Her work includes choreography for humans, inter-species work with horses, dancers and riders, film and video. Josa-Jones has been called “one of the country’s leading choreographic conceptualists” by the Boston Globe and the Village Voice describes her work as “powerful, eccentric, and surreal”. Much of Josa-Jones’s solo work in particular arises from her own experience of being gender non-conforming, and movement explorations of the deeply complex architecture of identity and expression.

Her background includes deep research into theater, somatics, improvisation, film, Deep Listening, Laban Movement Analysis, Body-Mind CenteringⒸ, interspecies relationships, equine studies, Authentic Movement, embodied psychology, and eco-performance.

http://www.paulajosajones.org