Sensing Bodies retreat in Brazil with Damarise Ste Marie

by Shanny Rann

Sensing Bodies is a 10-day artistic retreat in the south of Brazil, happening from February 28 to March 9, 2023. Participants will gather in Gamboa, a beautiful seaside community near Florianópolis to explore and share dances and rhythms. Sensing Bodies is open to all who are inspired by bodies, movement, creative process, and performing arts. The program is a festival, a creative process, a retreat, a confluence, and a magical meeting place, as a response to our hearts’ desires for connecting and relating in new and ancient ways. Damarise Ste Marie, the producer of this retreat, talks to Dance Central about what inspires her and why we should join her in Brazil next year.

SR: Hi Damarise, please introduce yourself to our readers.

DSM: My name is Damarise, and I live in Vancouver. I grew up in Kamloops and did a lot of my dance training out in Toronto and Quebec City. I love creating joyful movement experiences for people from as young as two years old up to ninety-two years old. I work in the public school system teaching dance, I also do community programs, workshops, residencies, and retreats. I am going to share with you my newest, shiniest project, the Sensing Bodies retreat.

RETREAT

SR: I love how you call your project a retreat. It has that connotation of bringing dance, movement, and healing together. The word retreat puts us in a relaxed mode right away, people really need it during these times. We don’t hear much about dance retreats. There are more yoga retreats. I think what you are offering is something unique to the wellness world.

DSM: It is about a combination of community energy, which is what dancing does. Retreat is about nature, time, and space away. I am not calling it intensive because when you are young, you go into a dance training program to enter the profession. Retreat has a different focus. It could be open to people who are seasoned professionals, and also those who are attracted to wellness. How all these people come together, share their own knowledge, and learn in different ways, is what really excites me.

SR: Tell us about the inspiration behind this project.

New folk dances for new spaces, co-created and danced with joy

© Damarise Ste Marie

DSM: I always work intuitively. I have worked with this constellation of artists before. Their work is very joyful and that is the centre of my work too. It is about connection, community, and relating. It is also a response to what we have been through for over two years of not connecting, being isolated, and alone. It is time to connect in new ways, to think about health, well-being and community in bigger ways and see how we can reconnect culturally, create connections, rather than staying in our own spaces.

FACULTY

SR: Tell me about your retreat faculty.

Kevin exploring ideas and materials around fascia, structure, power, relationship, and imagination

© Kevin O'Connor

DSM: I have five faculty: two of them are from Canada, and three of them are from Brazil. The Canadians are Ruth Douthwright and Kevin O'Connor, who are best friends and long-time collaborators. I met Ruth when I was living in Toronto, I was taking her weekly classes and I always felt so good after them. Ruth works with folkloric dances from Eastern Europe. She's also a contemporary dance artist and community instigator. Her formative education in folkloric, sacred dance, and storytelling continues to influence her research and practices. She is now developing support for breast cancer patients using dance improvisation methods based on her personal and ongoing journey.

Dr. Kevin O’Connor is a multidisciplinary artist working as a choreographer, dancer, improviser, circus artist, and installation artist. He finished his PhD in performance studies at UC Davis, where he researched the emerging 21st century human biology named fascia, through a critical feminist science studies lens. He examined anatomies, body performance capacities, interventions, and imaginations in relation to science studies, including the material-bio-cultural tissue called fascia.

He is also a cranial sacral therapist, and he brings that perspective to his workshops. Kevin works at the intersection of arts, sciences, ritual practices, practice-as-research, and improvisation theory and practice. He is involved in a decade-long artistic collective instigated with Ruth Douthwright and Billy Jack called Sweet Labour Art, exploring participatory de-colonizing performances within polluted watersheds in Ontario.

Kevin and Ruth will have a co-teaching class, called Togethering: Sweet Labour Art Practices at the retreat. The class includes dancing with fascia, social and folkloric dances, dance improvisation, crafting eco-somatic imaginaries, working with objects, dancing with ancestors, situating storytelling practices, woven together into a messy whole. These practices emerge from 15 years of community art collaborations along the polluted D’eshkin zibi river in what is now called London, Ontario. One key component of their work will ask how dance improvisation practices can offer different methods for listening without understanding and cultivating response-ability to our ecological entanglements with others.

BRAZIL

SR: Before you introduce the Brazilian faculty, I am curious about your connection with Brazil.

DSM: It started in Quebec City. I wanted to train because I had just finished dancing school but did not have very much money. There was a samba school in Quebec City that offered me a work-trade program. I would help with registration and help with social dance classes as a partner and in return, could take some classes for free. My initial training in Brazilian dances started there.

It is time to connect in new ways, to think about health, well-being, and community in bigger ways...

I spent three months in Brazil in 2015 and again in 2016. Then in 2019, I attended a retreat by Irineu Nogueira in Brazil. I met Irineu at a six-week workshop at École des Sables in Senegal. Irineu is a Brazilian artist, producer, and social entrepreneur whose approach incorporates eclectic references and experiences, combining contemporary dance techniques with the diversity of Afro-Brazilian culture to create a unique methodology for the body. I thought that his classes were great and had a lot to offer, so I brought him to Quebec City and created a whole residency for him. It was the first project that I organized. Irineu wanted me to bring his drummer, Alysson Bruno, who does Afro-Brazilian dances with his own blend of new and old, ancestral, and contemporary African-based dances. Alysson will also be at the retreat in Brazil, doing a workshop called Musicality of Movement with body percussion to connect the symbology of the dances of the Orixás with their musicality, creating communication between music and dance to tell a story with the movements.

The location of this upcoming retreat is a place that I've already been to in Brazil a few times actually. Gamboa is a small fishing and surfing community one hour's drive south of Florianópolis, near the town of Garopaba. I know a woman there, Camila Seeger from Chile, who's a dancer, movement educator, and body awareness facilitator. She plays through contemporary dance, somatic and eco-somatic research, creative collaboration, and local production. Camila will be doing a workshop called Dynamic Experiences, a somatic experience into dynamic motion to observe and practice connections between the parasympathetic nervous system and the dynamic motion that offers us spacetime and a huge spectrum of intensities to play with. She is also helping me with the coordination work in Brazil.

CULTURE

SR: There seems to be a lot of folk-dance elements in this retreat, which is quite unique.

DSM: Traditionally, folk dances come from the place where the people are living. They are inspired by the land that people are on and the elements that they are in. One of the essentials of folk dancing is that it comes from the community. Ruth and Kevin are interested in how the space informs the dance. With this community of people who will be at the retreat, what kind of dances would be coming up? What is emerging as a result of being in this space with these people?

SR: Dance can be a loaded term to unpack. For example, folk dance takes on a different meaning in Canada as compared to Eastern Europe, where it is much more integrated into the lives of people across generations.

DSM: In Canada, the community aspect of folk dancing is not as strong as it could be. There are cultures within Canada that may have a stronger connection with community dancing, but I feel there are a lot of people who are afraid of dancing in our culture. In Brazil, I have often seen young children in dance classes. If an adult is going to a dance class, it's okay to bring their young child instead of taking them away to childcare. So, this is how the generations will continue dancing. Everyone thinks Brazilians are such good dancers. It's because there is access and exposure to it from a young age. Dance is integrated in people’s lives in a way that is not quite the same in Canada.

A giant folk dance taught by Ruth, with concentric circles - inclusive, joyful, dynamic, rooted in land and community

© Ruth Douthwright

Oftentimes, we might see culture as flowery things, but culture is a lot deeper than that. It's about how we are with each other. Each cultural group is with one another in a certain way. Since we are human beings, it happens through our bodies. When we gather together as people from different backgrounds and walks of life, then sometimes we need to pause, slow down and consider what the culture of this new group is. For this retreat, there will be people from Brazil and Canada who are coming together with their own ways of relating to one another. I think starting with dances and rhythms creates that bridge right away for us to have goodwill, for us to connect with our hearts, and for us to have the intention to accept and understand other people, even if we don't understand them, to be able to accept that it is just the way that another person is doing something.

SR: It gives me a whole new understanding of what culture can be. Now that we are slowly emerging from this pandemic, this great isolation period, where we keep our bodies to ourselves, how do you envision it to be different from what you have experienced before the pandemic when bringing all these diverse bodies together? What do you think would be the most different aspect post-pandemic?

DSM: I don't know how it will be. I have an idea that there might be both more joy and more grief because we have been through a lot. To be together again is a big feeling. I think that a way I could meet that possibility is to take care of the container that I am creating for the faculty and the participants; to create space to slow down, to set expectations, to direct people if they need support, as the producer and director. I plan to start and end each day with a short embodiment practice, so participants feel a sense of gathering and grounding, so we are all in tune with one another.

JOY

SR: You connect to people easily, and you straddle across cultures, generations, and movements easily. What is the thing that enables you to be so fluid across boundaries?

DSM: Joy. What I do is based on joy. Everybody connects with joy. They really want joy in their life. It's not an intellectual process but a connective experience. That's where I'm coming from when I go places. I want to feel joy with you, and I want to connect with you. That's my intention.

SR: You obviously wear many hats, which role resonates most with you?

DSM: I feel like a connector and a creator of space. When I feel inspired, it is important that I do it. If after this retreat, I don't have any inspiration to do another retreat for the rest of my life, I won't do it. I don't need to produce art or artistic experiences to keep my career going.

Exploring tensegrity, relationship and entanglement through playing and examining the children's game Cat's Cradle

© Damarise Ste Marie

SR: In our culture of mass production, artists are often overworked and pressured to be producing all the time.

DSM: If it's not inspiring me to produce, what's the point? There is much pressure to hustle and to have output, to prove that you are still a professional artist but that's not how I live my life. It's more about what's the next thing that my heart is going towards.

SR: With such an attitude towards joy, listening to our intuition, and connecting to our bodies, dancers could have long sustainable careers. Often, it's that pressure of having to constantly produce that causes dancers to burn out, even before their careers have ended.

Do you see the possibility of holding this retreat in Canada in the future?

DSM: There is a possibility but I'm not thinking about any details as the future can be too much for me. I am focused on what I'm doing now. I see this as a pilot program for cultural exchange. I'm well-positioned, skilled, and experienced to bring people together from different places with different backgrounds. I have traveled a lot and I am able to connect with people easily. I can hold space and organize. Let's see what happens!

Touch, space, relationship and responsiveness - how we negotiate connection through improvisation

© Damarise Ste Marie

SR: Are there any last words that you'd like to share with readers?

DSM: Join us! We have two sliding scales for registration. One for the global north and the other for the global south. This is for equity with participation. The retreat is in Brazil, half the faculty are Brazilians. It's about community and cultural exchange. We need to create space for everyone who wants to come. One needs to be able to get there and to pay but it shouldn't be contingent upon being from the global north. One should be a Brazilian and still be able to afford it. So do join us from wherever you are!

Damarise Ste Marie is a dancer, teacher, producer, and choreographer. Since completing contemporary dance training in 2012, she has been studying dances of the African diaspora, specifically in Western and Southern Africa and Brazil. She teaches, directs, and produces dance/ movement projects in Vancouver where she is based. She also facilitates creative arts programming for children in First Nations communities throughout Canada. She is currently doing studio research in Vancouver for an interdisciplinary group performance project involving singing, dancing, and drumming. Damarise teaches in studios, community centres, and schools across Canada and internationally.

More information about the Sensing Bodies retreat can be accessed through sensingbodies.com.