November 17/20/22/24: Belinda He
Photo: Robbie Sweeney; from Hope Mohr’s ‘Horizon Stanzas'
Cover Photo: Sean West
Class Description:
We will approach class-taking as an experiential inquiry into choice-making by foregrounding curiosity. Together, we create conditions to investigate how to harness and integrate the forces coming from the ground through our individual and collective structures for spontaneously generative dancing, fast, slow, high, low, and everywhere in between. By orienting towards ease and a nuanced listening to our whole selves, we experience the functional use of ourselves as we direct our attention in movement and at rest, within and without. Drawing from the Feldenkrais Method, we foster the potency of touch as a vehicle for self-knowledge, community building and technique refinement. Collectively, we practice embodying lucid choice-making, so that our movement intentions become intelligible. We will play with the idea that musicality can be a barometer for virtuosity.
This is a contemporary dance technique class that in its structure, offers propositions for participants to create a practice for themselves that will feed their creative work and performance.
Belinda He is a Singapore born, San Francisco based dance artist, movement educator and Feldenkrais Practitioner who received her MFA in Dance from Sarah Lawrence College in New York. She incorporates her studies of the Feldenkrais Method and aspects of functional anatomy and biomechanics into an ever-evolving personal practice in order to synthesize her physical, intellectual and creative energies. While in NYC, she was on faculty at the Feldenkrais Institute of NY, and has also taught at Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Harlem School of the Arts, Long Island University and Queens College.
She was invited to share her teaching practice at the New Museum as part of its CHOREOGRAPHY season in 2015. Since relocating to the Bay Area in 2017, Belinda maintains a private Feldenkrais practice in San Francisco, specializing in working with and coaching professional dancers who are recovering from injury, or desiring to improve their performance.
In addition to her teaching practices, Belinda shares a collaborative creative practice with Karla Quintero, a studio practice with dance elders Sara Rudner, Risa Jaraslow and Wendy Rogers, and performs with Hope Mohr Dance. She also co-directs The Lead, an initiative she founded to support BIPOC bodies in somatic spaces.