I’d like to explain the differences between Dance Technique Class (Monday @5:30), Contact Improvisation Class (Friday @8pm), Downtempo Lounge/Jam and Ecstatic Dance (Sunday @Noon). 

Dance Technique is choreographed class that can help you become stronger, more flexible, and smarter in your body.  If you’ve never been to a choregraphed class you might think of it as a yoga or exercise class without a mat.  The class I teach is mostly contemporary/modern dance with elements from ballet, yoga, African, and many other movement styles.  Some experience with your body is helpful, and all levels are welcome.  Please be on time, or up to 10 min early.

Contact Improvisation (CI) Class can help you become more creative in your body and more comfortable in relationship with others.  The class will provide explorations of movement and awareness that get you out of your head and into motion.  Movement and touch with others is a part of the play, and you will be supported in claiming your boundaries.  This is an all-levels class, and those with experience will have the opportunity to make use of it.  Please be on time, or up to 10 min early.

Downtempo Lounge is an ecstatic dance with gentler/slower music.  It is an opportunity to continue with the lessons from Contact Improvisation (CI) Class, but you need not come to class to join.  In the world of CI, this is typically called a jam.  There is no additional charge for CI class participants.  Come and go as you please 9-10:30.

Ecstatic Dance is an opportunity to be completely yourself with others.  The focus is on the music and the space we hold together.  I play a mixture of music styles centered around new releases of organic bass electronica (find my playlists on Spotify at Matthew DJgluteus).  There is a brief opening circle 10-15 minutes after start time and a closing circle at the end.  Sometimes I’ll offer an optional movement mediation before circle, and otherwise there is no instruction. Come and go as you please.

You can find the events calendar and my website at www.soma.works/m

A BraveSpace Online Evening Class Wednesday May 18th
6pm-7:15pm Mountain Time on Zoom
Offered for $22.22, or for FREE
Link Below

Your pleasure is key to your healing power, and your spine is the primary generator for it.  The nature of the spine is connection, transmitting energy and motion through the body.  There are many names for the life force energy that travels this conduit, and many systems that study it:  The spiraling snakes of the caduceus are the symbol of modern medicine.  They also represent the flow of Kundalini and sexuality.  From Yoga to Chiropractic, we communally understand how important our spinal motions are.  Yet, the pleasure of moving the spine and its power to heal is less often discussed; perhaps this is communal shame around pleasure.  

In this BraveSpace Online Evening Class we will explore motions of the spine to find sacred pleasure within our own wholeness.  You will leave with practical tools for your own pleasure and healing that you can use without shame anywhere you go.

As a BraveSpace workshop you will have the opportunity to move, witness, and be witnessed by others in your authenticity.  We will hold space together for vulnerability in the safety and comfort of our own homes.  Please have a bit of space on the ground where you can move without the interruption of others and where you can have screen, sound, and camera on Zoom.  Nothing else is required.

Sign up at this link.  You will be emailed a zoom link for the class.
$22.22
Use the Coupon Code FREE to join for free.

A BraveSpace Online Evening Class Wednesday May 18th 6pm-7:15pm Mountain Time on Zoom
Offered for $22.22, or for FREE
Link Below

Your pleasure is key to your healing power, and your spine is the primary generator for it.  The nature of the spine is connection, transmitting energy and motion through the body.  There are many names for the life force energy that travels this conduit, and many systems that study it:  The spiraling snakes of the caduceus are the symbol of modern medicine.  They also represent the flow of Kundalini and sexuality.  From Yoga to Chiropractic, we communally understand how important our spinal motions are.  Yet, the pleasure of moving the spine and its power to heal is less often discussed; perhaps this is communal shame around pleasure.  

In this BraveSpace Online Evening Class we will explore motions of the spine to find sacred pleasure within our own wholeness.  You will leave with practical tools for your own pleasure and healing that you can use without shame anywhere you go.

As a BraveSpace workshop you will have the opportunity to move, witness, and be witnessed by others in your authenticity.  We will hold space together for vulnerability in the safety and comfort of our own homes.  Please have a bit of space on the ground where you can move without the interruption of others and where you can have screen, sound, and camera on Zoom.  Nothing else is required.

Sign up at this link.  You will be emailed a zoom link for the class.
$22.22
Use the Coupon Code FREE to join for free.

Technique is the how-to; the practicalities of alignment, weight shifts, timing, and overall coordination of the body.  Coming from a professional dance career I learned a lot of dance technique before coming to Ecstatic Dance.  One of the things I love about studying technique is that it increases the range of possibility within my experience of my body.  I have always danced for the experience of dancing–for the feeling of it.  Ecstatic Dance is a wide open palette for improvisation where anything goes.  My experience with technique gives me a lot of options within that freedom.

One technique that is fundamental to so many different styles of dance is the ability to get down, literally.  We bend the knee, hip, and ankle joints to lower the body toward the ground.  If you’re an Ecstatic Dancer and you’re wanting to get more into the feeling of a dance, it’s probably a good time to get down.  Use the technique to give you options.

My friend Kelsey and I are interested in supporting Ecstatic Dancers to go deeper.  If this is you, please write back with topics you’d like us to cover!

If you’re in Boise please join BraveSpace Company for Dance Technique most Monday nights.  Join the text list by texting DANCE to 877-796-1680, and find the events calendar at https://soma.works/events/.

Being alive is sometimes a lot to manage.  The most powerful tool that is mine to share with you is rolling around on the ground.  I have seen it offer healing in the face of physical, psychological, and even spiritual imbalances.  Its pretty much as simple as it sounds, and there are also innumerable layers of greater complexity that can deepen the effects.  My practice arose through the lineage of modern dance–an art form that I now frame as medicine.  Some of you reading this take this practice for granted, and surely a number of you have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about.  Why didn’t we learn the significance of this in grade school?  Perhaps it degrades authority…I’ll let you decide on that.

I’ve created the above video to share the simplest and most profound experience of this work with you.  It may or may not feel profound at first, but I promise that in time it will bring you gifts…perhaps during heartbreak, after hurting your back, or while tripping on mushrooms (legally in Oregon of course).  I like to call it Somatic Flow Meditation, or Moving in Sensation–surely there are at least as many names for it as there are people teaching it.  There are a number of us; the technology of this work is as ancient as our bodies and inherent to them too.  

There’s another piece that I share first in the video, and that is Heart Center Meditation.  This is another universal and profoundly powerful practice.  It’s much newer to me, and my initiation into it has brought new wholeness to my life equal to what I have gained through Somatic Flow.  I begin this video with Heart Center Meditation because I believe through it you can hold yourself safely through the experience of feeling in new ways.  Given that I can’t hold space for you to explore in person (not in this video anyway), the Heart Center Meditation will help you hold yourself in the Somatic Flow. 

In BraveSpace we engage with both of these activities on day one.  Then we go deeper, layer by layer, relating with each other from the ability to feel ourselves.  There’s still 5 spots and housing available if you’d like to join May 6th-8th.  Apply here.

In meditation today my spine rippled.  I experienced waves of pleasure as I felt inward to connect with divinity, life force, the great mystery, existential grieving, and my sensory drama… they’re all reasonable descriptions for an experience that can only be hinted at.  They’re also forms of intimacy.  I’m currently experiencing intimacy as vibrational connection across polarity.  In intimacy there is simultaneous singularity and duality.

I spoke yesterday with one of you–a dear reader of these emails.  We spoke for an hour resonating around the experience of our bodies, intimacy, and the feeling that arises moving in community.  We spoke about a longing to be met and taken beyond what we already know.  We also recognized that intimate exchange is a form of transmission through which our nervous systems might upgrade each other; like sharing files on a network.  We acknowledged the simultaneous importance of boundaries–not everything is an upgrade.  Intimacy is vulnerable and vulnerability requires discernment.

I hold BraveSpace retreats in order that we can dive into intimacy as safely as possible.  We all have transmissions for each other.  It is my job to create the container of BraveSpace, and then we hold it together.  The transmissions come through each of us; through the innate intelligence of our bodies.  I shared a video in my last email introducing BraveSpace.  Below is a Q and A in which a friend who has never attended asked me for more information.  Her questions are excellent.