While we are a school and a training body, this is really about making space for one of the most profound explorations of human potential. Body is the teacher, we learn to draw on its intelligence and respond to life from there.
These are deep trainings, focused on the personal practice of the dancer. We integrate other mediums into the work, including poetry, art and project presentations, and at every stage we invite our thinking minds to rest while we explore our embodied landscape.
A unique, community-based international training programme delivered through a series of multi-day modules each year.
We are a community dance school, embedded in Devon. Our sister organisations, Moving Together and Movement for Life provide regular dance spaces for different groups in the community. Our students connect in with the international network of Soul Motion facilitators who often combine the practice with other specialisms.
We bring international visiting Soul Motion teachers to Devon community to offer a range of CPD (continuing professional development). We are committed to dance for all, and this provides students with a chance to see dance embedded in life and community.
Unique to Soul Motion methodology, facilitators lead movement-improvisation explorations as active participants within the dancing field. Facilitators develop skills to see, feel and respond to the changing field from their own dance and varied witness perspectives.
Trainees arrive with us from many backgrounds and skillsets
Examples of recent graduates have also included lecturers, musicians, carers, full time parents.
Trainees continue on to integrate the training with existing practices, one to one work, lead small or large groups or on a personal level receive a deepening of their own dance and movement practice. We support trainees to develop sustainable social enterprise if they wish to build a career of facilitating dance.
Embodiment training for personal, professional and community life
Training with Devon School of Soul Motion enriches and extends all aspects of life and becomes a deep resource to accompany diverse professional roles.
Throughout the training, we focus on the internal somatic world within each of us, seeing and being seen and supported within the cohort, reaching profound levels of awareness and inner transformation. The journey empowers us to move in the world from soul, connect with heart and if we wish, lead groups with skilful holding.
Our trainings are for anyone seeking to deepen their self awareness or enhance a related career with deep movement and body-based practice. The training also welcomes existing dance practitioners or students of dance. Soul Motion is an accessible practice that meets all skill-levels.
When you visit a Soul Motion class, you are escorted through four relational landscapes while playing in a field of three core movement platforms.
Dancing alone, we discover our relationship with our body as a shifting shape in space.
Here we begin to move in ever-widening circles receiving and releasing the dance within a wider view of all those present.
Inspired by interior impulses, sensations, and images, the dancer joins with another in a field of common exploration.
What happens in the dance room is a template for the living world. We move out from the dance room more aligned and embodied with an enhanced perception of everyday dance.
A go-to place in the dance that opens the dancer to the benefits of active stillness and a relaxed view of the witness.
The dancer is realigned with the natural movement of spiral and circle both within and outwardly.
The dancer is ushered into the co-creative field of inspiration being received and released.
His path to the creation of Soul Motion led him a rich dance, from working with Barbara Dilley at Naropa University, Terry Sendgraff, Deborah Hay, Douglas Dunn of Merce Cunningham Company, Wilbert Alix of Trance Dance, Gabrielle Roth of 5 Rhythms, Emilie Conrad of Continuum and more.
After 30 of dancing and teaching, Vincent began to train teachers to facilitate Soul Motion as an established modality at the turn of the 21st century. Since then it has become established in the UK, America, Europe and Australia. Soul Motion has long been a leading dance modality.
As a young boy, Vincent (known as Vinnie), when setting off to school or church in the New York Bronx, would hear his Italian mother calling out to him, “Vinnie, always remember to keep your soul in motion”. Whether playing basketball or collecting donations at mass all through his childhood Vincent felt the expansive potential of Body in Space, the sacred aliveness experienced in Motion and Pause.
After many years of leading the US Soul Motion School, Vincent in 2020 decided to step down from day-to-day business and pass the further development of Soul Motion into broader hands. We’re delighted to be one of the schools offering Soul Motion leader and practitioner trainings now.
You can find more information about Vincent on his website: www.soulmotionnextsteps.com
Zuza Engler, long-time student of Vincent and community dance practitioner, urged him to offer a formal teacher training which she shaped collaboratively with him in 2007-2009.
In 2014, Aletia Anna Alvarez, graduate of the Pilot Program and founder of Madrona Mind Body Institute, brought forward an idea to develop an Embodied Leadership Program as the first step in the Soul Motion Teacher Training Program, to help people grow their embodied familiarity with the practice before beginning to develop teaching skill in the second year. Aletia invited Katrina to collaborate, create, and develop this program within the school. Aletia and Katrina tended the program for the first three cohorts, and together developed the school’s Mentorship program.
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Open to graduates of any Soul Motion school or certified dance practitioners of other forms
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info@devonschoolsoulmotion.org
Personal development, leadership and facilitation training for movement and dance
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