“Dance, when you’re broken open. Dance, if you’ve torn the bandage off. Dance in the middle of the fighting. Dance in your blood. Dance when you’re perfectly free.” – Rumi

Brooke Gessay is a dance artist, yoga teacher, and ordained zen monk. She is a lover of adventure, especially in the territories of creative process, collaborative performance, and meditation. She works with kids and adults in the Boulder community in elementary schools, with The Wellness Initiative, and on faculty at Naropa University and The Integral Center. She holds a BA in Dance and English/Creative Writing from Connecticut College. Brooke is currently an MFA candidate in Dance at CU Boulder, focusing on somatics and community engagement. She has danced professionally with LEVYdance, Malashock Dance, and Weird Al Yankovic, and toured in the U.S., China, Vietnam, Mexico, Italy and Lithuania. She has worked extensively with youth in arts education in San Francisco and Boulder.

—
Some of the questions/concepts I’m most interested in exploring through teaching, creating, and performing include:

– Developing witness capacity in movement – the ability to witness ourselves and others deeply, while also engaging kinesthetic clarity.

– Developing intimacy capacity in movement – the ability to fully savor any given moment of embodied movement, together and alone.

– “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” This wonderful question (from the poet W.B. Yeats) points to the multi-dimensional experience of any mover in terms of willing and allowing. In some moments it seems that we are causing movement, and communicating through it. In others, it seems that we are being moved – movement is happening through us, but not because of us. Sometimes the two experiences mingle and overlap; we move and are moved in a dynamic interplay between action and surrender. How do these states occur? Can we consciously cause them? What are their effects on other movers or viewers?