Join me for "Centering Our Power" workshop for BIPOC

 

 

CENTERING OUR POWER

a drop-in workshop for BIPOC

 

via freeskewl 

 

Saturday, February 20, 2021

12pm EST (9am PST)

 

Join our BIPOC Zoom "circle" for an active meditation practice to center and ground you (and all of us) in expansive power. Come as you are and leave with the awareness of all that you are. We will work with practices that sense and move personal and transpersonal energies.

 

Bring whatever you love to have near you to support this self-care--a journal, divination cards, crystals, shells, stones, sacred images, essential oils, stuffed toys, family/ancestor photos, what have you.

 

This is a seated visualization but, if you like, feel free to move with it. You may turn your camera on or off as you prefer at any time.

 

Please respect this circle as BIPOC space.

Accessibility: Closed captioning will be available through Rev Live Captioning

 

No payment required!
Donations welcome: Venmo: @Eva-YaaAsantewaa 

Zoom link: zoom.us/j/3093774924

Zoom password: 640262

 

Eva Yaa Asantewaa (she), native New Yorker of Barbadian-immigrant heritage, works as Senior Director of Artist Development and Curation as well as Editorial Director at Gibney. A veteran arts writer (since 1976), educator and curator, Ms. Yaa Asantewaa won the 2017 Bessie Award for Outstanding Service to the Field of Dance. She blogs on InfiniteBody and edits Imagining: A Gibney Journal. In 2016, for Danspace Project’s Lost and Found platform, Eva created the skeleton architecture, or the future of our worlds, an evening of group improvisation featuring 21 Black women and gender-nonconforming performers. Her cast received a 2017 Bessie for Outstanding Performer. Eva is founder of Black Curators in Dance and Performance. She is also a Tarot counselor with forty-plus years of experience.

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve, at Gibney, as Senior Director of Curation and Editorial Director. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

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Artists Reach Out: Kayvon Pourazar

Dear friends,

Welcome to Artists Reach Out: reflections in a time of isolation. I dreamed this series of interviews out of grief for my work both as a documenting arts writer and curator of live performance. In this time of social distancing, we are called to responsibly do all we can to safeguard ourselves and our neighbors. It is, literally, a matter of life and death.

But there's no distancing around what we still can share with one another--our experiences, thoughts, wisdom, humor, hearts and spirit. In some ways, there are more opportunities to do so as we pull back from everyday busyness out in the world and have time to honor the call of our inner lives.

So, let me introduce you to some artists I find interesting. I'm glad they're part of our beautiful community, and I'm eager to engage with them again (or for the first time) in years to come.

--Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody

Kayvon Pourazar

Kayvon Pourazar
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Kayvon Pourazar is of Persian origin and spent his formative years in Iran, Turkey and England. Kayvon immigrated to the US in 1995, graduated from SUNY Purchase in May 2000 and has resided in New York City ever since. He has performed in the works of Ivy Baldwin, Michelle Boulé, Beth Gill, Lily Gold, Levi Gonzalez, K.J. Holmes, John Jasperse, Heather Kravas, Juliette Mapp, Gabriel Masson, Juliana May, Jodi Melnick, Jennifer Monson, RoseAnne Spradlin, Wil Swanson, Donna Uchizono, Doug Varone, Gwen Welliver, Yasuko Yokoshi, Yaa Samar Dance Theater and in The Metropolitan Opera productions of Les Troyens and Le Sacre du Printemps. Kayvon's ventures into making dances have been shown in New York City at Danspace Project (Food for Thought), The Kitchen (Dance & Process), P.S. 122 (Hothouse), The Cunningham Studios, Roulette (DanceRoulette), Center for Performance Research, Catch, AUNTS, Dixon Place as well as the Universities of Nebraska, Vermont and Sacramento State. In 2010 he received a New York Dance & Performance "Bessie" Award for Performance. He has served as Adjunct Faculty at Bennington College and The New School, teaches regularly for Movement Research and has taught as guest artist for Tsekh Russia (Moscow) and Workshop Foundation (Budapest).

At center: Kayvon Pourazar
(photo: Alex Escalante)

Editor's Note: Pourazar alerted me to his practice of embedding (or collaging) direct quotes from authors such as David Abram within his own responses (which is different from his credited quotes, rendered in italics). He writes, "My approach...is to weave and construct my frameworks into a combination of my own ideas as well as ideas from a variety of other sources and influences." As editor, and for this piece only, I have taken the unorthodox approach of permitting this usage and highlighting these embedded words in blue. That particular material is, indeed, all sourced from Abram's writing.

*****

Do you have a current or planned project whose progress is affected by the pandemic?

I was scheduled to go to Cairo in April and Croatia in May as part of Movement Research's Global Practice Sharing (GPS) program. We are discussing potential postponement of both of these. The Cairo trip was to attend performances and events as well as participate in panel discussions, presented and organized as part of the Arab Arts Focus segment of the annual Downtown Contemporary Arts Festival in Cairo. In Croatia I was to participate in the Improspekcije2020 improvisation festival held in Zagreb. This year's festival centered around the "topics of aging, disappearing and death...in the body as well as in the wider sense of the decomposition of the larger body of the world we know it." I had proposed to show a new iteration of my most recent improvised solo work initirinisic.

At the current moment, I was scheduled to be in the midst of a 3-week residency with Ivy Baldwin Dance at Gibney for a new dance to be premiered in early 2021. We're not sure if we'll get the chance to reschedule this residency but I sincerely hope so.

Briefly, tell me about how you got involved in the arts and in your particular practice.

At a very critical moment in my life, dance became a literal lifeline for me. After fleeing the Islamic Revolution in Iran, my family was repeatedly displaced from one country to another while we waited for our green cards to the US. Ultimately, because of bureaucratic red tape, my parents were forced to leave me to fend for myself in London during my mid-teens living as an illegal immigrant, unable to help me financially because the revolution had rendered them penniless. At its bleakest, I would experience days where I would be beaten up by white nationalists in the neighborhood, come home to an apartment that had been broken into and robbed, receiving letters from the Home Office notifying me of my impending deportation, and eating out of cans without electricity because the little money I was making from my job at the local deli was going to drugs to help me escape the nightmare I was living. All of these things repeatedly happening and sometimes all in the same day. The worst part, of course, was that I had no one to turn to for help.

My only relief was in dance. I had enrolled in a public performing arts school because someone in my family had once convinced me that I possessed some artistic talent (something my parents would never have allowed if they were there), and I dove headlong into dancing. Dance became simultaneously a place for me to process some of the shit I was going through, an escape, another reality to retreat to when things became unbearable. It also provided a sense of place and belonging at a time when I felt like an outsider in every other facet, including my emotional estrangement from my family.

In a more specific way, what are you practicing? And what are you envisioning?

My practice came about as a result of another critical moment in my life about 20 years ago. After finally making it to the US, and soon after graduating from college, I found myself injured and unable to dance after years of accumulated imbalanced training. Again on my own, in New York City, unable to hang on to my "lifeline." A bodyworker I was seeing at the time magically and unknowingly unlocked something in me, something I can only explain as a vivid self-healing dialogue with the intelligent community of cells, tissues and organs that make up my body, all of them entities with moods and intentions, openness and spontaneity. What I initially perceived as a a long-lasting series of involuntary spasms, tremors, convulsions and unwindings soon became a life-long practice of deepening my attention to this vivid dialogue, and I have come to believe that the ultimate root of the divide-and-conquer strategy that is at the core of colonization is the split between mind and body. The belief that the experiencing self or mind, our innermost essence, as something incorporeal and ultimately independent of the body (and by extension the larger body of the earth) is the original violent hierarchy. By speaking of our bodies and of the larger body of the earth as inert, deterministic biochemical mechanisms or as a spiritless, vacant and corrupting/corruptible carnal realm, we deny their ability to actively engage and interact with us--we foreclose their ability to reciprocate our attentions, to draw us into silent dialogue, to inform and instruct us.

So my practice is a way to exemplify and aspire to the decentralization of power that I wish to see in the world. By working towards collapsing the hierarchical ways of being that I have been socialized with, I realize that mind and spirit is a property of all that exists, just as all of our ancestors once believed, and I'm left with a diversely differentiated field of animate and self-organizing beings, each of which has its gifts relative to the others. And I find myself not above, but in the very midst of this living field, my own sentience part and parcel of the sensuous landscape that is within me and that surrounds me.

How does your practice and your visioning align with what you most care about?

I care about wholeness and resilience, individually and collectively. By engaging in my practice and sharing it with others, particularly through the lens of the trauma that has informed it, I hope to offer others another way of accessing a wholeness that includes all of their wounds and vulnerabilities and a resilience that comes with trusting that our bodies will always be there for us to inhabit, always providing a sense of place and belonging from which we can find the strength and plasticity to choose paradigms that support connection, abundance and love rather than separation, scarcity and competition, no matter the context or conditions we find ourselves in.

To quote philosopher and performance artist David Abram (author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World):

"There are no priests needed in such a faith, no intermediaries or experts necessary to effect our contact with the sacred, since - carnally immersed as we are in the thick of this breathing planet - we each have our own intimate access to the big mystery.

"Each of us must finally enact this rapport in our own unique manner, discerning and learning to trust the particular gifts of our flesh even as we draw insight from the ways of others. Slowly we come to follow the promptings of our heart as it responds to the larger pulse of this earthly cosmos, listening inward even as we listen outward. And thus our voice, tentative at first, finds its own improvisational place in the broader polyphony--informed by, yet subtly altering, the texture of that wider music. Our rapport is ours alone, and yet the quality of our listening, and the depth of our response, can transform the collective texture of the real."

How does your practice function within the world we have now?

My practice, as it pertains to the world we have now, is in relation to our individual and collective approaches to problem-solving. I hold this quote, also from David Abram, close to my heart.

"Any approach to current problems that aims us toward a mentally envisioned future implicitly holds us within the oblivion of linear time. It holds us, that is, within the same illusory dimension that enabled us to neglect and finally to forget the land around us. By projecting the solution somewhere outside of the perceivable present, it invites our attention away from the sensuous surroundings, induces us to dull our senses, yet again, on behalf of a mental idea.

"A genuinely ecological approach does not work to attain a mentally envisioned future. It strives to become ever more awake to the other lives, the other forms of sentience and sensibility that surround us in the open field of the present moment. For the other animals and the gathering clouds do not exist in linear time. We meet them only when the thrust of historical time begins to open itself outward, when we walk out of our heads into the cycling life of the land around us. This wild expanse has its own timing, its rhythms of dawning and dusking, its seasons of gestation and bud and bloom and blossom. It is here, and not in linear history, that the ravens reside."

I believe that we have all, in general, become too quick to translate the qualitative world of sensory experience into the quantitative world of data and information that reside in the domain of linear time. I believe a lot of change and re-balancing can happen if we stay present in the realm of sensory experience, the other animals, the cliffs, the tides, the cells, tissues and organs, become participant in the unfolding of events, and so it no longer falls upon us, alone, to make things happen as we choose. Since we are not the sole bearers of consciousness, we are no longer on top of things, with the crippling responsibility that that entails. We're now accomplices in a vast and steadily unfolding mystery, and our actions have resonance only to the extent that they are awake to the other agencies around us, attuned and responsive to the upwelling creativity in the land itself. And as our own bodies are perfect analogs for the larger body of the earth, then the same applies to the agencies and the upwelling creativity in our own interior worlds.

Briefly share one self-care tip that has special meaning to you now.

As you can tell, I am hugely influenced by the work of David Abram. Here is a meditative exercise of his to help us enter more fully into the present moment:

"There is a useful exercise that I [have devised] to keep myself from falling completely into the civilized oblivion of linear time. You are welcome to try it the next time you are out of doors. I locate myself in a relatively open space--a low hill is particularly good, or a wide field. I relax a bit, take a few breaths, gaze around. Then I close my eyes, and let myself begin to feel the whole bulk of my past--the whole mass of events leading up to this very moment. And I call into awareness, as well, my whole future--all those projects and possibilities waiting to be realized. I imagine this past and this future as two vast balloons of time, separated from each other like the bulbs of an hourglass, yet linked together at the single moment where I stand pondering them. And then, very slowly, I allow both of these immense bulbs of time to begin leaking their substance into this minute moment between them, into the present. Slowly, imperceptibly at first, the present moment begins to grow. Nourished by the leakage from the past and the future, the present moment swells in proportion as those other dimensions shrink. Soon it is very large; and the past and future have dwindled down to mere knots on the edge of this huge expanse. At this point I let the past and the future dissolve entirely. And I open my eyes...."

I believe this can also be very effective by entering and inhabiting the wilderness of our own bodily interior. Particularly, since many of us are self-isolating in our homes and/or don't have easy access to wide open spaces or low hills.

******

DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

******

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Active Insight: an active meditation workshop with Adrienne Glasser

Gibney Dance Center presents a Hub Workshop with Dance Movement Therapist Adrienne Glasser.

Adrienne will guide us through an active meditation that will explore the relationship between our body, mind, the space around us and between us. This practice has been an effective tool in serving people recovering from addictions, eating disorders and trauma, as well as for anyone wanting to decrease stress and uncover their own authentic movement.

Active Insight: An Active Meditation

Gibney Dance Center

Community Action Hub

280 Broadway 

Monday, July 20

6:30-8pm

FREE ADMISSION

Sign Up

Adrienne Glasser is a Licensed Certified Social Worker and Registered Dance Movement Therapist that has been helping clients to find their intuitive path towards healing for over 15 years. She is currently enrolled in the Meditation Teacher Training at The Interdependence Project where she explores how to integrate teachings on meditation with her psychotherapy experience. She leads intensive weekends and trainings for professionals where she teaches Active Insight and Experiential Therapy theory and techniques. She maintains her private practice in Manhattan and is also the Director of Services at her group practice Experience Wellness Group. Through Experience Wellness, she facilitates weekly groups and workshops infusing Active Mindfulness and Experiential Psychotherapies.

Body and Soul: Listen.: Imani Uzuri

Imani Uzuri (photo by Petra Richterova)

Click here to subscribe to Body and Soul podcast in iTunes and listen to vocalist/composer Imani Uzuri talk about deep listening to the ocean and her own need, as an artist and a woman, for meditative time alone.

Innovative vocalist and composer Imani Uzuri is an eclectic artist who travels internationally from Morocco to Moscow creating and performing across various genres including concerts, recordings, experimental theater, performance art and sound installations. Uzuri’s work has been called “stunning” by New York Magazine and incorporates her interests in world culture, experimentation and sacred music. She has earned critical acclaim for her debut album, Her Holy Water: A Black Girl’s Rock Opera as well as for her collaborations with diverse artists such as Herbie Hancock, John Legend, Wangechi Mutu, Sandford Biggers and Vijay Iyer. Her new album The Gypsy Diaries which also features sitar, acoustic guitar, cello, violin, Japanese shinobue flute and world percussion, is a vibrant lyrical and spiritual sound scape and was named #2 on Rhapsody's World Top 10 List Summer 2012. She is currently composing a new musical GIRL Shakes Lose Her Skin that she is developing with playwright Zakiyyah Alexander inspired by the works of Philadelphia Poet Laureate Sonia Sanchez.

Click here to visit with Imani Uzuri and hear tracks from The Gypsy Diaries.

To subscribe to Body and Soul podcast, click here.

Your donation will help keep Body and Soul together. Please get in touch, and I'll happily send instructions. Thanks!

(c)2012, Eva Yaa Asantewaa, InfiniteBody (http://infinitebody.blogspot.com)

Museums explore the art of meditation

Om Is Where the Art Is
by Nick Earhart, ARTnews, October 2011

Zahava: Exploring the shamanic way of dance

Zahava

Dance as Shamanic Ceremony:
A New Offering to the Dance Community

 

from Zahava

The most curious, loving, and courageously adventurous dancers are starting to gather at the free Intros to Dance as Shamanic Ceremony.  We start by what we are most passionate to explore in the next phase of our dancing.

I felt very disconnected from my trained body, within a dance culture that valued me for things that were not related to my soul.  My metabolism, my body structure, my willingness to follow instructions through fatigue, my willingness to compete, all gave me mobility in the ballet culture. I found myself in this culture because it was one of the few options for me as a young white American girl who wanted to dance!  I have watched the impact of this culture on my body, in my friends (many of whom have stopped dancing but have not completely healed their relationship to dance), and in the current generation of professional dancers.  This is a crucial time for transformation on the Earth and it’s showing up everywhere, including the dance world.

I remember wondering how I could love something so much, rehearse hours each day, and yet see that when the audience showed up to the performance they could not connect with us.  The new course that I am offering explores dance as a source of deep connection.  I remember how awkward my dancer friends and I used to be improvising in clubs.  It’s intimidating to move how you feel in the absence of choreography when you don’t know how you feel.  The course includes feeling our soul instincts and expressing them fully through improv. 

I remember how many of us lost our menstrual cycles as young women because we did not have the body fat to support a baby.  The course gives us the opportunity to become profoundly present to the needs and desires of our body, as our primary intuitive instrument.  The pleasure we can create in our dance sets a pretty high bar for the pleasure we create in our sexuality, our career, our homes, our spirituality, our families, and our community.

I'm offering this, not only to heal the relationship individual dancers have with dance.  It is also to create more trust, wholeness, and love, in the culture of dance training as a reflection of the values we want to live by in our society.  We can train our bodies to do so much in addition to triple pirouettes and ponches.  We can train our bodies to be the perfect instruments for our souls and to transform what is not LOVE.  Forgiveness and compassion start in the body.

Standing still has become a tremendous experience with the growing awareness of the energy system in my body and it’s relationship to the Earth, in partnership, tribe, and ancestry.  Dancing from this full place is the most enlivening, grounding, pleasurable, and purposeful way of being in “here.” 

Shamanic Ceremony is speaking an intention in a charged space such that it’s possibility becomes real to the speaker, the community present, and the universe.  Dance as Shamanic Ceremony is moving our soul inside our body with an intention and we become in that moment who we need to be for the intention to manifest in the physical world.

If you are a professional dancer or have intensively studied a dance form for the past 5 years, this class will meet you at your growing edge as a mover. Experience with improv and contact improv will enhance your journey. If you have a meditation practice, study energy awareness, are on a shamanic or tantric path, then this is your class! Come meet your tribe. All genders are welcome.

Wednesdays, 6pm-7:30 pm
Sept 21, 2011 to April 25, 2012

The Red Bean Studios

320 West 37th Street, 7th Floor

between 8th and 9th Avenues, Manhattan

For more information, click here.

Register here by Wednesday, September 14.

Contact: Zahava@LoveMakingDances.com

A meditation on "The Making of Americans”...and writing

Juliette Mapp’s The Making of Americans
by Maura Nguyen Donohue, Culturebot, April 21, 2011

The Black Monks of Mississippi

Rubin Museum of Art:

Theaster Gates and the Black Monks of Mississippi

Saturday, January 22

Echoing his video installation in Grain of Emptiness, sculptor, urban planner, and performance artist Theaster Gates infuses the gallery with live monastic chanting at the top of each hour. Monks layer meditative sutras and gospel singing in this accumulative performance, juxtaposing the Buddhist and African American spiritual experiences. Each performance is distinct, building upon the experience of the previous hour.

Public performances at 12, 1, 2 and 3pm

Free with museum admission

(complete information)

Rubin Museum of Art

150 West 17th Street (between 6th and 7th Avenues), Manhattan

212-620-5000

(directions)

Signify, Sanctify, Believe: The Library of Sacred Technologies

Every now and then, an announcement comes along that is way too good to not share. Here's the latest!

A Call for Contributions
Signify, Sanctify, Believe: The Library of Sacred Technologies

archivists: Tanya Rubbak and Adam Overton
at The Church of Public Fiction in Highland Park (Los Angeles)
in April 2011

dear friends,

do you ever feel like you see things that are invisible to others? 

do you ever intuit the presence of other possible realities?

do you ever sense a thickness of energies swirling within the materials around you?

do you ever look at plants and animals and think, “I know what you’re thinking.”

perhaps you’re interested in age-old traditions, but tired of age-old religions?

perhaps you hanker for sacred acts that history has forgotten,

or better yet, perhaps you’ve discovered NEW ways to gently channel the magic in your life?

sceptic or saint, believer or apostate, we’d like to talk to YOU …

about being a part of something very, very SPECIAL ...

The Library of Sacred Technologies

we would like to invite you to participate in our library/reading room in April as part of a residency at the Church of Public Fiction in Highland Park. the space will feature several artists and groups from February through April 2011 as it transforms itself into a church and spiritual center.

our library aims to intercept and illuminate a relationship between contemporary religious and artistic pursuit. we are interested in overlapping the sisterly processes of signification and sanctification, which we view as being innately creative and living in spirit.

with a mixture of found and invented ephemera in the form of pamphlets, newsletters, and articles of faith, the library will capture a communal voice as we celebrate a tradition of religious experimentation in the city of Los Angeles.

Do you hear the call? Will you heed it?

we invite you to temporarily become a best-selling self-published self-helper, a charismatic guru or spiritual leader, a religious anthropologist, or any other type of sincerely mystical dabbler from the past, present or future. we primarily desire text(s) and images to include in printed ephemera, but will consider video and sound documents as well. to whet your appetite, we’ve posted below a list of possible technologies we might be looking to collect. you’re welcome to contribute as much or as little as you’d like, and it can be as [in]comprehensive and [in]comprehensible as you please.

we plan to compile, design, and display these materials for visitors of our Library of Sacred Technologies opening in April 2011. meanwhile, artist-led sermons, services, and workshops based around the temporary observance of [semi-]fictional religious practices will be taking place throughout the month that, with your permission, may or may not incorporate some of these documents. (if you’re interested in leading one of these, please let us know and we’ll contact you as soon as we finish developing a separate call for that portion of the residency.)

here are some starting points for religious invention that we pray you’ll contemplate and contribute:

a religion of the hour

a religion of the day

a religion of the month

a religion of the year

alternative horoscope systems and charts

dance instructions that direct the kundalini or the schizophrenic flow

shaman seances to commune with animal spirit helpers

guided meditations for sudden reality shifts

cures for tardiness

recipes for honesty

maps, formulae and visualizations for time travel

guides to local vortex and portal areas

exorcisms of deep heteronormative conditioning

automatic writing to channel the language of light-beings

alternate creation myths

incantations for accessing the transverbal space of the semiotic chora

harmonic science scores of the ancients that modifies DNA

visualizations for clearing debt

scriptures on radical responsibility

ceremonies that deal with water, driving or synaesthesia

rituals for loss, or lost rituals

prayers and hymns for making new friends

resurrections, fortune-telling, channeling, oracles, predictions and sooth-sayings on the matter of anything you please

et cetera, et cetera, et cetera ...

please send your submissions to: sacredtechnologies@plus1plus1plus.org

deadline for text and image submissions is January 15, 2011

deadline for audio and video submissions is February 1, 2011

also: stay tuned, as we hope to convene a couple sacred technology group writing sessions in late December and early January

Workshop in traditional chant and dance of Korea

Traditional Korean Buddhist Ritual Chant and Dance with Myung Suk Lee

Saturday, June 12 (2-5pm)

This workshop presents a rare opportunity to learn about Korean traditional meditative arts. Master artist Myung Suk Lee, assisted by Nuria Divi, will give an introduction to Bumpae, traditional Korean Buddhist ritual chant and dance. She will teach the Buddhist chant Doryang Ge, and how to play and dance in time to Baras (cymbals).

No experience in dance or singing is necessary to attend this workshop.

Admission: $5

RSVP by email at nuridisa@hotmail.com or walk in on the day of the workshop.

Location: Westbeth Community Room, 155 Bank Street (left side), Manhattan

Keely Garfield's he(art)

The He(art) of Healing with Keely Garfield

A workshop for everyone!

Saturday, March 27 (2:30pm to 4:30pm)

Laughing Lotus Yoga Center
59 West 19th Street, 3rd Floor, at 6th Avenue, Manhattan

Fee: $20

Join Keely Garfield for a transformative afternoon! As an integrative therapist and yoga instructor, Keely will take you through an exploration in ways to enhance your optimal wellbeing and become empowered with the knowledge and confidence to improve your life through therapeutic yoga, breath awareness, meditation, reiki and essential oils.

"The land of healing lies within, radiant with the happiness that is blindly sought in a thousand outer directions." Swami Vivekananda

Contact Laughing Lotus

Spirit in voice and body

SINGING IN TONGUES

Chanting/Meditation Encounters: Indian, Asian and African Songs uttered in the ancient form of kirtan (call and response chanting).

Come sing with us, dance with us or just be with us in the tranquil energy and infinite possibilities of the present moment.

Led by Bret Cohen on vocal and percussion; featuring Donna Wang on harmonium

Fridays: July 24, August 21, October 23, November 13 and December 11, all from 7-9pm

CHI Movement Arts Center (home of Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers)
1316 South Ninth Street (between Wharton & Reed), Philadelphia
Directions

$10-$20 suggested donation, or pay what you can

For more information, click here.

CHI Movement Arts Center is also offering the following workshops:

Contemplative Practices Workshops with visual artist Jeff Sable
(for dancers and non-dancers)

August 9, 16; September 13, 20, 27; October 4, all 11:30am-12:30pm ($12/class/workshop)

and Open Dialog on Sunday, Oct. 11, 2pm (free)

Explore the landscape between our mental process, our bodies and our creative voice, utilizing contemporary and ancient tools of contemplation, meditation, tai chi movement, voice and improvisation to enrich and deepen our personal and creative communication with the confidence of direct awareness.

CHI Movement Arts Center (home of Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers)
1316 South Ninth Street (between Wharton & Reed), Philadelphia
Directions
For more information, click here.

Physical Culture: Exotic Martial Arts

Choose Your Weapon - Exotic Martial Arts
by Mandy Katz, The New York Times, April 15, 2009

Update: Pink Empowerment Day

The following post has been updated with new program information:

Color it pink: a day for women's wellness

Color it pink: a day for women's wellness (UPDATED)

[Scroll down for updated information.]

Pink Empowerment--February 8, 2009--is a wellness day, dance concert and artist health fair presented by the Move for Breast Cancer Awareness (MBCA), sponsored by and located at Dance New Amsterdam, 280 Broadway, 2nd Floor (enter at Chambers), Manhattan.

Wellness Day
FREE ADMISSION
9AM-12PM

Drop by lower Manhattan for FREE classes and workshops including meditation techniques, rehabilitative yoga, and information on FREE or discounted Health Services. In anticipation of a full house given the FREE admission to our 2pm concert, we will be offering 20 confirmed reservations on a first come first served basis to Wellness Day participants.

Dance Concert
FREE ADMISSION
2PM

featuring works from

Monica Bill Barnes & Dancers

Alexandra Beller/Dances

David Parker & the Bang Group

Laura Peterson Choreography

Urban Bush Women

Christopher Williams

Ellis Wood Dance

Reception & Services Fair
FREE ADMISSION
3:30-5PM

Please join us after the performance for wine cheese and more! Our partnering organizations will be present with staff and materials to share with you available health services and resources to the dance community.

Partners include: Dance/NYC, [QuA²D], Fractured Atlas, The Dancer's Resource, and the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries.

Move for Breast Cancer Awareness (MBCA) is a project of the Queens Academy of Arts & Dance [QuA²D]

UPDATE

WELLNESS DAY
9-9:45am - Raising Awareness for Movement Teachers
A demonstration on teaching Iyengar Yoga to Breast Cancer patients/survivors by Bobby Clennell

10-11am - Prescreening and Prevention
Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered - Patricia Brett and Lisa Held from FORCE discuss genetic profiling
American Cancer Society - Mrs. Riker teaches how to perform a self breast exam
Woodhull Hospital - Oncologist ___ talks about genetic testing and resources at Woodhull

11:15am-12pm - Meditation class (all levels of experience welcome)

RECEPTION & RESOURCE FAIR
FORCE - Facing Our Risk of Cancer Empowered
Harkness Center for Dance Injuries - Injury Prevention
Artist Access program at Woodhull Hospital
Libby Ross Foundation
Actor's Fund - The Dancers' Resource
Young Survivors Coalition
American Cancer Society
Fractured Atlas - Health Insurance options

Re-energize for the New Year!

[Please note: The registration/information contact number originally submitted with this announcement was incorrect. See below for the correct number.]

Dancer-choreographer Laura Shapiro is offering a new six-session workshop, De-Stress and Center. Start the New Year with clear focus and renewed energy!

Classes will draw from several modalities such as chi kung and tai chi, experiential anatomy and developmental movement, creative movement, and meditation. You will use breath and bone as well as muscle to cultivate resilience and strength of body, mind and spirit. Benefits will include improved balance and coordination, increased flexibility and a more relaxed nervous system, generating feelings of peace, harmony and well-being.

By attending the workshops you can expect to:

· Strengthen your body as well as mind

· Increase your balance, coordination, and flexibility

· Become a more relaxed person

Location:

KIMA Center for Physiotherapy and Wellness
14 West 23rd Street, 2nd Floor
212-686-3101

Fee:

Single class, $25//bring a friend for $20 per person//6-class series, $120

Register for individual classes or take the full six-session series for a deeper experience.

Schedule:

Six Saturday sessions, January 10 to February 14 (10:30am-11:30am)

For registration or more information, please call 212-946-1537.

Laura Shapiro, a dancer/choreographer with over three decades of experience teaching people of all ages and levels of fitness. Her recent work includes teaching for Fu-Yu International Foundation, Dorot Wellness Program for Seniors, Center for Kinesthetic Education (children and adults), and the McBurney YMCA (adults 20s-80s). Her credentials include permission from her chi kung teacher to teach; certification in IM=X Pilates Floor Work and Tai Chi for Arthritis; and teaching dance as a Visiting Artist at several universities in the U.S. and abroad.

Catskill Mountain Womyn's World Drum and Percussion Happen’n

11th Annual Catskill Mountain Womyn’s World Drum & Percussion Happen’n
August 21–August 24
Circle Lodge, Hopewell Junction, New York

For registration and scholarship application, click here.

The Circle Lodge is a private lakefront adult retreat center with comfortable indoor accommodations, vegetarian and non-vegetarian meals, multiple indoor workshop and jamming areas, performing arts center, cell phone reception, heated pool and access to Sylvan Lake. The Happen’n is just 1-½ hours from NYC or two hours from Albany, four hours from Boston.

The Happen’n is an annual multicultural drum, percussion and dance gathering for women and girls of all levels (beginner, intermediate, advanced).

We have assembled some of the most diverse, dynamic, inspiring, and skilled women musicians/ teachers in the drumming world today. Learn rhythms, songs, techniques and musical styles of the Conga, Djembe, Dundun, Taiko, Dumbek, Frame Drum, Tablas, Bodhran, Sakara, Gyil, Shekere, Berimbau, Drum Kit, Bells, Gourds and various world hand percussion.

Expand your knowledge and skills of traditional music of West Africa, Brazil, Haiti, Japan, Cuba, the Middle East, North Africa, India, Ireland, Native America, and original music of North America.

Explore methods of music for healing, teaching, facilitation and performance. Move with West African Dance, Capoeira, Maculele, Movement Meditation and circle dancing. Learn to tune and repair your drum. Sing, drum and dance around the fire!

The Happen’n provides many opportunities for networking and music exchange while in a supportive atmosphere of women’s drumming community. Experience the Blessing of the Drums, Saturday Night Showcase, Vibrational Healing Circle, Opening and Closing Ceremonies. Circle with others to sustain the Heartbeat Drum throughout the gathering.

Expand your awareness of global women’s drumming at the Happen’n Gallery of books, instruments, photos and videos. Explore instruments and handcrafts by the teachers and craftswomen at the Marketplace.

Bring your drums, percussion instruments, voice, and musical styles to the various music and dance jams.

2008 HAPPEN’N TEACHING STAFF:

Edwina Lee Tyler--West African Drum Traditions


Emilia Biancardi--Music & Percussion of Brazil


Nurudafina Pili Abena--Djembe, Afro-Cuban Drum


Peace Elewonu--Women’s Music of Ghana, Dance


Sejal Kukadia--Tabla Drums of India


Phyllis Bethel--Afro-Cuban Conga


Valerie Naranjo--West African Gyil, Native American Music


Ubaka Hill--Art & Spirit of Drumming


Bonnie Devlin--Haitian Folkloric Music, Bodhran


Elaine N. Fong--Taiko Drums of Japan


Leaf Miller--World Drum


Caru Thompson--Shekere, Bells, Vocal Gourds


Raquy Danziger--Dumbek & Frame Drum


Fre Atlast--Teaching & Drum Circle Facilitation


Joy San Agustin and Molly Lee--Capoeira, Maculele


Nana Akosua Baakan Agyiriwah--Sakara, Dundun


Nancy Asch--Stick/ Kit Drumming


Victoria Christgau--Vocal Improvisation

White Feather--Movement Meditation

Beverly Nadelman--Drum Care and Repair

Drum Central Vision Statement:

Drum Central is dedicated to the advancement of women's knowledge and participation in the ancient and sacred traditions of women's drumming locally and globally.

This vision is expressed through our annual gathering: the Catskill Mountain Womyn’s World Drum & Percussion Happen’n. Drum Central was founded in 1998 by Leaf Miller, Fre Atlast, and Ubaka Hill.

Come for the Entire Time or Come For the Day!
Registration & Lodging Options

Your Registration Fee includes Workshops, Meals, Accommodations and Featured Programs.

Per-woman Accommodation Fees are listed as Before July 1st / After July 1st Rates. Early Registration saves $!

Double w/ Shared Bath $485.00/ $505.00


Double w/ Private Bath $495.00/ $515.00


Single w/ Shared Bath $595.00/ $615.00


Single w/ Private Bath $675.00/ $695.00


4 Day Commuter $365.00/ $385.00


Single Day Commuter $165.00/ $185.00


Children 8-12 years old $ ½ the price of the adult fee


Registration begins at 3pm on Thursday. The Happen’n ends at 2pm on Sunday.

All Registration Rates are per woman registrant. Housing for groups of three

or more can be arranged with advance notice. Linens and towels are provided.

Accommodations do not apply to Commuter Rates.

* Confirmation Packets with directions and other information will be sent to you upon receipt of your Registration form. Cancellations will be charged $75.00 before July 1st. After July 1st, fees are non-refundable unless we can fill your space.

Please make Checks or Money Orders Payable to: The Arts Community

After July 1st, Money Orders ONLY will be accepted. Mail Registration Form with Payment to:

DRUM CENTRAL - PO Box 231, Saugerties, NY 12477. For more information and questions:

Call (845) 706-1176 Email: info@drumcentral.net

Visit our website www.drumcentral.net for details, updates and the FAQs.


*** PLEASE DONATE TO OUR SCHOLARSHIP FUND
Every tax-deductible contribution, whatever the amount, supports the participation of Elder women and women with financial need. A limited number of participant assistance grants are available.

To apply for a Scholarship, send in a Registration Form with your letter of request for a scholarship application. All Applications are due by July 1st, 2008.

Dunya's reflections on dance and healing

Kripalu Notes: Dance Healing

Dunya Dianne McPherson: Body and Soul podcast

Dancer and Sufi teacher Dunya Dianne McPherson’s new memoir–Skin of Glass: Finding Spirit in the Flesh–tells of her exploration of the multisensory intelligence and wisdom of her body. In our interview, she retraces the path that led her to her embodied spiritual practice and reads from her extraordinary book.

BIO

Dunya Dianne McPherson is an acclaimed dancer and choreographer, writer, filmmaker, and Master Teacher. As founder and Principal Teacher of the healing movement practice, Dancemeditation, she specializes in techniques that open the wonderment of deep, subtle, peaceful self-perception.

She received her BFA in dance from Juilliard and her MA in Writing from Lesley University. She was an Artist Scholar at Columbia University. With the completion of 1,001 days of Sufi training, she was given teaching permission by Sufi Master, Adnan Sarhan (Sufi Foundation of America). Her numerous teaching credits include: Barnard College, Montclair State College, Mark Morris Dance Center, Hunter College, Oberlin College, Swarthmore College, New York Open Center and Kripalu Center. Awards include: National Endowment for the Arts Choreography Fellowship, Lincoln Center Out-of-Doors Choreography Commission, TX & MA Arts Council grants. She is featured in the film ‘Dances of Ecstasy.’ Dunya lives in New York City.

UPCOMING EVENT

Sunday, April 6 (3pm): “Skin of Glass” book launch, featuring performance by Alembic, saxophonist Premik Tubbs and Ensemble, film and photographs, reading, tea and book signing.

Location: Metropolitan Building, 11-04 44th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens.

RSVP: info@dancemeditationbooks.com

LINK

Dunya’s Dancemeditation blog
http://blog.dancemeditation.org/

Dervish Society of America
http://dancemeditation.org/

"Skin of Glass"
http://www.dancemeditationbooks.com/skinofglass/


Body and Soul is the official podcast of InfiniteBody dance blog at
http://infinitebody.blogspot.com. Subscribe through iTunes or at
http://magickaleva.hipcast.com/rss/bodyandsoul.xml.

(c)2008, Eva Yaa Asantewaa

This material may not be reproduced in any way, either in part or in its entirety, without the expressed written permission of Eva Yaa Asantewaa.

MP3 File

Dancing prayers

Dunya (Dunya Dianne McPherson), of the Sufi-practicing Dervish Society of America, calls DSA's performance branch Dunyati Alembic, referring to the distillation vessel used in alchemical processes. Last evening, the group demonstrated the quiet, soul-stirring beauty of their practice in an intimate presentation at the spacious and welcoming Metropolitan Building, formerly an electrical parts factory, in Long Island City, Queens. Highlights of Dance As Prayer, Body As Sensual Voice: An Evening of Dancemeditation and Spiritual Bellydance included dreamy solos by Dunya (Thread, with violinist Annemarie Wiesner) and Zahava Griss (the modern dance-infused Untitled, with its Puccini aria sung gracefully by Rebecca Lee Lerman). All in all, Dunyati Alembic--which also includes Kate Temple-West, Anita Teresa, Stephanie Rudloe and Nisaa Christie--offered an evening of inspired and inspiring loveliness, capped off with an invitation to the audience to get up and shake a tail feather or two.

For information on future programs of DSA and Dunyati Alembic, click here.