My career and health transformed when I learned how to bridge conscious living and art-making, and began to explore the connection between the experiences created in the studio and life lived outside it.
Anna Halprin is a pioneer of experimental art and widely known as the “mother of contemporary dance.” I came across footage of Anna teaching a workshop in Paris, where she spoke to participants in a way that deeply moved me:
“The focus of this workshop is on you, and not on me. I’m a facilitator. I can’t do the work for you, but I can guide you into experiences. It is up to you to integrate those experiences. Your previous experience has nothing to do with what we’re going to do today. If you’ve never danced in your life, you’re going to be able to dance. If you’re a professional dancer, you’re going to be able, for a change, to take something in instead of always giving out.”
That final phrase stayed with me.
It brought into focus something I had long known in my body: the experience of constant output as a dancer—training, performing, refining, giving. It also revealed something I had not yet fully named—that I was likely not alone in the exhaustion that can arise from the rigour of a professional artistic life.
From that place, I began to imagine spaces for dancers who are seeking to deepen their creative practice, with a focus on restoring balance between life and art, effort and receptivity, doing and being.
Eight years into my training and early professional journey at Canada’s National Ballet School, I became very ill and began to question the strict structures of my profession. Around that time, I encountered an interview with Anna Halprin titled “From Dance Art to Healing Art” (Dance Magazine, 2004). Her words landed with a kind of visceral clarity—a longing for reconciliation between my body and lived experience, and for the non-integrated parts of myself to find wholeness while continuing to dance.
I turned toward expressive and free-form movement practices as a way of re-entering relationship with my body.
This became a path of support throughout my career with The National Ballet of Canada, Ballet British Columbia and Kevin O’Day Ballett Nationaltheater Mannheim. It offered tools that allowed me to sustain a long-term professional life in dance while also tending to the internal realities of being an artist.
Over time, I developed a deep interest in the psychological, scientific and therapeutic dimensions of movement. Much of this was shaped through my studies at the Tamalpa Institute, which offered a space for inquiry alongside the demands of a performance career.
What I came to understand is this: when dancers are supported in moving beyond habitual patterns, aesthetic expectations and self-judgment—and instead enter a more direct relationship with sensation, imagination and presence—something shifts. Creativity expands. The body becomes more communicative. And a different kind of intelligence becomes available, one that supports both the artist and the human being within the work.
Dancer: Ryan Genoe, “Blind As Night That Finds Us All”
Choreographer: Maggie Forgeron
Photographer: unknown
Not Just Any Body Part 