Creative Well
Awaken your vitality, artfully.
Our bodies are living, learning processes, unfolding
moment by moment,
breath by breath.
Through movement, drawing, poetic writing, sound, and ritual,
we discover and activate body-based resources
to transform limiting patterns of thought and behavior.
Movement
Movement in this work is somatic and non-stylized, allowing our body intelligence to “choreograph” new postures, gestures, and behaviors within and outside of the studio. This approach cultivates an “absolute love of movement, not style (ballet, modern) but movement itself… No technique but life soaring through the wind, pawing the earth and standing strongly on the ground” (Emilie Conrad from Life on Land). *
Drawing
Spontaneous images arise, offering fresh insight about the ways we inhabit (or don’t) our bodies, in personal and professional contexts. New connections within ourselves and with others may begin on the imaginal level first, where linear thinking and critical analysis can’t extinguish them before they have a chance to become manifest.
Writing
The narratives that shape our lives – our pasts and presents, and the futures we long to create – spill forth in the free association of poetry. Lyrics of songs our bodyminds are waiting to sing decorate the pages of our notebooks.
Sound
Through magnified vibration, sound invites our bones, muscles, connective tissue, and organs to move in ways that they don’t usually have the leisure to enjoy. Waves of audible breath may wash through dense areas, awakening fluidity, flexibility and possibility where immobility reigned before.
* Choreography by Elaine Colandrea, photography by Phyllis McCabe
Ritual
Artful enactments of our intentions propel us along the paths we long to walk, work, and live. Through ritual we can become the change we wish to see in the world. This work includes personal rituals of somatic movement sequences, self portrait rituals from Tamalpa Life/Art, as well as community performance rituals including the Planetary Dance. (Please see Community Events for more information.) *