Jane Ellison’s movement and teaching practice is based in exploring the pleasures of embodied awareness. This workshop will be in two parts — an indoor session that will guide you into your body and its inherent fluid movement qualities, and an outdoor session where we’ll walk and move by the Courtenay River.
Free, In-Person Event – donations are gratefully accepted.
ADVANCED REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED – email: gallery@comoxvalleyartgallery.com
Space is limited.
Participants are asked to bring their own yoga matts and to dress prepared for an all-weather outdoor walk.
Jane Ellison’s teaching is an expression of her lifelong interest in movement and body-mind practices. Childhood experiences in dance and yoga, and a desire for a creative life, led her to the Western Front artist-run centre in 1975. Jane was exposed there to Linda Rubin’s approach to bodywork and dance, which spurred her fascination with embodied anatomy and somatic practices. She deepened these interests by studying Body-Mind Centering with Bonnie Bainbridge in the 1980s. She collaborated for ten years with Susan Aposhyan, whose work in Body-Mind Psychotherapy richly supports embodied presence. The fertile environments of the Western Front and the dance company, EDAM, have also greatly influenced Jane. She and EDAM have shared the dance studio since the company’s inception, and she continues to appreciate this connection with a research-based movement community. For decades, the Western Front has hosted and housed artists from all disciplines, and their work is a steady source of ideas and pleasures. Laughter, music, images, cooking smells, objects and empty spaces, sounds and stillness filter through the building. All who come to the dance studio are encompassed by this spirited ecology.
Between 1991 and 2008, Jane was on faculty at Studio 58, Langara College’s acclaimed theatre school. As a movement instructor, she developed practices for working with young actors, ranging from simple physical conditioning to the complex task of establishing an authentic presence in relationship to other actors, the text, and the audience. This milieu was yet another opportunity to dance on the edges between art, performance, and life.
Underlying Jane’s work is an applied philosophy rooted in Buddhadharma. She has been meditating since 1984, mostly in the Theravedan tradition. This practice is gently embedded in her teaching, manifesting as clear and helpful instructions based on mindfulness and compassion for bodies and minds. Jane’s classes are dedicated to uncovering ease, well-being, freedom, and joy.
This event is part of the RETURN TO WATER FESTIVAL – a series of arts-based events and presentations that bring the community together to explore issues related to perceptions of water, use of water, the human relationship to water, the climate’s effect on water, and the concept of water as a “living entity”. From May 12 – 14, 2022, daily events will instigate interdisciplinary and cross-cultural considerations of water and its significance through visual art, photography, video, sound, interactive media, texts, performance, music, dance, and song.