Sift
Dance for Repair
THESIS
Healing is a process of rediscovering what the body wants to share through somatic attunement and deep listening. By building relationship to bioenergetic currents, discoveries abound which demonstrate that life is a non-dual, complex, interconnected matrix of experience and therefore an ecological approach might suggest we remain curious And Resilient as we traverse the landscapes we inhabit.
Dear Beloveds,
Gazing back in time, we see that native dance traditions are as sacred to and expressive of communities as methods of craft, building, farming, science, and medicine. Stewards of dance (dancers & often musicians) have always been shamans; fostering individual and community healing through movement.
Across time and place, dance has been a human practice for releasing stress and trauma from the body, reconnecting with nature, and deepening our capacity for intimacy.
Dance is an ancestral skill.
Even ballet, which eventually became steeped in coloniality, originated through communities of street musicians and poets interested in storytelling.
SIFT - Somatic Intelligence for Trauma is the emergent articulation of my experience as a dance artist and choreographer working in ecological and healing-centered pedagogy and practice. It is a poetic approach to somatic potential and phenomena that fosters wellbeing and connection through guided improvisation; a catalyst for transformation and resilience.
SIFT invites us into the body’s ancient languages - the preverbal, the trance, the altered - to re-pattern our wounds and awaken the mirrors between us.
It’s dance. It’s ecology. It’s neuroscience.
SIFT is devoted to the flowering of your authentic self. It also supports you to embody the biological reality that your authentic self is not separate from the larger web of life.
The authentic self can be mystifying, especially because many who come to SIFT practice have histories of complex trauma. And traumatic experiences typically cut us off from our true nature. So here are some of my thoughts on who the authentic self really is…
I believe the authentic self is not something we choose or craft. It is right here, in this moment, accessible through emotion and breath.
Authenticity is honesty.
Your true self is as fluid as the flow of blood in your veins, as irrational as your feelings, steady in defense of your right to dignity.
Your authentic self is ever emerging in response to your environment, relationships, circumstances, and integration.
It is a collage of your life experiences, values, traits, interests, identities, preferences, desires, contradictions, limitations. But ultimately, it is your sentience.
To source from the authentic self we might need to accept that we are much more complex and nuanced (and flawed) than our systems prefer us to express. We are educated to exploit our bodies, other people’s bodies and our lives in the name of the built world. But as my teacher Beth Sanchez says “Techo-fascists hate our bodies.” Our bodies, like nature, are illogical, magical, and mystical.
This is the medicine of sourcing from our honesty, moment to moment, through dance.
SIFT is about repair, resilience, and revolution. Please join us.
With Love,
Mo Kulas
“Morgan’s genius is revealed in every session of her SIFT classes. Her explanations, juxtapositions & invitations for movement allow me to go beyond the physical, to allow my movement to originate from the invisible deep, inviting me to belong in a world that is so solid yet so free. This is a dance class like no other you have taken before - SIFT dance is a conduit for the release of invisible stuck, hurt and constricting patterns. All of this is possible because Morgan creates a space of safety, acceptance and respect coupled with an invitation for us to challenge our perception of dance.”
K.H.