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Centering the Artist Series presents Embodied tools for socially engaged creative practice: an introduction to Inner-Relationship Focusing

Tuesday, May 26, 2026
1:00 PM - 2:30 PM (EDT)
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Centering the Artist is Dance/USA's public learning series, which advances well-being in the arts through artist-driven dialogue, reflection, and collective inquiry.

More About the Series: 
Continuing Dance/USA’s programming for and about independent artists, this series of critical conversations will bring together artists from diverse backgrounds to share and reflect on their journeys in dance, their artistic work, and their practice around wellness.  Guided by the artists’ experience and interests, these conversations center storytelling and invite deep listening and collective learning. Exploring these and other issues, this series of programs will offer a learning journey, with moderated and unmoderated conversations, opportunities for attendee participation, and curated readings. Thank you to the Wallace Foundation for their partnership in presenting this series in 2026. 

More About the Conversation: 

This workshop invites professional dance artists to explore their relationship to the often-dismissed stresses and entangled challenges of their careers using tools of embodied listening, somatic exercises, conversations and writing prompts.
Our time together will begin with a guided practice, which invites participants to sense more deeply into their own relationship with meaning, alignment and doubt in their artistic careers. Through discussion and exercises, the workshop will offer tools and perspectives to develop a more caring and compassionate relationship with the whole of one’s experience, building more capacity for resilience and renewed energy. As body-based artists committed to social practice and change, Murielle and Tommy will connect a set of internal techniques with a larger perspective on creating change in the world and reimagining what is possible by starting with a creative and care-ful, process of inner listening.
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Meet Your Speakers 

Murielle Elizéon (Dance/USA 2025 Fellow) and Tommy Noonan are choreographers, teachers, facilitators and co-directors of the performing arts laboratory: Culture Mill, based in Saxapahaw, NC. At Culture Mill, Tommy and Murielle interweave the creation of dance works with both somatic and social practices. Their particular orientation towards socially engaged art starts with a comitment to undo internalized patterns of oppression. The primary lens of practice for this workshop will be Inner-Relationship Focusing: a modality in which Murielle and Tommy are certified by the International Focusing Institute.

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Krystal Collins (c)

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