For those who cannot…

Artistic Director Dr. Seónagh Kummer invites you to participate…

For 10 years I experienced the aging process with my mother after she could no longer be independent. I watched her experience the effects, losses and pains of Altzheimer’s and Dementia with extraordinary grace. The experience of staying very present with her during this time has been profound, and I collected treasured life lessons.

My mother is a person to whom I am very deeply joined to in an ancient way, as a friend of my soul. I began to develop dance movement about her experiences, and our experience together of being in relationship during these changes, of helping her find pieces of herself, of walking beside her throughout her slow losses, fears, suffering, and loneliness. I am working toward some meaningful projects related to this disease, and collaborating with theatre artist Carolyn Dunn, and dancer-collaborator Rosa Rodriguez Frazier.

One of our deepest longings as humans is to have love and friendship. The person with dementia often experiences a deep loss of loneliness and isolation that is worsened when she or he cannot remember the friend from the day before and thus cannot build or develop friendships. For the dementia person the soul-knowing of another person can still continue to be present as a sensed belonging. Even if there is a sense of being both outside of time and in the moment, the dementia person who carries the wisdom of awakening to the eternal, to the timelessness within oneself, may still be able to feel a sense of belonging to an energetic complexity of life. In this way, she or he can continue to deepen her presence on earth.

As I develop movement for a dance piece I am creating I am opening up to a wider community interested in movement ideas about memory, time and belonging. My mother’s experiences teach me to explore deeply this sense of belonging on the earth, and as part of this process I am developing movement about timelessness and memory in belonging. Movement can help us attune to different fluids of our bodies such as Cerebrospinal Fluid, and this can help to create a sense of equanimity, balance, and being at peace in the moment, which relates to timelessness and belonging. The experience of such movement is healing and helps to create a sense of peace.

The next series will begin in October 2023. This class is open for anyone who wants to explore a healing process through movement. The class will also likely benefit or attract individuals who are helping–or have helped–a beloved, an aging parent, a spouse or another close person, through a dementia journey. Classes are open to anyone at any level of movement and dance ability who is curious about this process, and movement options will be offered for different body types or degrees of strength and flexibility.

Check back here and on the events page where we will offer specific workshop times beginning in October 2023. When we play together in movement (online classes), we form a sensed community. I will listen to you and guide you through improvisational work during the class, and in this way I am building on my understanding of the topic. The prompts I offer may help you with telling your story, and your story may become part of a collection of stories that leads me to new insights and creative directions in my work.

Wild Woman Archetype–Dance Workshop (online or in person-location varies)

This workshops explores memory and belonging through the lens of the life-death-life cycle of a Wild Woman archetype. Learners explore these archetypes with movement, and create new movement that evokes for them the concepts of memory and belonging. Participants may reference objects, photographs and landscapes that evoke these concepts, and their stories may become part of a collaboration in the development of a new piece.  Sign up to have your story be part of this piece. Write “Wild Woman Workshop” in the subject header of your email to seonagh@seonagh.com

Seónagh leads several specialized in-person dance workshops, which are designed for both experienced and inexperienced dancers. Workshops are focused on a variety of topics: Creative Process, Dance Dramaturgy, Creative Development, Dance and Wellness, Performance, and other topics.

Peace Activism and Somatic Body Maps

Seónagh has been doing deep work and mindfulness practice for over 30 years. As a somatic educator she aligns dance and therapeutic aspects of somatic movement with the work of Gandhian activists. Her workshops and events on Embodiment and Social Justice assist participants to interrogate and discuss bodied “ideals,” which shape our understanding of who and what body is considered normal, safe, deserving, and beloved.

What is Somatic Movement?

Somatic Movement is a rich healing practice that brings greater awareness to how our bodies experience our environments, social/political contexts, family relationships, traumas, or other experiences. Somatics has affected many areas of the arts, yoga, social sciences, and wellness by raising consciousness about how our body experiences shape our world and the health of our bodies. Systems of body awareness are highly developed by dancers, assisting us to gain clarity of connections and control over precision in body movement. This field understands the body as a holistic system.

The Somatic Movement field draws from a number of important dance and wellness experts of the 20th Century such as Ingmar Bartenieff who created a system to understand the developmental aspects of human movement. Seónagh uses these tools in coaching and choreography to help individuals process learning, to draw attention to how our body experience impacts our health, shapes our worldview, and affects how we perceive and process new awareness. This can help individuals to overcome perceived body limitations and to have a greater sense of our own agency.

What is Somatic Coaching?

Seónagh’s somatic movement workshop for ISMETA at Gibney Dance, NYC (2019)

Somatic movement exercises are often followed by short writing exercises, painting or speaking after moving.

Seónagh’s movement exercises and somatic body mapping techniques assist individuals to gain control over the “voices in our heads” that drown out authentic responses. Awareness of how our early patterning affects us is empowering, and can help individuals to recognize and overcome limitations or restrictions they might have developed and carried in the bodies since childhood.

Seónagh observes her clients holistically-meaning she understands our minds, bodies and the environments we live in are not separate. She works to analyze and understand her clients’ habitual movement patterning, which relates closely to emotional-psychological factors such as human needs, childhood development, culture, internalized shame, and other social factors. Her exercises vary according to her clients’ needs, and are designed help people to have breakthroughs they might not have recognized without assistance.

Seónagh draws from over 30 years of training in dance and somatic techniques such as Bartenieff Fundamentals, Authentic Movement, Laban Movement Analysis, Somatic Body Mapping, Experiential Anatomy, and multiple other therapeutic dance traditions. Dance somatics has greatly influenced the way that yoga and other embodied practices are taught, and Seónagh’s mission is to help articulate this, and to share these beautiful traditions with those who wish to learn.

Slow Peace

As the Creative Advisor to the International Gandhian Institute for Non-violence and Peace, Dr. Seónagh co-facilitates workshops with Dr. Reva Joshee and Dr. Jill Carr Harris. These workshops introduce participants to Gandhian principles, helping them to think about principles in relation to their own life and work. In part, these workshops are designed to interrogate bodied “ideals” that shape our understanding of who and what is normal, safe, deserving, and beloved.

What is Somatic Practice?

Seónagh’s work is multifaceted and focuses on physical processes and subjective processes of the body as “lived consciousness.” She draws techniques from her ongoing training in Certified Movement Analysis, Somatics, Authentic Movement, the Heifetz Needs Matrix, and more.

About Somatic Movement

Somatic Movement is a rich area of dance that brings greater awareness to how our bodies experience our environments, social/political contexts, family relationships, traumas, or other experiences. Somatics has affected many areas of the arts, yoga, social sciences, and wellness by raising consciousness about how our body experiences shape our world and the health of our bodies. Systems of body awareness are highly developed by dancers, assisting us to gain clarity of connections and control over precision in body movement. This field understands the body as a holistic system.
The Somatic Movement field draws from a number of important dance and wellness experts of the 20th Century such as Ingmar Bartenieff who created a system to understand the developmental aspects of human movement. Seónagh uses these tools in coaching and choreography to help individuals process learning, to draw attention to how our body experience impacts our health, shapes our worldview, and affects how we perceive and process new awareness. This can help individuals to overcome perceived body limitations and to have a greater sense of our own agency.

Scope of Practice

As with many somatic practitioners, Seónagh’s work covers the following international scope of practice, set out and refined by ‘The International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association’.

“The purpose of somatic movement education and therapy is to enhance human function and body-mind integration through movement awareness. Our profession, as represented by ISMETA, encompasses distinct disciplines each with its own educational or therapeutic emphasis, principles, methods, and techniques….Somatic movement education and therapy is applied to both pedestrian and specialized activities for people in all stages of health and development. The work can be communicated either on an individual basis or with groups.”
—ISMETA

The practice of somatic movement education and therapy includes:

• postural and movement evaluation
• experiential anatomy and imagery
• movement patterning and re-patterning
• communication and guidance through touch and verbal cues

Each method helps students and clients in some way to:

• refine perceptual, kinesthetic, proprioceptive, and interoceptive sensitivity that supports homeostasis, co-regulation, and neuroplasticity
• recognize habitual patterns of perceptual, postural and movement interaction with the environment
• improve movement coordination that supports structural, functional and expressive integration
• experience an embodied sense of vitality and create both meaning for and enjoyment of life

*Please visit The International Somatic Movement Education & Therapy Association’ (ISMETA) for further information about this international profession.