As a movement teacher, guiding people deeper into their experience of their body is an enormously rewarding venture. One’s relationship to their body is profoundly personal and unique. This is one of the things I love the most about being a movement teacher- you're on a quest with each student, helping them do the discovering of their own world. I never know what analogy or new movement is going to light up an aha/awe moment for someone. It’s thrilling for us all.

Having studied some of the most subtle and slow modalities like feldenkrais or yin yoga to some of the most athletic and action packed like capoeira, I have the range to bring students into an internal, hypersensitive experience of themselves or an athletic, external experience. I love both aspects to self expression and exploration and approach both with a lightness and comedy that alleviates any sense of performance anxiety or pressure. Although I take the art of dance and the exploration of embodiment very seriously, I prefer not to take a dry or serious approach. Rather, I like to create some breathing room by making the quest of deeper embodiment relatable and fun. I have assembled details from each of the gifted teachers that I love and turned them into my own special flavor- Some lightheartedness from over here, some specificity from over there.

Suzee Grilley started me on my dance path, teaching me how to grain energy- passing it through my body all the way out of my fingertips. She taught me that choreography is the art of manipulating time, space, shape and motion. A lesson she passed down from her mentor Alwin Nikolais. I now find myself directing students to become sensitive to the texture or movement of their energy through their body and how they relate to others in space using time shape and motion.

I ask students to take control of their own education through exploration. One of my favorite sayings from one of my most impactful teachers Augusta Moore, (RIP), is “exploration over ambition”. I like to helpfully direct students to answer their own questions by asking them to investigate in their own private laboratories. I’ll lead students in the smallest, slowest movement patterns with their eyes closed, in a quiet and internal way. My goal is to demonstrate to them that working slowly and small is how people receive the most detail about how their body is moving and that this is how they can most easily create new sensory pathways.

I learned from my yoga teacher Paul Grilley that taking time to sit with yourself in a long hold can do wonders for not just the physical body, but also the emotional and thought bodies as well as they are all connected. He taught me that skeletal variation should be considered at every turn. Just because two people might be making what looks like the same shape on the outside doesn't mean what's happening mechanically on the inside to achieve that shape is the same. I now teach students how to find out if they are running into the end of their range of motion because of muscular tension, or compression and what the answer to that question means for them.

Having done a cadaver dissection workshop with the infamous anatomist Gill Hedley, I can now picture what our insides look like. I learned to truly love my adipose (aka fat) tissue. I saw the beauty of our muscles and the root like systems of our nerves and veins with my own eyes. I am confident that I understand human anatomy and it is so wonderful to be able to pass on what I’ve learned. The dissection was really a before and after event for me. Although I had studied anatomy and been learning about bodies my whole life, that workshop completely changed how I think about them and blew apart some concepts I had while reinforcing others. Sharing the wonder I have of kinestheology and physiology is a passion of mine.

My capoeira teachers- Professora Suzee Grilley, Mestre Mariano Silva and Mestre Amen Santo taught me the joy of community. It’s a game that can’t be played without group participation and a common respect of the traditions of Afro-Brazilian culture. I deeply value my education about the history of African slavery in Brazil. In my capoeira curriculum students learn how to improvise with the capoeira movement vocabulary in order to play the call and response style game. This helps to create a community of brave citizens who choose to explore activation and risk taking rather than passivity. I love the sense of empowerment I can foster in students as we sing around the roda and build our muscles while playing capoeira.

As I write this, I keep flashing back to the teachers I’ve had, several of whom have passed on, and it makes me emotional to think of their little idiosyncrasies or metaphors that I now use. I love that the lessons they’ve taught me are now the ones I am teaching. The passing on of knowledge of the body is sacred to me. We only get one and it is our home for this life. I can’t think of a bigger honor than being a part of that lineage and I know I will continue to make a valuable contribution in other body oriented people's lives. And perhaps someday some of them will be incorporating my little phrases or ideas into their classrooms too.