Releasing Technique

When: Mondays, 2/2-4/13/2026, at 5:15-6:45pm

Where: Held at the beautiful Ithaca Movement Arts studio in downtown Ithaca

$150 for the series of 10 classes

If it is your first class, let me know if you'd like to attend the 2/2/2026 session as an individual class. While this series is a continuation of the Fall series, welcoming people new to this approach to dance. Some experience with meditation, movement, martial arts, or an allied fields can be helpful but not essential. Registration deadline: 1/26/2026.

For people of all movement backgrounds.

Releasing explores the rich, multidimensional dialogue of movement and imagination, specifically poetic imagery. The dancing is fostered in part through partnered work, in which specific touch and subtle movement suggest new kinetic and kinesthetic possibilities - opening, lengthening, widening, tipping, falling, more. Some parts of class are also spent lying on the floor, enjoying support in gravity. Music is woven throughout the classes, lending texture, space, and provocation to the mix. Physical awareness, availability to impulse, and allowing movement to happen are central to this experiential, experimental and process-oriented practice. Class can serve as a support for creative work, or a place simply to honor the wild and subtle dances at play within the body.

This work was developed by Joan Skinner, whose dance career initially led to unwanted, sustained injury. She sought a way to work in dance wherein unfoldings of movement may follow the unique logic of our own bodies, gently revealing layers of presence within us. 

Releasing embraces the principle of softening, to find strength. Other principles include letting go of unneeded tensions in support of freedom of movement; internal space as a felt experience of receptivity, inter-being and communication; alignment that is multidirectional and mobile; creative process as inseparable from technical work; poetic images as culturally specific and culture forming, having the power to illicit new movement.  Through the lens of body systems, Releasing is widely understood as an approach that foregrounds the skeletal and fascial systems. However, Releasing can serve as a radical gateway to engaging all of the body systems at once.

Registration: You registration is confirmed via payment by check or by venmo @JulieNat (essential to ‘friend’ me first to ensure correct account). PayPal is also an option, at nattie.hjn@gmail.com, please be sure to pay as friend to avoid fees. Reach out to Julie with any questions at (512)669-6985.

Listening across species

When: Coming in 2026, a continuation of the PRIMATE movement research project.

In this workshop we’ll explore ways of listening in movement, to some of our inheritances in form and behavior from across generations. We’ll spend some time, too, in the company of other-than-human primates, appreciating the wider family of creatures to which we belong. Our approach will incorporate multi-sensory materials, movement games and experiments, and selected footage from a field researcher’s video collection. Facilitation by Julie Nathanielsz, with support from Wendy Erb.

Julie Nathanielsz, MFA, is an artist, teacher, and bodyworker working in the field of dance and somatic practice for over 20 years. Trained in biological anthropology and behavioral ecology, Dr Wendy Erb studies the behavior, communication, and conservation of wild primates. This experimental workshop arises in part from conversations between Julie and Wendy enjoyed over the last ten years.

In the movement arts, we turn to metaphors of animal movement as gateways to self-discovery, community health, and physical language. This workshop proposes a fresh field of possibility, by including conservationists who, also, are influenced and altered by inhabitants of the forest, and who recognize the interdependence of species on our planet.  We are in fact all of us researchers, engaged in conscious and unconscious bodily intercommunication every day. At it’s base, this session is an opportunity to play within a wide field of movement possibilities, with multi-sensory materials, field recordings, other-than-human primates, environments and atmospheres.