“One of the most profound and far-reaching ways we can evolve and transform our future is by bringing consciousness to our physical bodies. Movement-based Expressive Arts Therapy uses a low skill approach that helps get feelings out.”
Maggie Forgeron
Movement-based Expressive Arts has enabled me to enjoy a more than 20-year healthy, professional career in dance. I have learned this unique perspective towards movement, and all forms of art, during my Expressive Arts training at the Tamalpa Institute in California with Anna and Daria Halprin, as well as at the European Graduate School in Switzerland. As a result, my vocation has now expanded to include bridging conscious living and art-making; exploring the connection between the incredible experiences created in the art studio with life lived outside this space. I am most excited about bringing the benefits to both self-professed non-dancers and dancers alike. When talking alone is not enough support on our complex paths, I seek to offer creative experiences for people to encounter their lives and discover what matters most to them.
I have observed that there is an essential connection between life and dance that not only feeds the dance, but can inform our lives. Exploring this connection can facilitate healing and change. In this work, practitioners are interested in expanding our relationship to movement in a way that examines the here and now of our authentic life experiences, rather than simply relying on a specific dance form.
It all start with the body. The body contains the entire repertoire of our life experiences. In using the body as a vehicle to connect, deepen and refine awareness, we can create and express through movement, visual art, poetic writing and music in a way that defines us, our relationship to others and the environment in which we live.
As a dancer, my approach is dance-centered, but all artistic disciplines and sensory modalities can be drawn upon in the work. The field of Expressive Arts explores the subtle movements back and forth in which the body, imagination and feeling interact, intersect and inform each other. Movement-based activities are combined with drawing and poetic dialogue, guiding participants into creative play. The beauty of this process is that it is appropriate for all bodies, and no previous experience is necessary. In this way, we begin a simple and delicate dance of change. We need only bring loving affirmation to ourselves.
Expressive Arts as a medium for change in the world
As a practitioner of the work, my interest is in taking on a self-authorship that could serve to invent, coordinate and integrate values, interpersonal loyalties and intrapersonal states that encourage more arts-based research. It is time to reignite and lay claim to the arts as a valid path forward. I see this work as an inquiry into the question, “What am I doing?” as well as an attempt to confront the enemy in our own heads who speaks, “Who do you think you are?”. David Whyte calls this need for affirmative personal entitlement the “arrogance of belonging”. Elizabeth Gilbert elaborates:
“I am a child of the Universe. I am a human being, made not only of matter but also of consciousness who has urges and impulses and desires and aesthetics that allow me to want to participate in creation, as is my human right as a child of creation. That’s who I am. And what I’m doing here is engaging with the experiment of my life.”
“Creative Living Beyond Fear” (Calm App), Elizabeth Gilbert
We need more leaders in the world now who can let go of control and rigid agendas and trust that art can help us flourish and re imagine our current disarray. Human beings and our planet must be cherished, and the appropriate outcome to this seemingly insurmountable unrest (within and without) will emerge from a positive and affirming journey together. We need to normalize an approach that causes change in individuals and social systems, with the intention of helping people develop into transformational leaders. We then need to unleash these change-makers out into the world to heal our global, social context, filled with both beauty and unprecedented threats.
A lofty goal, yes. However, through Expressive Arts, I hope to inspire such co-creators of a new reality. It is time to be active participants in this huge task. When we step into our sense of entitlement, without collapsing under our lack of self-worth and the terror that can sometimes berate our dreams, we begin to feel that we belong to this world. It is time to foster a knowing within each one of us that we are here because something wanted us to be here. It is time to bring humankind to a new milestone, querying our own standards and methods, evaluating the risk of change; to dance for wholeness. To me that is where Expressive Arts meets our own “arrogance of belonging”.
Dancer: Ryan Genoe, “Blind As Night That Finds Us All”
Choreographer: Maggie Forgeron
Photographer: unknown
Not Just Any Body Part 