A SAMPLING OF PAST CLASSES : : :
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Rituals to Honor Earth
This series explores our embodied relationship to the natural world. Through movement, dance, drawing, and poetry we will explore connection to the elements — both universal and personal, and then create and enact our own rituals to honor them.
How do you relate on the personal level to each of these elements? What are the archetypal themes and metaphors you associate with each, and how do they show up in your life? What is calling for deeper connection and re-membering with the natural world? How would you like to honor and celebrate these connections through ritual?
Through guided explorations and structured prompts, we will collectively dive into embodied meaning-making through the language of the arts.
Week 1 – Earth and Sky
Week 2 – Light
Week 3 – Plants
Week 4 – Animals
Week 5 – Water
If you are able to join the class from outdoors, wonderful — but it is not necessary. We relate to these natural elements no matter where we are.
Body Mapping
Each part of our bodies is unique: each has developed specific functions, moves in particular ways, and has its own stories to tell and dances to dance. In this series, we focus on a new area of the body each week. For each body part, we study anatomy and body mechanics, we explore its movement somatically, and we allow its wisdom to express through drawing, creative writing, and dance. By exploring our anatomy experientially and artistically, we connect more deeply with our bodies, creativity, and lived experience.
Dedications
Who is someone in your life who you would like to honor? Who has supported you, or been a good friend, or made life more meaningful?
We will each come to this workshop with one specific person to honor. We will come together in community to appreciate the people who have been important in our lives, and dedicate our art and dances to them. Perhaps you want to honor a best friend, or a deceased parent, or an influential teacher, a quickly-growing child, an ancestor you’ve never met — or even an aspect of yourself like an inner guide who you would like to thank. Whomever you choose, what gifts have you received from them? How do they live in your soma, in your body, emotions, imagination and memories? How would you like to honor them and your relationship through art and ritual?
Through guided imagery, somatic explorations, drawing, creative writing, dance and sharing, we will use the Tamalpa Life/Art Process® to focus our attention on the people in our lives who have made us who we are.
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Dancing Life
What moves you? Where do your dances come from? How can your real-life experience become art? This class uses mindfulness and somatic practices to guide participants in explorations using awareness as a bridge between embodiment and expression, sensing and movement, life, and dance.
Beginning each session with guided mindfulness, we immerse deeply in our present lived experience with a witnessing mind. Slowly, participants will be guided to allow sensations, feelings, and images to find their natural expression through the body. We follow these impulses and expressions organically into dances, whether large and energetic, or subtle and minute, with a chance to reflect and share with others at the end of class.
Men’s Workshop
Dance, expressive arts, personal development … men are frequently outnumbered by women in these spaces. Join us for an opportunity to connect as men as we explore our creativity, ourselves, and our lived experience through dance, drawing, and creative writing.
*Gender is complex, gender is fluid. What it means to be a man can be different things to different people and can feel conflicting even within one’s own identity. This space is open to anyone who holds a male identity, including cis men, trans men, masculine-leaning gender queer folks, and others.
~ Please note that we will not explicitly explore issues or themes related specifically to masculinity or maleness.
Through the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, we will encounter aspects of ourselves through guided somatic explorations, dance, drawing and creative writing with opportunities for sharing and witnessing one another.
Dancing Breath
“Dance is the breath made visible.” — Anna Halprin.
Breath is foundational to all of our movement; to life itself. This series centers the breath as a way to find more ease, depth, connection and presence in our dances and in our lives.
In this workshop we will :
– Study the mechanics of breathing
– Develop awareness of the breath
– Discover different aspects of the breath through guided somatic explorations
– Practice using the breath as foundational support for movement and dance
– Explore the connection between the breath and creative expression
– Reflect on and share our experiences with others
Join us to explore what can emerge when we follow the breath and allow it to move us… to become visible.
This series is open to everyone. No art or dance experience needed.
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Past Reflections, Present Stance, Future Hopes: A Self-Portrait Journey at Year’s End
Who have I been, who am I now, how will I re-vision myself?
The closing of the calendar year provides an opportunity to mark the cycle of time, to take stock of where and who we’ve been, and to envision our future. As 2021 comes to a close and 2022 awaits us, we use the Tamalpa Life/Art Process to reflect on who we’ve been this last year, who we are today, and who we want to become. Using the power of drawing, dance, creative writing and community, we explore ourselves through a self-portrait process that can help us mark the passage of time and tend to our growth.
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Somatic Arts and Nature
The Halprin and Tamalpa legacy has a long history of working outdoors in collaboration with the natural world. After over five years of Tamalpa holding classes over Zoom, this series will be an opportunity to apply practices from our online studio to the natural environment. Each week we will explore a new somatic practice together indoors. Then, you will take the practice and repeat it on your own in relationship to and in connection with the natural world — whether that be remote wilderness, your back yard, or a city park — whatever is accessible to you. Explorations will follow gateways such as Sensory Awareness, Breath, Sounding and Movement that connect and open our bodies and minds to the animate, alive, more-than-human world. There will then be opportunities to share about your experiences with the group before learning the next practice.
Dream Workshop
Dreams are windows to our subconscious, gifts from another realm. Movement and the arts can serve as valuable tools for engaging with our dreams in waking life. The arts lend themselves well to dream work, and can be experienced as a sort of waking dream, a highly imaginal realm of symbolism, feeling, and story.
In this 3-hour workshop, each participant will come prepared with a specific dream they want to work with. It can be a recent dream, or one whose memory has stayed with you from the past. We will use movement, drawing, and creative writing to bring the images from our dream into embodied exploration, visual expression, and language that help us make meaning and deepen into the offerings it has for us. Please be aware that the individual support available in this container is limited; highly charged or traumatic dreams are best avoided in this workshop.
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Dance, Draw, Dialogue:
Self Portraits
Who Am I Today? Through guided experiences of movement, drawing, and writing, we look into the mirror through the language of the arts. Using the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, we reveal a new mini self-portrait each week, dance with it, and listen to what it has to tell us.
Moving in the World
We are living in an unprecedented historical moment, from the Covid-19 pandemic to the worldwide uprising for racial justice, to climate change.
How do we move as individuals within the larger world dance?
What art do we need to create for a meaningful response to these times?
In this 5-class series, we will use the expressive arts (somatic-based movement, dance, drawing, and creative writing) to support us in discovering how current world events live in and through our own bodies; to resource ourselves through embodiment and artmaking; and to explore new possibilities within our own somatic and creative experiences that can guide us in how we want to relate to and dance with the larger global body.
Moving in the World aims to open creative bridges between the thread of our personal lives and the social fabric of which we are a part.
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Drawing Explorations
This workshop series will be geared towards developing creativity, the imagination, and an embodied approach to image-making. We will explore somatic-based drawing exercises, techniques of freeing up creativity and dive deep into the rich landscape of the imagination. Using the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, we will focus on drawing as a bridge between our imagination and our bodies to open artistic pathways to themes in our lives, and to discover deeper layers of who we are.
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Tamalpa Online : Moving Within
As we come together for this workshop from within our own homes, we will take the time to slow down, stand on the ground beneath us, listen to the wisdom of our bodies, and express ourselves creatively through dance.
// This weekly series of online classes is founded on the work of Anna Halprin and the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, using anatomy-based movement improvisation, somatic exploration, and creative expression to connect more deeply with ourselves, our global community, and even our sense of place.
Each session will end with a drawing exercise based on your movement experience during the class.
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Movement Arts Lab
Veterans Memorial Building,
200 Grand Ave, Oakland, CA
Hall 2
$10-20, notaflof
Experimental research lab for embodied creativity. Tamalpa Life/Art Process, BodyMind Dancing, and new somatic discoveries. Explore in an inquiry-based expressive & improvisational dance and movement space.
w/ Brae Weil Sisk, SMTE
& Natan Daskal, RSME/T
~ begins feb 5, 2020 ~
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Movement Ritual
2727 California St.
Berkeley, CA
$10-20 donations, notaflof
Movement Ritual, created by dancer Anna Halprin, has served as the foundation of somatic movement practice and a departure-point for creative dance improvisation at Tamalpa Institute, and previously San Francisco Dancer’s Workshop.
This class will be in 3 parts:
Slow, focused, guided movement on the floor
Creative Exploration & Group Improvisation
Drawing & Sharing
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The Creative Body
The Finnish Hall
Berkeley, CA
In this movement/dance class, we dive into the internal landscape of the sensorial body using guided somatic-based movement as a source for creative exploration and embodied awareness.
Based on the work of Anna Halprin and the Tamalpa Life/Art Process, we use anatomy-based dance improvisation to increase somatic awareness, connect external movement with inner experience and life themes, express our creativity, and deepen our experience of being human.
* No dance experience needed.