movement as mythic art
adult & teen studies program, age 12+
“I float out of Laura’s classes on a river of magic, no matter how ungrounded I felt when walking in.”
”The way Laura takes you into her dance world is irresistible. I found myself dancing with others who share the same need for beauty, nature, spirituality and self-expression.”
”the most magical and empowering dance class I have ever been to...”
”Laura teaches a kind of beauty that is not for sale.”
Laura Melling photo Vicky Sloat
Our method: Many volumes have been written about the work of Isadora Duncan and how her approach to dance spawned the many fields of expressive movement and authentic (method) acting, returned a living approach to mythology to the West, laid the way somatic psychotherapies, and restored to the West a positive, holistic view of the body's relationship to the Earth. This brief webpage cannot begin to explain the complexity of Isadora's work.
In truth, the only way to meet Isadora's work is in person. It is a living, dynamically unfolding tradition, that relies on our participation. It is based in mythic, rather than conceptual, modes of thought.
As Isadora said, "If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it."
A dance of deep connection: Though the dance is grounded in our personal feeling and destiny, we dance to serve something far grander and wilder than ourselves. At the same time, the centered technique bestows upon us each powerful, grounded, wild, graceful, and authentic movement that carries forward into all movements we make.
Our Monday class takes up a unique theme every five weeks.
Past themes have included: Jung & Alchemy; Centering the Sacred Self; Integrating the Perceptive Faculties: Sensation, Image, Feeling, Thought; Making a Home in the Body-Soul; Essential Triadic Archetypes.
Our theme for Fall of 2017 is 'Myth & the Dreaming Body'
In this 5 week movement class, we will explore the subtle, dreaming body, also called the soul, and its role in connecting us to the land, to one another and to the patterned movements of archetypal energy.
In the mythic landscape of the Dreaming Body, we find an ageless dance. The dance to connect to the animals that feed and inspire us. The dance for speaking with the trees and the winds. The dance of connection with the very forces of birth, life, death, beauty and transcendence.
We will nourish, understand and celebrate this realm below the surface, the grounding and source of our physical body and of our capacity for beauty, integrity and grace. We will dance in silence and to music, in group harmony and in solo improv, as well as tone, speak and meditate.
We will practice expressive movement for renewal and self-understanding, and learn Bioenergetic exercises for daily release of tension. You will have the opportunity to cultivate your daydreaming and visionary meditation skills and learn integrative approaches to working with night dreams.
This entire course will also be taught in a single workshop on September 24th at the Starhouse. Email mythmovement@live for details.
We dream a dance reaching beyond the Self to connect with the whole of Life, in archetypal designs extending and repeating in matter, space and time. And we dream a Body able to stand within this timeless dance.
There will be a simple performance / community sharing of our work at the last session.
Schedule:
August 28 6:45-8:15 pm
Sept 4th 7:45- 9:15 pm
Sept 11, Sept 18, Sept 25, 6:30-8 pm
(5 class session). Kelly's Barn, 1360 Sumac Ave.
Class fee: $85/5 class session. $20/drop in. Sliding scale fees available by application.
Contact us to pre-register or to join the mailing list.
Teacher Laura Melling, MA, IDMA is Director of the Colorado School of Myth & Movement and an affiliate teacher and performer with the Isadora Duncan International Institute since 2003. Laura came to dance in her twenties, leaving a promising academic career to embrace a life in art. She is considered internationally to be an exemplary teacher and performer, with training passed directly from Isadora: Her master teacher Jeanne Bresciani, PhD, was the protege of Maria-Theresa Duncan, Isadora's adopted dancing daughter. For more about Laura visit http://mythmovearts.org/about-3/
“Imagine then a dancer who, after long study, prayer and inspiration, has attained such a degree of understanding that his body is simply the luminous manifestation of his soul; whose body dances in accordance with a music heard inwardly, in an expression of something out of another, a profounder world. This is the truly creative dancer, natural but not imitative, speaking in movement out of himself and out of something greater than all selves.” – Isadora Duncan