Ophra will be available for private sessions and bodywork, including Chi Ne Tsang and Thai Bodywork, starting May 10 - book now to reserve your spot. Updates on classes and events to come soon.

Dancing with the Dolphins

Posted on May 17, 2012 by admin

Speaking of waves and oceans, and with a big environmental summit on the horizon, I thought it was a good moment to mention this beautiful project by a fellow dancer, Chisa Hidaka:

The Dolphin Dance Project (click on the link to view a trailer)

The film ‘Together: Dancing with Spinner Dolphins,’ won ‘Best Experimental Film’ at its world premiere at the Big Apple Film Festival and a number of other awards, and is a vivid example of the intelligence inherent to movement. Chisa’s work shows that we can communicate with other highly intelligent beings like dolphins through dance, and in appreciating and recognizing this intelligence, asks us to consider the damage our way of life is doing to our fellow earthly inhabitants.

But for me this is a call most of all to all humans to begin a deeper communication with their own body, because it is the intelligence of our body, most of all, that will communicate to us how we can heal and transform ourselves and our world.

The Waves in The Ocean Never Stop

Posted on May 15, 2012 by admin

Just finished a session with D., a beautiful Haitian woman who looks about half her age but is struggling to get back into exercising and is ready to lose some weight. D. is vibrant and full of energy, and it struck me that her issue is not so much inertia as it is a resistance to what she had decided “exercise” was. So I asked her to reconsider what it means to exercise and as the session unfolded and her breath and movement opened up, we arrived at this metaphor:

Continue reading →

Welcome Calamities

Posted on May 6, 2012 by admin

Relishing my last full day here at Earthdance, getting ready to go for a short hike to the waterfalls nearby. Last night’s full moon was spectacular, and being able to enjoy it for hours on end in the cool of the woods by the heat of a bonfire left me giddy with joy. I woke up this morning marveling at the lack of anxiety in my body! But the journey continues and New York City awaits, along with its many pleasures and stresses…

On the couch in the small Earthdance library, I’m surrounded by books I’ve pulled out to distract me occasionally from the glowing computer screen. A moment ago I opened up the miniature Tao Teh Ching (translated by John C. H. Wu) to a random page, and here are some of the words that were on it:

Why should we “prize calamities as our own body”?
Because our body is the very source of our calamities.
If we have no body, what calamities can we have?

Epiphanies Abound

Posted on April 22, 2012 by admin

An Art Factory in the Making in Guangzhou, China

It’s raining outside, the first rain since I arrived at Earthdance a week ago, and the fog rising from the woods and melting into the gray expanse of sky is so stunning, a soft subtle movement which is somehow helping me experience some stillness in the midst of all the movement that I myself have been doing.

It’s been two weeks now since I landed in the Western Hemisphere, and they have been a dynamic and vigorous two weeks, full of stops and starts, arrivals and departures, moments of feeling lost in familiar territory, and a simultaneous sense of having found a compass to direct me no matter where I am. Continue reading →

Moving and Still Images From China

Posted on March 24, 2012 by admin

Now back in Chiang Mai, resting and preparing for my week-long intensive Tao of Woman course with Ajan Toh, the Medical Qi Gong Master I have been studying with since earlier this month. Finding the time to look back with lots of joy at my time in China, and wanting to share so much with you, but feeling that for all kinds of reasons, it is better to let images speak for themselves at the moment. Continue reading →

Teaching in Guangzhou, China

Posted on March 19, 2012 by admin

It has been so wonderful to teach a Movement Improvisation workshop here in Guangzhou, China. The dancers are beautiful and everyone has been so warm and generous here. I continue teaching for another three days, and then I return to Chiang Mai, Thailand, where I am also teaching a weekly improvisation class, but spending most of my time with a medical Qi Gong master, studying the form daily. I will write more about my adventures soon!

And for those of you who have or may contact me on Facebook, I have discovered it is blocked in China! So please do write, but I won’t be able to respond until the end of this week.

Performing in Chiang Mai

Posted on March 14, 2012 by admin

Sunday, March 11, 2012, at the Yoga Tree in Chiang Mai, Thailand Photos by Kimberly Bryant

These are stills from my performance at the first Solo Sunday event of the Arts Root Project. I performed two pieces, a solo and a contact improvisation duet. All photos by Kimberly Bryant. There are more below, so enjoy… Continue reading →

More Movement Means More Life

Quote

Posted on March 1, 2012 by admin

“to enhance the efficiency of bodily movement is to enhance the vitality of human beings in all their functions, whether physical, mental, or emotional.”

One of the great pleasures of my time here in Chiang Mai is the opportunity to do a lot of reading, and I am surrounded by people as curious as I am about the soma (aka, “the living body in it’s wholeness”) with plenty of suggestions for reading material. Edward Kearny, one of the most talented bodyworkers and interesting thinkers I have ever met (and a recently ordained Buddhist monk now living in Thailand), turned me on to Thomas Hanna’s The Body of Life, which I have yet to pick up without finding some sentence or paragraph that I think is quote worthy. Continue reading →

Dancing Makes You Smarter

Posted on February 29, 2012 by admin

I love when I find scientific articles that justify what has seemed at times an insanely stubborn pursuit of a life dedicated to dance and movement. Here are two links, one to a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2003 on Leisure Activities and the Risk of Dementia in the Elderly, showing that of all activities, dancing was by far (76%!) the most effective for reducing the risk of dementia, and another to an interesting and easy to read synopsis by Richard Powers of Stanford of this same study.

Powers is an avid social dancer, and hence his focus is on that form, but I can only imagine that for dance and contact improvisation the benefits are potentially exponential. But the truth is that any movement, when approached with a certain kind of listening, requires you to make moment to moment decisions and hence increases the complexity of our neuronal synapses. Those of you whom have been in my Pilates and Yoga classes in Brooklyn know that even familiar movements offer an opportunity to create and discover entirely new pathways of movement and therefore new patterns of thought.

Take a simple roll down, for example: this can easily become a rote movement which requires very little attention. But if we focus on the coordination of the breath and movement, the constantly changing relationship of our body to gravity as we pour our weight into the floor, and our skeletal alignment from moment to moment, this simple movement becomes a complex dance that can teach us so much about the way our body experiences gravity, breath and movement not just within the exercise, but in general.

Teaching Contact Improvisation in Chiang Mai

Posted on February 27, 2012 by admin

It’s been so wonderful to get to teach and dance out here in Chiang Mai – a perfect flourish to all the bodywork I am doing! Our hosts, The Yoga Tree and Areerat Kaewkla, have provided such a beautiful and inviting venue, and the class and jam continue for at least one more week.

FORCE AND FLOW

Integrated Bodywork