I offer a dance practice grounded in the Open Floor school, which I call “Moving Soul”.
Note: I am not currently offering any dance sessions whilst settling my family and my psychology practice into Geelong.
Open Floor can be described from various perspectives, but here are two of them:
1. Dance & immerse yourself in a diverse mix of global and contemporary music. A two hour dance journey into the territory of your life, woven together by beats that make you move and ballads that make you feel. Let your body speak!
2. Open Floor as a practice is also about developing resilience and self awareness through embodiment on four levels:
a) We explore and develop our physical capacities: fitness; flexibility; endurance; self pacing; proprioceptive & kinaesthetic awareness; spatial awareness; physical expression as a dancer. Core movement principles are explored together with Laban Movement Analysis (an additional layer alongside Open Floor principles).
b) We develop our emotional capacities: to identify and open to our feelings; to sooth ourselves; to hold, express, integrate and release feelings as we need; to identify and express the layers of emotion that we carry beneath the surface.
c) We develop our mental capacity: to become more conscious of the thoughts and stories we carry and how they are impacting on us; to soften or release ourselves from obsessive thoughts; to create an embodied understanding of how thoughts and feelings are connected.
d) We develop our capacity to connect to something greater than ourselves: to develop our awareness of what we are being uniquely called into in our lives, what is our contribution; to develop and claim an expanded sense of self and increased clarity of how to be in the world in regard to our greater purpose.
Along the way we explore what are referred to in Open Floor as “The Four Hungers” or needs that we share as humans:
1. Solitude
2. Connection with others
3. Belonging to community
4. Connection with Spirit
Some further comments/ reflections about the Open Floor style I offer:
Open Floor is a freeform style of dance/movement where we allow our bodies to respond to the beat & the feeling tone of the music. This takes us a on a physical and emotional journey. We may have a background theme but we always start & move to what is most alive in us at any moment. We allow the background theme to have its organic place in the dance.
In developing my dance journeys I use Open Floor principles as a primary guide. I also use conceptual schema drawing from other trainings and study, including concepts from Laban Movement Analysis (LMA), deep ecology, dance therapy, psycho-dynamic & Jungian theory and neuroscience (see article on the website-blog entitled “Eight Lenses on the Dance”). This makes it sound a bit heavy (!) but mainly its about having a great, deep, authentic dance/movement experience.
In terms of the process, we usually start by warming up for while, dancing/moving to an inviting beat that gradually builds. This supports us to bring ourselves into our body and become present. We then have an opening circle where I briefly introduce the practice and set an intention for our dance. We explore a theme to take into the dance. Then its usually non-stop free movement for about 100 minutes followed by a period of silence and a closing circle, all of which is part of the ritual of the practice. The music is a diverse mixture of funk, jazz, latin, african, middle eastern, contemporary, new age, ambient, earthy techno beats, psy-trance, nostalgia, ballads and classical. I don’t always get to cover every genre in each session though!
The idea is to take you on a physical, emotional and spiritual journey.
Note: Open Floor is not a therapy in the strict sense, however it is highly therapeutic in that it encourages you to embody in movement, in each moment, the wholeness of your experience and yourself. It is a practice to integrate your experience and expand into yourself. Also its an unbelievably good workout and a lot of fun!
Acknowledgements: In the development of Moving Soul I would like to acknowledge Open Floor International. Their training provides a structure and depth to build a coherent model of embodied experiencing. I would also like to acknowledge the influences of the International Dance Therapy Institute of Australia, Marcia Leventhal, Trancedance, Souldance, Heart Dance, 5 Rhythms, State of Flux, Theatre of the Ordinary, the (now de-funded) Melbourne University Graduate Diploma in Movement & Dance, Tony Norquay.