“Hello fellow voyager. I’m so glad you are checking in here. I’m happy to share this body of work with you, in person or on-line.
Body Songs has been growing as a practice over many years of learning and teaching. This practice evokes creative supple responsiveness - in our body experience, nervous system states, daily life expression, in our relational ecology, and in response to the contemporary collective challenges of culture and climate.
We are in the midst of many currents of collective stress and suffering, and we also carry wise wild lineages of magic and creativity. Movement and play are fundamental to life and caring well for life force. When we are stressed we often contract and become still and braced against gravity. Movement play helps us find our supple flow again. Improvisation supports us well to develop creative present moment responses to life.”
As a mode of being in the world, improvisation shows us that there are other ways of doing things, that social change is possible, that another world is possible.
—Fischlin, Heble, & Lipsitz (The Fierce Urgency of Now)
Body Songs is a movement practice developed by Katriona Ilsedóttir Curry, weaving improvisational movement arts, somatic source, relational ecology and kinship with Earth, and social justice praxis.
This work is a creative synthesis of Katriona’s 47 years of explorations and training in movement arts, improvisation, creative arts, group process, physical and applied theater, embodied, relational neuroscience, the Work that Reconnects, somatic psychology, Social Justice Praxis, and Earth-based Wisdom Traditions.
Katriona (she/they) is a dynamic facilitator of collective improvisation and embodied, playful, supple presence. A movement artist, image crafter, embodied storyteller, somatic and arts therapist, mentor, and teacher. She has been teaching and leading groups for the past 30 years, has been teaching movement for 25 years, has been working as a somatic & arts psychotherapist for 25 years, and a trainer and mentor of therapists for 23 years.
A Registered Yoga Teacher and Certified Soul Motion Conscious Dance Teacher, Katriona has studied many lineages of creative movement over the past 47 years, including: Authentic Movement, Modern, Jazz, Tap, Ballet, Argetine Tango, Salsa, Soul Motion, Mammals Moving, Movement Based Expressive Arts with Tamalpa Institute, 5 Rhythms, and Contemporary Improvisation. A member of the first cohort of teachers of Soul Motion (the Pilot Program), Katriona later co-created the Soul Motion Embodied Leadership program with Aletia Alvarez.
To her teaching she brings 25 years experience with somatic methodologies, storytelling and theater improvisation, visual arts, creative group practice, mindfulness and wisdom traditions, Earth-based spirituality, and somatic inquiry.
Body Songs is informed by Land, this beautiful Land of “Vancouver” Island - a land of rivers and rainforest, of ferns, salal, Arbutus, Gary Oak, Elder Cedar, Douglas Fir, and dangling moss, at the edge of the Salish Sea. A land of Salmon, Herring, Eagle, Raven, Bear, Cougar, Wolf, Hummingbird, Orca, and Humpback. This land is a teacher that deeply supports the practice of Body Songs: Earth and Sky. This Land that is unceded First Nations Ancestral Territorty, Land that holds memory of great suffering and also of great dignity and powerfully connective ceremony.
Katriona’s human teachers include: Joy Harjo, Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Abram, Fyre Jean Graveline, Jean Tait, Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat Hanh, Suzanne Simard, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Andrea Olsen, Paulo Freire, Vincent Martinez Grieco, Zuza Engler, rev angel Kyodo williams, Jonathan Fox and Jo Salis, Augusto Boal, Anna Halprin and Daria Halprin, Peggy Hackney, Pat Ogden, Kekuni Minton, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, Andrea Juhan, Kathy Altman, and many more.
“Our task is to stir up potent response to devastating events, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places.”
formal credentials:
Registered Yoga Teacher (200hr).
Certified Soul Motion Improvisational Movement Teacher
CoFounder of the Soul Motion Embodied Leadership Program
Registered Canadian Art Therapist,
Certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapist, Approved Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Consultant, Certified Sensorimotor Psychotherapy Trainer
Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in California
Registered Couple and Family Therapist in Canada
Registered Clinical Counselor in BC.
Katrina lives with her partner and two youngest children in Victoria, BC, in the Ancestral, unceded territory of the lək̓ʷəŋən People, known today as the Esquimalt and Songhees First Nations. Deep respect and solidarity to the Ancestors, Elders, community and descendants of the lək̓ʷəŋən People.
Katrina practices an abiding commitment to cultural transformation through Earth-based, creative, playful, generative social justice practice, is an ongoing student of Radical Dharma and a student of Indigenous feminist teachers. She is invested in learning together about healing the wounds of history towards relations of kindness, integrity, reciprocity, equity, respect, and warmth.
Bodies are part of Earth….As dancers, we don’t create movement, we participate in a dynamic, moving universe….Bodies have intrinsic intelligence….As dancers, rather than seek control over our bodies, we learn to listen to this deep intelligence. Bodiers locate us. Movement is inherent; we move to feel ourselves in relation to Earth. The mysterious animating flow that moves through every cell in the body and all life systems is the creative source. For innovation in creative work, we need inhabitation — of our bodies, of the places we live and love, and of the ideas we want to bring back responsibly to our communities”
(Andrea Olsen, The Place of Dance)
Katriona’s classes are Social Justice oriented spaces. We practice dimensions of community care & honour one another’s personal space and boundaries through action.
These are spaces of diversity in age, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, culture, ethnicity, race, ability, neurotype, language, body size…. These are spaces of practicing commitment to transformation of domination and exclusion culture. These classes and workshops are Queer and Trans-celebratory spaces, Neurodivergent welcoming and affirming, accessibility invested, BIPOC welcoming and affirming, diversity in Body Size welcoming and affirming. We are many variations of human, and this multiplicity creates magic and innovation.
These classes are rooted in a commitment to learn together about practicing transformative community, practicing our collective in a way that actively dismantles systems of domination as they live within our own procedural tendencies.
We will not do this perfectly together, as we all have been socialized in practices and attitudes of harm. Yet, rooted in our embodied humanity and a devotion to healing culture, we can practice transformative ways of being together, practice an ethos of curiosity, mindfulness, and restoration when harm occurs.