by Elizabeth Phillips

To the Committee,

Thank you all so very, very much for supporting my fabulous summer experience. My career, my life energy, and my sense of focus have all increased tremendously as a result of this summer’s dance experiences.

I spent one month in Europe doing two different dance workshops, based on a philosophy and teaching style created by Gabrielle Roth. I was so inspired that I then went to California for another ten day workshop, lead by Gabrielle Roth herself.

The first dance workshop was held in Switzerland. Thirty participants stayed in a chalet and spent 5 days dancing for about 10 hours per day. The workshop was titled Procreation. The workshop supported topics including sexuality and trauma, historical perspectives of the body, ancestral relationships to birth, sexuality, and the body.

This workshop used dance, movement, and music as primary tools for investigating such topics. Intellectual analysis was discouraged, the philosophy being that the body stores memories, even ancestral, and pre-birth memories, and instinctive movement can clarify, cleanse replenish, re-channel, inform, change, affirm, and transform energies that have in the past been hurtful. The mind, however, often blocks the body from its inherent knowledge and wisdom. Therefore, refraining from analysis is imperative to creating desirable change and from seeing the ‘truer’ states of feeling and awareness that the body harbors.

I did a second five day workshop, titled ‘Movement Medicine’ in London. We met for 6-8 hours per day for five days. We focused on the relationship between the body, physical rhythms, and related emotional states. There were 60 participants in this non residential workshop in which we did both individual process work and group work. Once again, there was virtually no intellectual analysis. Rather, the focus was one connecting to one’s own emotional state and natural rhythms that arise from those states or vice verse via dance. One premise in this work is that the more one can release into natural states of being, without resistance, the more power one has to react from instant, and from a place of honesty.

The third workshop, in California, focused on dance and shamanism. The title of this workshop was also ‘Movement Medicine’, and the aim was to access wisdom in instinct and to be able to rely on instinct amidst chaos. We spent 6-8 hours per day in a variety of experiences. We danced a great deal, painted, created rituals, did theatre, sang, wrote, performed. One premise here of course, is that instinct is actually where wisdom is stored.

This last workshop was by far the most intense and the most powerful for me because it tied the work of two previous workshops together and because it provided strong confirmation about my desire to mix shamanism, art, and healing. I may now do a teaching certification program with Gabrielle Roth or I may develop my own practice. I am a second year graduate student in the social work program, planning to be part of a clinical practice that supports body-based transformational learning. I obviously have a strong bias that change needs to happen in the body, not just in the mind, and that physical experiences are required for such change. I hope to incorporate color, sound, art, dreams, visual art, voice, and dance into my practice, and I am currently seeking out therapists who use such techniques. In any case, these workshops were the first time I have every found a body of work that makes a great deal of physical, emotional, spiritual, psychological, cognitive sense to me. It is a body of work that is not linear or traditional to the western mind, and which requires a great deal of rigor. I trust the process greatly and will definitely do more with Gabrielle. Once again, thank you for making such an amazing summer possible.

Sincerely,
Elizabeth Phillips