Category Archives: moving, breathing, feeling

Mar5

body dharma 2

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Here is the next part of body dharma.

Randee Fox sent me this link.  Daniel Mollner is 47 years old and is making a film a week about being a dancer, something that he has only recently claimed.  It is a brilliant, generous idea.

I have just started making solos again. My friend Ryder hosts an open mike at Cafe Helsinki in Hudson, NY.    She said, “Why don’t you do something?”  And I thought, “Yeah.  Why not?”

I have not performed a solo for over ten years.  Here is what happened:  Over a period of twenty years, I lost my ability to move, even to walk.  My hips were GONE.  Everyone said, “But you are too young to have the surgery.”  Really I wasn’t, but I liked that they thought so.  By the end, I could not even walk across the street.  I felt a terrible sense of shame.  “I am a dancer.  I cannot move.”

The other thing that happened was 9/11.  Many of my artist friends were creatively derailed.  Mute.  Numb.  It went on for many months, even years.  I went into a creative deep-freeze that lasted about seven years.  I felt ashamed. “I am an artist. I cannot make art .”

It was finally the horses that brought me back, and a persistent, wonderful image of making a dance with horses and an aerial dancer, the beautiful Paola Styron.

The one thing I know about body dharma is that it is not one thing.  It is not a straight line.  It is a meandering river with backwaters and tributaries and terrible, ferocious class 5 rapids that will leave you washed up and rinsed out way downriver.  It is also the only place to be:  in the water, between the banks, flowing.

Sharing my experience and  passion in a way that helps and supports others is what I love.  I am always thinking about new ways to do that.

So here are three of my body dharma offerings:

I have other offerings.  You can check them out here.

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Mar5

body dharma

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Deanna Pellecchia        Photo by Jeffrey Anderson

Body dharma is about bringing our practice into physical form.  It is rooting all of our experiences in the body and seeking a fully embodied creativity.

What it means to me is continually engaging the body in a spontaneous, authentic and improvisational way.  Practicing body dharma means that we are listening to and feeling the body all the time, and weaving that awareness into our moment-by-moment experience.  It is about listening at the cellular level.  It also means that we allow the body to be a teacher, a guide, and understand that it is a reflection of the presence or absence of harmony and balance in our lives.

I will be exploring this theme more this week.  In the meantime, I have just finished my new eBook, Breaking into Blossom.  It contains ten chapters on bringing more vitality and improvisation into your life.  You can order it here.

Mar3

my first eBook!

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What I have become aware of is that for many of us there is a big commute between our creative work and the rest of our lives. As It is hard to maintain a sense of living wide-awake in a body when we are so tethered to the digital world and disconnected from vibrant, physical experiencing.

I developed Breaking into Blossom:  Moving into an Improvisational Life as an online class because I wanted to offer some fresh ideas on how to close that gap from my perspective as an improvisational movement artist, a teacher and a coach.  It  is designed to inspire you to become more daring, more visionary, and more playful and improvisational in your daily life, relationships and work.

I am now offering the materials that I developed for that class in a beautifully designed eBook that contains ten chapters integrating writing, movement, guest artists and specific strategies to help you find a deeper creative engagement.

The book will be available at the end of March.  You will receive it as a downloadable pdf.

The cost is $15.  You can order it here.

Mar2

trespass

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Yesterday I wrote about the boundaries set by others – our feral cat Mamacita, and the owners of the empty farm next door.  How there are places we cannot go, where we are not welcome.

When we lived on Martha’s Vineyard, during the off-season, we would trespass.  After the summer people evacuated at the end of the season, we  would walk on private properties, across land that was fiercely private during the tourist season.  We would joke, saying, “I am going to trespass against them.”  To me this felt like a way of weaving the forbidden lands back into the whole cloth of the island.

I have a friend with a daughter who is fiercely private.  Secretive even.  Resentful of any incursion on what she considers to be her business.  She is also a child who requires particular attention due to her learning deficits and chronic, even dangerous poor judgement.

So my friend has to dance along the thin wire of holding on and letting go.  It is not always a graceful dance.  At times she finds herself hanging by her toes, or teetering perilously close to falling.  She has found that if she can find an aperture – a space that invites entry – things go better.  Sometimes there appears to be only a wall, but if she waits, a way to enter will usually appear.

What initially seemed to be a trespass is then a meeting place.  Like the tree in the photograph above. Can you find the opening?