Union Sitting

Meditation on Fridays.  10:00am – 11:30am in Park Slope, Brooklyn.  By Donation.

We cultivate awareness and return again and again to the present moment.  When we return to the present, we notice what arises in us and we can begin to work with the mind.

Everyone is warmly welcomed at the loft, a sunny and spacious studio space for remembering the body/mind.  A little bit of meditation experience is helpful. We sit for 30-40 minutes.  The session also includes walking meditation, a body scan, or a brief period of easy stretching for everyBODY,  a short reading and time for sharing about one’s practice.  The sessions are lightly facilitated.

May 13th, May 20th, June 3, June 10, June 24

Contact: info@jen-harmon.com to confirm the schedule.

I choreographed a new piece Winter Electric for the Creative Arts Studio Company.  Its been a pleasure to work with such inspiring pre-professional teenage dance artists. They will perform at the Actors Fund Arts Center at 160 Schenmerhorn St. in Brooklyn on Saturday April 2nd at 7pm and Sunday April 3rd at 2pm. They will also perform on May 15th at Paul Taylor Studio at 3pm.

This past fall I began facilitating a Vipassana Meditation group on Friday mornings.  The sessions include 30-40 minutes of sitting meditation practice as well as a shorter walking meditation period and one of the following: gentle movement/yoga or a body scan.  These sessions are open to all levels of experience although a a little bit of meditation experience is helpful.  The sessions are lightly guided. We rotate bringing in a reading.

Sessions provide an opportunity to practice training the mind to come back to the present moment. Email at info@jen-harmon.com if you are interested in joining in at any time.

April 1, 8, 22 and 29. Where:  The loft, 725 Union St. #3  When 10-11:30am.  By donation.

I asked the dancers I was working with to keep a journal and to write on the rehearsal process we were undertaking together.  Sometimes  the writing was open ended, whatever arose.   At other times I asked a particular question.  The writing below is from Kristin Swiat.

This place already feels like a sanctuary. Processes are always rushed, but here, we don’t rush the slowness and we don’t skip the details of who someone is inside of their dancer body. Think and talk and share and then get out of the head, let the energy pass downwards, into the heart and lungs.  It is so hard to let the thoughts go, but let them go we must.  A quake has a warning, a tremor.  When I go from stillness to movement, I can feel already in my minds eye where I want to go- but do something other than that.  The new sensation of my psoas muscle, any resistance to exploration that I have felt in other times (in other projects) is totally gone.  But I can see my habits: forced arch foot, pivot around it.

Group synthesis, enough time passes that we begin to have collective memories, some which we will one day have to remind each other of. Using less effort for simple restorative movements like circling of head on cervical spine, then thoracic, then lumbar.  finding limitations in the body, small injuries, working through them, though they are scary.

I recently found this early video of my choreographic work with young people. The dancers and I worked with structured improvisation, abstracting narrative ideas, and set choreography for this piece.  I utilized a story most of the children and parents knew from reading it in school that year.

Affiliated with the Creative Arts Studio in Brooklyn, these young dancers performed an evening of work by a handful of professional choreographers at the Triangle Theatre, Long Island University.

Check out the article I wrote about my work with mentor and master teacher Nancy Topf in the current issue of  Contact Quarterly.   Learn more about Dynamic Anatomy/Topf Technique, the history of Release Technique and the context in which this movement work developed.

CQ Chapbook 3, vol. 37 no. 2 summer/fall 2012

Contact Quarterly will publish an Issue in May/June devoted to master teacher and choreographer Nancy Topf.  The issue will include lessons/practices from her manuscript in progress as well as articles written on the context and development of her work within the lineage of  ideokinesis and anatomical release technique.  I have written a piece on my personal experience as a young artist working with Nancy Topf.   It will be a great source of information and inspiration for embodied practitioners, teachers and students.

Also…. I am starting a new dance project that will go up in the late spring/early summer with some lovely dancers.  More on that soon…

Today we worked with voice in studio.

I am less interested in seeing what a performer is “doing” or what they can do –and more interested in how they are “being” and how is the quality of their attention.  We can follow the voice, let the sounds be what they are and not judge the tenor, pitch, or any other part.  The voice can be beautiful, ugly, kraggley, soft, animal like, sweet, silky, stuttering, a whisp.  The focus is on locating an easy inner initiation and then following that into the unknown.  The breath. This traveling leads through feelings and worlds.   Other cultures arise and dissolve, so does our own ancestry, darkness and the light.