Releasing Technique - Ongoing Series
When: Beginning September 7, 2026 ~ Mondays, 5:15-6:45pm
Where: Held at the beautiful Ithaca Movement Arts studio in downtown Ithaca
$150 for the series of 10 classes
This series continues from a spring ‘26 series of introductory level releasing technique. Some experience with meditation, improvisation, or poetics in allied fields is essential. Registration deadline: 8/28/2026. If it is your first class, let me know if you'd like to attend your initial session as a single class. Reach out to Julie with any questions at (512)669-6985.
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 with payment for the series. Payment by cash, check, zelle or by venmo @JulieNat (essential to ‘friend’ me first to ensure correct account) is welcome.
PRIMATE: listening across species
Saturday July 11, 2026. 10am-12:30pm at the Soil Factory, Ithaca
Registration and information > here. Free, and for people of all movement backgrounds.
Following from last year's session at the Soil Factory, we are back to explore (more) ways of listening in movement to some of our inheritances in form and behavior across generations. We’ll also spend some time in the company of other-than-human primates, appreciating the wider family of creatures to which we belong. Multi-sensory materials, movement games and sound experiments, as well as selected footage from a field researcher’s video collection are some of what we'll get into. Ideas arise in part from conversations enjoyed over many years with biological anthropologist and behavioral ecologist Dr Wendy Erb, founder of ERB Lab.
In the movement arts, we turn to metaphors of animal movement as gateways to self-discovery, community health, and physical language. These experiments propose a fresh field of possibility by including the work of conservationists who themselves 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.
SHAKE ~ two Tuesdays, two Saturdays
Dates: Tuesday July 14 6:00pm-7:00pm, Tuesday July 28 6:00pm-7:00pm, Saturday August 8 9:15-10:15am, Saturday August 22 9:15-10:15am
Free, donations accepted. Home studio in Trumansburg, address shared via personal contact.
* Please drop an email or text 24 hours in advance, if you intend to attend. Participation: 2 minimum, 10 max
Shaking can be revelatory. Let the word land and expand in your body, over and over. Get big, wild, explosive. Shake in a chair or on the floor, take a break or get real small. Microquivering. Let the walls come down. It's an experiment. We begin and end together, otherwise we stay with our own movement research and process. Google all the good that can come from it. Playlists include environmental sounds, creative music composers, pop lyrics, percussion tracks, etcetc...
CDP ~ four Sundays
Dates: Sunday July 12; Sunday August 9; Sunday August 30; Sunday September 13.
11:00am-12:15pm / / by donation, NOTAFLOF
Home studio in Trumansburg, address shared via personal contact.
* Please drop an email or text 24 hours in advance, if you intend to attend. Participation: 2 minimum, 10max
CDP, or Contemplative Dance Practice, is an opportunity to explore intimate connections with yourself and spirit, through movement. Facilitation sets the circle, for meditation, personal warm up, open space. No prior experience required, all backgrounds welcome, and it is understood you are accustomed to respecting others' signals when it comes to interest in touch/movement. CDP is a place where the balance between our inward and outward attention privileges attending to ourselves. We move with ambient sounds of the studio and surroundings, without music, and a singing bowl marks phases of the practice. We'll begin promptly (closing the door) at 11:05am, so please arrive on time. A nice summary of CDP, originated by Barbara Dilley at Naropa, Boulder, is also here . A rich creative practice. Happy to chat about any aspect.