RESPONSIVE BODY WORKSHOP

with Holly Johnston

December 6-8, 2019

Location: Santa Barbara, CA

Brasil Arts Cafe, 1230 State Street, Ste C, Santa Barbara CA 93101

Program Fee: $450

Application Form: www.responsivebody.com

Contact Holly: ledgesandbones@gmail.com

Financial Assistance and Payment Plans are available on a limited basis. Please contact Holly for more information: ledgesandbones@gmail.com

responsive body Workshops

The Responsive Body Workshops are skill-based professional programs for dancing bodies, educators, and somatic based therapists that advance methods and approaches for teaching biodynamic movement practices and dance as embodiment. Participants will build a knowledge base that includes foundational practices for teaching through sensorial linguistics that create movement experiences that speak through the language of body. Participants will be facilitated through daily movement experiences, group lecture and discussion, and practice skill sessions. 

PROGRAM BREAKDOWN

Skills, Topics, Subjects, Lectures include:

Biological Orientation to Human Connectivity, Body as Energy, Reading and Speaking Body Languages, Healing Movement- Body to Body, Body as Responsive System for Life, Teaching through biodynamics, Touch and Contact, and The Responsive Body “Groundwork” Movement Sequence for health and healing.

Sample Daily Schedule:

10am-11:45am Responsive Body Movement Experience

12pm-1:30pm Group Discussion, Learning, Lectures

1:45pm-3pm Practitioner Skill Sessions

 

Dancing as dynamical exchange of energies

It is hard to convince people that dancing is more than what they see. It is hard to convince folks that what they feel is actually of greater significance that what they think others see or what they think they're seeing. Trying to illuminate body's intelligence as superior to the 'overculture's' image of body is the ultimate challenge.

What is dancing?

what, who, where, how, why, when are we dancing?

.. perhaps it is movement, animating forces, animate form, anything that becomes sensible to us through our bodies…could dancing be a state of being, an energy of moving matter, the physicalization of spiritual motivations, musculoskeletal forms of present bodies, dancing as a mode of moving through spacetime, dancing as the language of feeling, dancing as body's communication system and means of expressing the 'qualia of internal sensations' to others. Yes, perhaps this is all true. When we dance together we are activating our biodynamic interbodied energies animating the process of materializing potentiated ‘life-force’ into embodied movement. Body knows how to dance its own aliveness, even if we are confused by it.

what we can learn from dancing as responsive bodies

When we are dancing everything we're doing is physiological, not psychological. Our bodies enter into metabolic activities that are pretty magical. Our physical volition-ignited from intention or will sets off a process of responding. Synapses fire, memory banks unload, axons light up, connections...billions of connections are made...chemicals get made, cells die and get reproduced, muscle fibers work in coordinated efforts with one another, adrenaline, endorphins, the pounding rhythmic heart that evidences your persistence, this mighty effort... this ongoingness of bodily pursuit...this produces 'flow'...and the overworking prefrontal cortex can  quite and the holistic process of body materializing through spacetime can occur without disruption from your 'thinking head'. This is dancing as a system of responding in the moment through the moment.

What we can learn from dancing is that body is inherently intelligent.

It is your birth rite to dance in your body, as your body, with your body.