Who & Why

To get a feel for the group and our purpose, see some member's reasons for being here (listed in order of joining):

Seth Dellinger

In May 2016, I met Juliana Pongutá, a contemporary dancer, dance therapist and educator, at a Fighting Monkey Movement Research workshop in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. I was attracted to the workshop because I saw many of the ideas of my own practice, the Feldenkrais Method, being put into action in a completely different context. Josef Frucek and Linda Kapatanea, the creators of Fighting Monkey, offered us movement games where we could explore basic principles of biological fitness in fast moving and unpredictable situations. Their offering was perfectly in tune with the possibilities I had felt opening up inside me in the last of the four years of my Feldenkrais certification program. I was ready to test my physical capabilities again and reconnect with some of the power and agility I had once known as a teenage athlete.

Juliana and I decided to continue practicing the games when we returned to Washington DC, meeting in Malcolm X Park. We quickly began to invent our own games as well. Half a year later, we decided to offer some of our games in a 2-day public workshop called Moving UP and DOWN! That experience allowed me to feel new possibilities of using my training to invite people to use creativity to move more deeply into their bodies, and opened up new worlds for me in my teaching practice.

Today there are a half dozen of us meeting regularly each week to explore whatever we've been thinking about in the realm of movement, bodies, mindset, interpersonal connection, improvisation, and much more. For me, the group is a creative laboratory where I can experiment with new ideas or simply show up and see what happens. Maybe most exciting to me is that we are building a community based on our shared curiosities.

Ken Manheimer

I enjoy exploring my movement frontiers, physically and creatively, and feel doing so is a general human need, not just a whim. I love to climb, run, roll and tumble, bike, frisbee, that sort of stuff. I fell in love with Contact Improvisation when I first encountered it during college (many years ago), and have practiced it since. Along the way I've branched into related practices, including ensemble movement improv, Authentic Movement, and other movement awareness practices. I have come to recognize any opportunity to discover and develop my abilities as frontiers, and approach ¡Movement Research! as an opportunity to explore these moments, and learn to cultivate them, with like-minded people.

Specifically, I want to:

• Play with moving with people for the sake of play, independent of ulterior motives that tend to occupy so much adult interaction
• Engage more fully in movement and interplay than is common in daily life
• Learn to cultivate and share opportunities to explore these kinds of things with others

In line with that last item, I'm interested in expedient means for facilitating grass-roots endeavors like this, and am responsible for this website and application of some of the other communications facilities used by our group.

Ana Orenstein

I ask the question of whether there are some fears that my body knows; and might they have clouded my understanding of who I am and how I get to occupy space in this world. Some things get to be moved without the need to answer these questions; or I end up with more simple things to do, such as "what happens when I close my eyes and fall backward?" What I value about this practice lives somewhere around there. Also, I enjoy the sense of community.