Body Songs is relational ecology through movement. This is movement for living, a practice that develops our supple, sturdy, creative, improvisational responsiveness in our own embodiment and in our relationships with one another and with Earth and Sky.

Welcome. Here you will find classes and workshops that support creativity, playfulness, and embodied presence, restoration of dignity and belonging, reciprocal relations in community, and the magical dance of sensory aliveness with Earth and Sky.

Body Songs is an eco-improvisational movement practice. Improvisation is a fundamental aspect of living, and is something that Earth is skillful with. Improvisation is something that restores suppleness, and helps us to develop our capacity for responsiveness to what is actually happening in the present moment. Ecology is improvisation in call and response.

When we dance, we experience our relations with Earth and Sky:

Movement partners the dynamics of the earth. Momentum, centrifugal force, and gravity inform the way we swing an arm, turn our head, or leap across a stream. In many ways, the moving body is our connection to the family of things. Rather than creating movement, we participate in the inherent movement of the planet….

Andrea Olsen

Body Songs invites us to come alive together in the present moment of motion and stillness. Breath that releases all the way to the end of the flow. Bones that feel into gravity and rest down into that bouyant support of Earth. Muscles that relax and energize, that play the range of movement, creating responsive engagement with life. Joints that bend and curve, limbs that extend and return to center, feet that soften upon Earth, body that drinks the sky and shapes space in all directions. Orbital, Resonant, Living Being.

This practice is a playful unfolding through micromovements as well as expansion through our kinesphere and through the open spaces between us, with attention to what feels good, true, real, easeful, surprising…. attention to what is emergent and curious.

In a Body Songs class, there is no set choreography; instead, participants are supported to explore their own instinctive body movement responses, gestures and phrases, through embodied inquiries in solitudes, small groups, and as a collective. This is playful, joyful, deep hearted magic through simple, real, tangible, tactile, curious scores.

Movement inquiries and scores are simple, somatic structures that offer frameworks for exploration and evoke embodied curiosity and playfulness. We might move with music, with sounds of nature, or other curious soundscapes, and sometimes we move in the great song of silence.

There are an infinite array of somatic inquiries or scores we play with through the classes. These inquiries help us explore some of the fundamental teachings of relational ecology that Body Songs is rooted within.

For example, we might explore working with cycles of ‘breath to movement’ in solitudes, dyads, then triads - such as moving on the exhalation and pausing on the in-breath. We might play with curved and straight lines as we travel through the spaces among one another, while we practice breath to movement.

We might spend time echoing the gestures of a partner, then switching who is the initiator and who is the responder in the dyad, and then soften the structure so that both in the partnership are initiating and listening/responding in their own timing as they travel through the spaces around the other dancer movers.

Each class includes some time practicing an inquiry and some time flowing through a movement passage of spacious ripples that jump off from and are informed by that earlier simple focused inquiry.

• Body Songs is welcoming, creative, playful, curious, and vibrant.

• In class we move through the range of tempo and the range of micro to large motor movements.

• This practice enhances suppleness in creativity, playfulness, and responsiveness.

• Through this practice we grow capacity for relaxation, responsive connection, and brave more authentic engagement in life.

• Body Songs is collaborative movement process that holds spaciousness for one another and evokes our awareness of the sensory resonance between us.

Body Songs helps us travel through the layers of relationship - solitudes, small dyads and tryads, and community scores, nestled in relation to Earth and Sky - helping us to become more available to relationship, more at ease in ourselves in relationship with others, more creative and innovative in our responses to one another.

• This practice ripples outwards from the dance floor into life, deepening our improvisational capacity to respond to the immense challenges of contemporary life.

• Body songs helps folks land more deeply into their embodiment, develops nervous system suppleness, growing capacity for creative relations with one another and deepening our felt relations with Earth. This changes how we show up in our bodies and in our sense of supple presence.

• Body Songs weaves somatic inquiry, body storytelling through gesture, dance movement scores, explorations in sound and body response, inquiries in image and motion, helping unfold our expressive range.

• Body Songs is movement improvisation in the collective, where the intention is deepening our embodied humanity through play.

• Katriona developed this practice through deep study of various movement forms through time, including: Soul Motion, Authentic Movement, Somatic Psychology, and Movement Based Expressive Arts, woven with her experience as a somatic, arts, and movement psychotherapist and listening to Relational Ecology, over many many years of curious enagement.