Notes from the Director - Spring 2017
I’m sitting in the Maple Leaf Lounge in Vancouver waiting several hours for my connection to Hong Kong. I’ll teach there for a week and then on to Shenzhen. I wasn’t home long. Was teaching at the wonderful Halliburton School of Art and Design’s Expressive Arts Program. Before that, in Sweden for the 30th anniversary of the EXA Spring Symposium. All of that followed a full and wonderful year of conducting training in Edmonton’s World Arts Organization which I formed about 12 years ago after leaving the EXA training program I founded and directed in New York.
Leilah and I are now citizens of Canada and very much enjoying life in Canada. We’ve been remodelling our very cool penthouse in the coolest part of Edmonton, right on the Mill Creek Ravine.
The folks organizing the symposium in Sweden did an amazing job. Vadstena is a medieval town just filled with charm, magic and beauty. Partnering with Paolo Knill facilitating community was as exciting as ever and co-facilitating workshops with Melinda Meyer was enlivening and invigorating. Several fantastic musicians made my work easier when charged with the task of bringing together almost 100 participants together through dance. Yipes. Great challenge and so much fun.
The next Spring symposium will be in Berlin in 2018 just after Easter. I’ll be co-facilitating with Margareta Warja, long time friend and colleague from Stockholm. We co-created a workshop for several years called “The Embodied Voice.”
This was also the year that I completed my doctoral dissertation, Building the Ensemble. Was awarded Magna Cum Laude and had a ball “defending” my work. I enjoyed this 4 year project so much. I so appreciated the learning curve and the opportunity to reflect on 30 years work and distill what I love about the expressive arts.
2017 will also bring me to the new European Graduate School’s campus in Malta teaching Expressive Arts and Global Change. This is a super exciting project that has me, as usual….all in.
Please contact me if you would like to know more about what is going on. Hoping to see some of you out in the world or in my home town at one of our 5 Day EXA Intensives that are open to the public.