I made this film for a class that I did this term on Embodied Inquiry. At the beginning of the term, we were invited to find a somatic practice that allowed us to enter a flow state. From this embodied practice, we were tasked with writing and creating based on what came up for us. We engaged in this practice over the course of the term and this film is my final project based on that process.

The practice that I chose was dancing for fun in my house. Through these sessions, I attempted to find freedom from my inner critic. I did this by prioritizing sensation and letting go of the desire for a particular outcome. I found that over time I was able to find joy as well as a fluidity and ease in my movement that had been difficult for me to find in the past.

I decided to make this project as a dance film because I felt like the classroom would be too small of a space for the expansiveness that I’d been feeling. I also felt like it would be too early in this process for me to bring that sense of ease and vulnerability to a live audience. So, making a film gave me a safe container to work within. It also allowed me to experiment with being in different environments while I was dancing. I loved dancing with the sun, the sounds of the birds and the crunching leaves.

A lot of different themes came up for me during this process. What I decided to focus on was patterns of movement and what meaning they might hold about my emotional and psychological inner world. In the film, you’ll see repetition of movement as well as repetition of words to symbolize the cyclical and repetitive nature of my thoughts. The movement in the film stems from my somatic practice as well as memories of physical vocabularies from my dance training and other choreographic explorations. I tried to thread these “movement memories” into my new patterns of movement and see how it all sat together.

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