Daria Halprin
Opening Talk at Tamalpa’s 35th Anniversary Celebration >>
“Honoring the past, celebrating the present, and seeding the future.”

Keynote Address at the IEATA Conference in Hong Kong >>

The Planetary Dance: Using Somatic-Centered Art to Heal Communities and the Earth >>

A Conversation with Daria Halprin, Janice Ross, and Laura Whitcomb >>

Still Dance Activation by Daria Halprin >>

Hiie Saumaa, PhD
Journeying from Sensation into Words
“Both the mover and the movement witness speak and use a particular formula for rendering their emotional, imaginative, and physical responses to movement and sensation.”

Rick Lepore, MA, MFT, RSMT
In Memoriam: Remembering Anna Halprin – 100 Years _ A Life of Dance

“Anna Halprin, who died in her home this year at the age of 100, was a pioneer, credited for transforming the field of dance into its postmodern phase even as she returned it to its early roots. Anna refocused the practice of movement and dance from making stylized forms to something more universal and spontaneous. This left her with the emphasis on exploration itself.”

Sophia Ali
Level 1 Journey. >>
“Being in the process, I feel the power of healing and transformation that the Tamalpa work carries. I want to take this opportunity to carry the work forward in India to the communities experiencing challenges and who need support voicing it out.”

Anne F. Alper
Abling the Disabled through the Expressive Arts. >>
“Whatever is in the present tense for a client is what the script becomes. My interest is to expand the range of feelings and explore how the participants know themselves through their expressed emotions. I use the work of Tamalpa to facilitate the process. We move, draw, creatively write, and then dramatically improvise with each other our real life experience.”

Andree Baillargeon
Companionship with Horses. >>
“Most of us have memories of a time when as children we freely conversed with nature. As lifelong companions horses have been my primary teachers in the active re-membering of a language that communicates through gestures, rhythms, images and the symbolic.”

Tessa Barr
Dialogue and Daria Halprin On Witnessing the Aesthetic Process >>
“When I move,
I can see it.
I can see something.
Something comes and makes sense.”

Claudia Patricia Buitrago
An Embodied Psychology: Using your Body and the Arts to Support the Creation of a Sacred Relationship >>
“I had the privilege of sharing my Tamalpa Institute training with groups of mothers whose newborn babies are in extremely vulnerable health conditions at the Intensive Care units at the Clínica Universitaria Bolivariana (Medellín, Colombia). One of the first thoughts that come to mind as I remember this experience is an idea one of the mothers expressed at the end of our groups: ‘this work allows me to meet with God: the tranquility, the inner peace, and the hope that our daughter will get better.'”

Vivian Chávez, PhD.
Dance of Critical Pedagogy & Expressive Arts
“My service is education ~ my work, to facilitate peace through innovative teaching methods that bring the whole body into the classroom. My calling is movement ~ the goal, to unleash the transformative power of critical pedagogy and expressive arts in Public Health.”

Health Promotion and The Life/Art Process
“I teach college students health promotion. My classes are filled with predominantly multicultural, multilingual, and digitally savvy students. These students tell me that an average college class can be tedious and repetitive. They say they’re bored and lose attention during long lectures. Many are starting to take classes online because they feel that if they are going to have a disembodied learning experience, it may as well be through the computer. My courses aim to go beyond teaching health to building bridges between practical embodied healthy experiences in the classroom, life-long learning, and empowerment. ”

Iu-Hui Chua
Tracking Paper. >>
“Suddenly things began to shift and Change entered my life in a big way. I began taking my personal challenges from life /work as material to create scores. I imparted these to my high school students to perform. Artistically de-centering and altering the relationship with the initial trauma was the key. It provided distance from the event as well as created a productive and often entertaining experience.”

Joy Cosculluela
Creating in the face of Struggle: An Interview with Helene Vosters. >>
“What is the role of an artist in today’s world? I ask that question every day. The more I come in contact with suffering, mine, other people’s, the environment, the world, the more I believe that the artist has a much bigger response-ability today.”

Ashley Crofoot
Dancing with Chaos: Lessons in Life, Art, & Leadership >>
“In the creative process as well as that of personal transformation, there is no way out but through … the process of creation becomes a mirror to our inner working, and out teacher…”

Maria Luisa Diaz de Leon & Rosario Sammartino
Expressive Arts and Traditional Culture: An Aesthetic Rendition of our Experience in the Seminar. >>
“Taking the Expressive Arts out of the studio and into the traditional culture provoked, evoked, and inspired the group members to create community … Sowing true dialogues between life and art.”

Julia Gilden
Movement/Sound-based Expressive Arts Based on the Tamalpa Life/Art Process:
A New Approach for Alzheimer’s Patients >>
“For older, cognition-compromised people, I use elements of Anna Halprin’s Movement Ritual to awaken the spine and study its connection to all body parts. Although we work in chairs, participants are able to incorporate many of the concepts and movements. As we progress through a class, I invite participants to offer movements for the class to follow…”

Ilse Jordan
A Report from Bogotá. >>
“The most beautiful and exciting challenges have come from the people I am working with: most of them are men who have had amputations because of accidents with landmines. They arrive on crutches, in wheelchairs, or without parts or all of their arms or legs. This is a sad reality of my country, which continues to be in a kind of war. So, here I am working with the Halprin life/art process with these wonderful and brave people, helping them heal somehow the wounds of war, insanity, and injustice. … For the first time in their lives they can experience a space where they can express themselves creatively with any of the feelings or issues that show up for them around their disabilities, the pain of war, their losses, or their fears for their future.”

Amanda Levey
Video Self-Portrait: A Tangible Artefact of the Movement Arts. >>
“The Halprin method of movement-based expressive arts employs the modalities of movement and dance, expressive drawing and creative writing to facilitate the creation of self-portrait dances connected to real life issues. Adding the medium of video to this process enables the dancer to view their expressive movement, and to create a tangible artefact, an edited video piece. In this study a single participant is facilitated in the creation of a video self-portrait. The thematic analysis reveals ‘authenticity’ as central, relating closely to other themes such as ‘freedom’. The making of a video self-portrait facilitates a therapeutic outcome – the participant has a strong emotional and kinaesthetic response to her video piece and her experiences of the process correspond closely to Csikszentmihalyi’s model of a ‘flow experience’.”
Published on ANZJAT Oct 2008. Vol 3. No 1.

Dennis MacDermot
Towards an Expressive Arts Practice. >>
“While spiritual aspiration is an essential part of our humanity, it is possible for spiritual practice to be used as a way to escape from the confusions of embodiment. In reality most of our lives are actually lived in motion, in dynamic relation to other people and the environment and spiritual practice does not always prepare us for this…”

Life-Art and The Rational Mind Reflections on the meaning and purpose of Life/Art work >>
“So there we have a polarity – two aspects of me which are also played out in the society I live in: a life-art personality who speaks an imaginal language on the one hand and a rational personality who speaks a logical-analytical language on the other. And it seems there really is no way of translating from one language to the other. Tamalpa graduates often struggle to explain in objective language what the Work is about.”Jamie McHugh
Embodying Nature, Becoming Ourselves. >>
“The burden of “being creative” falls away when we let go and follow the impulses and multiple inputs of all the senses, and what they stimulate in us. Our creative response reflects the richness of human experience; the animal body expresses our essence. Trusting our inner and outer nature more, we can create, live and take action in a state of responsiveness and responsibility that could truly be called ecosomatic.”

Chloe Noble
Emotions in Motion: Using Movement-Based Expressive Art Therapy with People Recovering from Addiction >>
“As they recover from alcohol abuse and become sober, patients have to deal with a whole new way of experiencing themselves and their emotional capacity that can be very frightening and require healthy and sustainable care. Without the alcohol interaction on the brain, some emotions can be experienced as very vivid and overwhelming. Through the Tamalpa Life/Art Process® method I aim to offer people a ground for expression and providing them with resources to address the emergence of their emotions.”