Workshops with Seónagh

Seónagh’s somatic coaching draws from her vast background and training in the field, and her clients gain greater awareness of parasympathetic processes in movement. Movement exercises and can assist individuals to gain greater control over the “voices in our heads” that drown out authentic responses. With coaching assistance, and through the use of repeated movement or by exploring the area of authentic movement, clients recognise and overcome limitations that are no longer serving them. Somatic movement exercises are often followed by short writing exercises, painting or speaking after moving.

Leadership—Workshops and Retreats for Mindful Leadership

Small Groups and Forums

To stay with a vision leaders need to learn how to adapt. This workshop is designed specifically for you, your small group or forum. I support leaders and emerging leaders to communicate under conflict, or to learn communication tools using movement and somatic practices. Book a free consultation now to learn if this is the best fit for you.

Lead Embodied

This workshop draws attention to our body as a resource that helps individuals to overcome perceived body limitations and to have a greater sense of their own agency. Our bodily experiences over a lifetime impact our health, shape our worldview, and affect how we perceive and process new awareness and relationships. This causes people to suffer, struggling with communication, losing touch with how they feel, and to develop either a lack of compassion or confidence. Through Embodied leadership training we become more adaptable, and learn how to be adept at resourcing our strengths in the face of change, chaos, and uncertainty.

Seónagh designs and adapts her leadership workshops for the needs of specific populations. Some of her workshops are designed to address the issues women face in leadership positions.

Mindful Movement

Somatic Movement is a rich area of dance that brings greater awareness to how our bodies know meaning in our environments, social/political contexts, family relationships, traumas, or other experiences. Somatics is an experiential practice that helps to raise consciousness about how our body experiences. The way we process our body’s experiences shapes our world, our relationships, and even the health of our bodies. Systems of body awareness are highly developed by dancers, and assisting us to gain clarity of connections and control over precision in body movement. This workshop helps you understand and connect to the body as a holistic system.

Dance and Creative—Online Workshops

For those who cannot…

Artistic Directors Seónagh Kummer and Carolyn Dunn with dancer-collaborator Rosa Rodriguez Frazier, invite you to participate in our online workshops starting soon. Workshops are open to anyone at any level of movement and dance ability who is curious about this process. Check back here we will offer specific workshop times in summer. Come play with us (online only) to form community and make sure your story is part of our collection of stories!

Our piece is about memory and loss we experience through our mothers’ dementia and Altzheimer’s. Our workshops explore this this through the lens of the life-death-life cycle of a Wild Woman archetype.

  • Learn how to create movement as poetry in motion
  • Understand how to explore the Wild Woman Archetype with dance movement!
  • Create movement using objects and photographs that relate to memory and survival
  • Explore the central concepts of remembering and forgetting through movement as they collaborate in the development of a new piece. Check back here for links and more info. Sign up to have your story heard.

Dance and Creativity In-person Workshops Coming

Dance Workshops

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, Dramaturgy, Creative Development, Dance and Wellness, Performance, and other topics.

Check back here for updates when we can have in-person dance workshops again.

Storytelling, Slow Peace, and Somatic Body Maps

Dr. Seónagh has been doing deep work and mindfulness practice for over 30 years, and she lives in the space of embodiment and social justice. As a somatic educator she engages in “slow peace,” aligning 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 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.

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 in Madurai, India and on Salt Spring Island 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.