This week’s Dance First Members’ Spotlight shines on Fred Sugerman and Medicine Dance! Holding space for the Los Angeles movement community for many years now!
With weekly classes, international workshops, and immersions in Southern California and beyond, the Medicine Dance community is a dynamic force for movement. Medicine Dance is a “verbally guided, often music-accompanied movement experience.”
Fred says “We find solace, connection and a sense of mending and wholeness within the movement we see on the outside, and the movement that we can feel on the inside. Our desire and our practice is to join in with that movement which is occurring inside of us, in our deep inner cave that is so personal and so private that words become inadequate to describe. Why describe? Because we want to share, we need to share; we discover our own and each other’s magnificence and brilliance and unadulterated being alive and it is not possible to not want others to taste and smell and feel what we have discovered”
With weekly classes creating continuity for the Medicine Dance community in SoCal, they also reach out into the world with annual immersions in the UK and Hawaii. Facilitators take note of their “See Hear Love: As a Tree” Facilitation Training.
Here’s what noted Somatic Psychologist Gary Glickman, LMFT, PhD has to say: “Medicine Dance integrates two fundamental aspects of consciousness —intersubjectivity and bottom-up processing— by creating safe relational, experiential containers for the body’s movement into and out of autonomy and communion, inner and outer awareness. By slowing down, by encouraging all sensations, feelings, and emotions to emerge and allow them to transform, by enhancing curiosity, movement, and radical self agency (always do only as much or as little what you wish to do, follow the body’s inherent impulse), Medicine Dance sessions provide safe relational experiences that encourage greater comfort with self-agency and self-awareness on all levels of consciousness…”
Check out the Medicine Dance website for more information about classes, retreats, and immersions and make sure to attend a weekly class when you’re in Los Angeles!
