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Dani called for a Dance Buddy Session, and five dancers showed up at the Rehearsal Barn on the Podi (Platform of Deep Imagination) Ranch north of town. The ranch owner converted the property into an Arts Center, complete with a Rehearsal Barn, community gardens, horse riding, and a multitude of free workshops guided by artists from all over the world, ranging from Creative Life Hacking to Musical Design & Development. “Thank you for coming on short notice,” Dani said. “I’ve been having trouble breathing through fear zones, and I want to dance lifting and carrying boxes as a form of contraction and expansion.”
First, each dancer took a few moments to visualize their boxes for size, contents, and weight and why they were being lifted and carried to a new location. Dani recalled her college dance days when she joined a Contact Improv group off campus and learned to explore her body in relation to others by using the fundamentals of sharing weight, touch, and movement awareness. She applied this memory to the boxes, filling each with various loads of fear. Squatting to lift became contraction, a resistance to breathing into the fear and carrying them through a door to a spacious room became the expansion.
Dancers learn to release by minimizing tension in the body through breath-based movement. With their boxes weighed down by fear, the Buddy Dancers contracted…
