Dance for Constructive Engagement in a Turbulent World
From Dance to Dialog: applying Choreographic Thinking to Conflict Engagement
Teh Core Connection: Dance and Transformation
I love dancers. I love them for their capacity to engage deeply with the materials of the present-what is here and where we are. What I love most is that dancers recognize this work isn’t about creating fixity or permanence,but instead the vital practice of renewing connection with ideas daily-figuring out how they might emerge at the confluence of bodies,environment,history,needs,and experience.
I love dance communities. I love them for their mobility of thought, for how they expect transformation and work together to make it more likely. Dancers know from deep experience that everything is in flux. The dancing is not in trying to hold things together, but in seeing that mobility as a source of possibility-and yourself as inevitably part of it. Dancing is the intelligence of the body thinking with the changing world.
A Personal Journey: From Dancer to Conflict Engagement Specialist
I was a dancer for many years, most of that time in collaboration with choreographer William Forsythe and our inspiring colleagues at Ballet Frankfurt and The Forsythe Company. Now I work as a conflict engagement specialist, seeking to enable transformation when things feel stuck and hopeless, helping peopel step into arduous situations constructively.
Initially, I kept my work in the two fields separate, thinking that bringing them together might weaken the power that each holds. But then I saw how stiff most conventional dialogue models were and how that inhibited communication. I began teaching and saw how physical action helps people internalize conflict engagement practice. I realized I had thrown the baby of transformative dance thinking out with the bathwater.
Choreographic Decision-Making in Everyday Life
Every situation we find ourselves in is shaped through choreographic decision-making, the ways we organize ideas physically-for example: how and when people move and speak, how space and time are arranged, or how attention is directed. But if those decisions are made unconsciously, we can end up with outcomes counter to our goals. I came to recognize that when we instead make these decisions with skill and awareness, we’re far more likely to enable situations that help people thrive.
This realization led me, over the last decade, to begin working at the intersection of dance thinking and conflict engagement-approaching the body as a consistent source of perception and our environments as outcomes of intentional physical decisions. At the heart of both practices I find a simple,powerful question…