Dance & Somatic Wellbeing: Connections to the Living Body centres on the lived-felt-body through explorations in the imaginal, sensuous, emotional, spiritual, and philosophical aspects of the body. This course sees somatic movement as a practical life tool through which to promote wellbeing, develop a more holistic sense of self, and a capacity to be in relationship with others and our environment. Sessions include group, dyadic, and personal explorations. Academically and experientially the course introduces students to the fundamentals of somatic practices and phenomenology.

Year one focuses on:

• Individual exploration into body-self, cultivating an understanding of embodiment and well-being. This involves developing awareness of somatic experience - kinaesthetic, sensory, feeling, imaginative explorations
• Developing an expressive language through movement, drawing, gesture, metaphor and story, as reflection
• Developing embodied and imaginative ways of being in relationship (touch, language, moving together)
• Collaboration and facilitation of group improvisatory and somatic processes
• From the outset our practical work is supported by theoretical inquiry. This includes historical and contextual background to somatic movement practice and existential phenomenological frameworks

Year Two focuses on:

• Expanding the skills and practices learned in Year 1 with a greater emphasis on client/one to one practice, as well as an ongoing development in group facilitation
• Research methodologies, and synthesizing and integrating knowledge through cross curricular learning and personal research, thereby broadening personal practice.

The course covers the following within and across modular study: 

• Proprioceptive and interoceptive sensitivity and the imagination
• Non-judgemental methods of feedback and facilitation
• The quality of language and quality of presence
• Dialogical processes in relation to feeling, sensation, imagination, and functional movement description
• Explorations into the inner landscape of the body through interoceptive sensory awareness and meditative movement practice
• Skills of interoceptive and extroceptive listening supporting sensory homeostasis
• The wider contextual academic paradigm in relation to current international practice
• The sacred aspects of somatic movement

The field is based on the belief that we have the capacity and personal agency to direct and/or re-direct our lives through gentle self-reflexive processes; becoming active agents in our experience, sensually alive, and co-actively engaged with our world. The following are key areas covered within and across modular study:

• Experiential anatomy
• Moment-by-moment depth-connection to the body through movement and anatomical awareness
• Deep relaxation fostered through an awareness of the nervous system and meditative movement modalities
• Practices of self-care
• Personal and social change fostered through "models of dance and human companionship"
• Moving within the sensory-imaginal
• Improvisations sourced through anatomical investigations
• Poetic, symbolic, metaphoric and various art modalities, which deepen reflection, supporting people in re-visioning their lives with more direction and clarity
• Inter-age and inclusive models of dance-health
• The study of sacred dance, the soma and contemporary spirituality in movement
• Somatic research methods

Core Academic Team

Penny Collinson, MA, IBMT Dip, RSME

Penny is course leader on the UK programme, and contributes to the teaching and assessing of many of the modules. She also contributes to the teaching and assessing on the USA programme. Over 20 years of moving, as a facilitator and performer, within improvisation, Authentic Movement and Release-based techniques, has brought the body as central to all experience and supported her fundamental interest in sensing, moving and witnessing as tools for navigating self in the world. Penny’s particular area of interest and practice is embodied presence, and how through our engagement in deep bodily listening, we are awakened, clients and facilitators alike, to the lived felt experience of our sensory imagination. Penny is a senior lecturer and has been teaching at UCLan for 15 years. She has a Diploma from the Institute for Integrative Bodywork and Movement Therapy, and is a Registered Somatic Movement Educator with ISMETA. She runs a private practice from her home, facilitating somatic practice work which includes methods of awakening to our bodily nature, Integrative Bodywork & Movement Therapy and Authentic Movement.

Email: pscollinson@uclan.ac.uk

Mary Abrams, MA, RSME

Mary is course leader of the MA Dance & Somatic Wellbeing: Connections to the Living Body from UCLan in the USA at Moving Body Resources in New York City, and also teaches on the course in the UK. She brings passion, skill, and an inquisitive spirit to her nearly 30 years of teaching. Mary offers dynamic and detailed attention to breath, sensation, emotion, and creative personal and social development. Mary is owner and program director of Moving Body Resources, and has been an Authorized Continuum Teacher since 1999. She has a thriving private practice and teaches workshops across the USA. From 2002-2011, Mary served on the board of directors of International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association (ISMETA), serving as president from 2005-2009. Her background includes 30 years of dance training and performance, study with Emilie Conrad (found of Continuum), Susan Harper, and Gary David, Ph.D. incorporating body awareness and movement with the fields of Epistemics and affect script theory. She holds a BA in Dance Education with Departmental Distinction from St. Olaf College, and a master’s degree with Consciousness Studies concentration (consciousness as embodied movement) from Goddard College.

Contact: UCLan c/o Moving Body Resources, 112 West 27th St., Ste. 400, New York, NY 10001

Email: mabrams@uclan.ac.uk / mary@movingbodyresources.com or movingbodyresource.com

Tim Lamford

Tim is an Associate Lecturer at UCLan on MA Dance & Somatic Wellbeing.
He is a dancer, choreographer and teacher with forty years experience in movement arts, specialising in the teaching of dance skills, creativity and somatic awareness. He trained at the London Contemporary Dance School, studying contemporary techniques with Jane Dudley, William Louther, Kazuko Hirabayashi, Noemi Lapzeson, Robert Cohan (all Graham Company); Danny Lewis (Limon Company); Albert Reid (Cunningham Company); contact improvisation with Steve Paxton; release work with Mary Faulkerson; choreography with Nina Fonaroff (Graham company); Pilates with Alan Herdman, and Tai chi Chuan with Gerda Geddes. In the 1970s performed with X6 dance collective; Second Stride and Mantis.

Career highlights include: Artistic Director of the pioneering dance in the community company, Spiral Dance, Liverpool; Professor Visitante at the Institut del Teatre Barcelona; introducing contemporary dance to the Polish conservatoire system; lecture tour for the Australia Council on the theme of the creative role of a dance artist in education; and directing the graduate performance course at London Contemporary Dance School. He has also been Tai chi coach at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden.

Tim has been an External Examiner for the universities of Leeds and Kent at Canterbury; an External Adviser to Royal Academy of Dancing; member of regional and national arts panels; member advisory panel setting industry standards for “Dance”, and “Creativity in the Arts” (GNVQ); and conducted research as an Academic Adviser for the Northern School of Contemporary Dance.

After developing and teaching a programme exploring traditional and contemporary body mind practices (Body/Mind/Movement) at Middlesex University, he now teaches body awareness for the International Opera course at the Royal College of Music.

Research interests include somatic perspectives on the practice of Tai chi Chuan; symbology of long form yang style Tai chi Chuan; Jungian and Post-Jungian perspectives on body mind unity.

Email: TJLamford@uclan.ac.uk