What is Dance?
Dance is spirit tasting itself in form, from stillness to movement, chaos to harmony, cacophony to symphony, in all of its infinite diversity. Dance is what we call it when we see the movement and rhythm that is always already there. Dance is what we do when we let our bodies breathe our being into becoming and our becoming into being. Dance is the soul's love and laughter as it breathes into time. Dance is a heart explosion making love to the air. Dance is form and formlessness endlessly getting it on. Dance is the merging of sound and movement, where each feel like they are causing each other. Dance is God's living in time, as us, through us. Dance is a celebration of and total immersion into process. Dance is the manifestation of the fluidity of spirit in form. In that sense, dance is the resolution of paradox in form. Dance is a noun that is a verb that is life. Dance is our heart fire as it expresses itself through the body. Dance is a celebration in form of Now. - Ellen Davis
Former owner-director of Rozann-Zimmerman Ballet Center in Los Angeles, Ellen Davis danced with the Stuttgart Ballet Company and was a Ford Foundation scholarship student at the School of American Ballet in N.Y.C.
Ellen has taught beginning through professional level ballet for over thirty years. A choreographer, she has performed, choreographed and improvised works in California, New Mexico and abroad. She taught and lived for a year at the Sri Aurobindo Ashram in India and was a guest instructor at the Children's Palace in Nanjing, China. She is currently teaching in San Diego including at City Ballet of San Diego.
Ellen uses the teaching of dance as a way of evoking self-acceptance, beauty, balance, grace, a sense of unity and love for the process of learning. She acknowledges and nurtures the "dancer within" in all of her students regardless of body-type, limited self-belief, or level of training.
She believes that along with proper placement and technique, the awakening of expressive truth, musicality and one's innate creative intelligence are equally important in empowering dancers to use the body as a means of creative self-expression and to extend the grace of dance to all of life. While seing good technique and the spirit of the movement as an integrated and inseparable whole, she evokes and encourages, right from the beginning levels, the expressive and musical qualities along with the technique.
Yoga of Ballet is a traditional classical ballet class taught with a yogic approach that can be translated into one's life. The classes are progressive; in each class more is taught and asked of the dancers. Sometimes improvisational movement is given at the end of class so that dancers can get an experience of their innate creative intelligence, authentic expressive truth and "owning" their movement. Getting an experience of that enables them to translate and integrate it into the rest of their work. Her teaching paradigm encourages self-motivation and a conscious collaboration in the learning process.
Ellen is also available to teach private and semi-private classes, workshops in improvisational dance, to guest teach and to facilitate private whole-person healing sessions as well as satsang. She has another myspace profile: sunyalila's profile and blog: The Play of Emptiness"
She has started this blog to focus on dance, ballet, and pedagogy and so that students, dancers and others in the arts or interested in new paradigm teaching approaches can interact with her on her blog.
Please contact Ellen at ellentd@aol.com for more information.
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