Leah Zia Dance
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Reflections From b12 Festival

9/15/2019

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Today is day 19 of training everyday for at least four hours for 30 days. What is most present for me at this process is self-confrontation. Only three days in to this process Francisco Cordova said to a group of us: "your greatest teacher is your own frustration, resistance and avoidance." He was completely right. In order to move forward I am feeling undeniably confronted with all of my own psychological habits, my own self limiting beliefs, and my threshold to say "fuck it" and throw myself at something that feels too hard to pull off. I thought I already sat with discomfort all the time. I have rationalized that I know about leaps of faith: I have traveled alone as a woman foreign cities, started over many many times, started new dance forms from scratch many many times, rebuilt my life from the foundation up many many times.

Yet.... I am discovering so many more subtle ways that I let comfort lie to me.

You can spend years building up progressions and preparing to be ready for a flip, for instance. BUT one day there is no progression left to get you there. There is just the flip. And that day you are confronted with what is actually preventing your feat: your fear or shame or avoidance. We will go great lengths to never meet those feelings head on. But to be willing to meet them is to finally be willing to change. You have to just launch yourself at the feat...... and somehow...... you land it. You survive. It wasn't pretty, but what was once impossible becomes clumsily/barely possible, and that it where growth really happens.

On this 19th day once again being a practitioner (for me it just happens to be of movement) has shown me everything I need to know about how to proceed in this moment in my life. I find myself on the lip of another huge transition. A leap out of life in Colorado and into one on the East Coast. A leap into owning my studies, owning my practice, and finding my own path. A leap away from apologizing for who I am and how I take up space in the world.

Today I did it though: This late-starting, not classically trained, 30-something, scrappy-ass late bloomer did a shitty-ass-kinda-flip-thingy, and now every time will be incrementally better than the last. Today I "broke the jump," as they say in parkour. And the next jump just happens to be moving to Philadelphia to start all over yet again.
Picture
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Performance and Upheaval

11/25/2017

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The summer of 2016 I finally understood what I want to be when I grow up: a movement researcher. Tom Weksler's Zen Acrobatics and Movement Archery resonates with me in a way that synthesizes so many great loves at once: stillness, athleticism, contemplation, playfulness, artistry, being out of my comfort zone, humility, studentship, dance, discipline, community, and exploration. When I watch him and Ido Portal move I see the union of mental and physical intelligence, and a merging of self-practice and humor. This world of movement unites so much that neo-plationic ideals of separation of body and mind dismantled. I feel hungry to sit more, and dance harder all at once. I feel called to make things, to retaliate against complacency, and to listen simultaneously. As a mover I am always curious how performance can offer anything to a world in upheaval, and how we as performers can lend ourselves to finding solutions. I am curious how I can use my body, my participation, and my "here-ness" to dismantle the way we unconsciously participate in the capitalist machine in almost everything we do. I love this video. I love that artists have the ability to shake up the human relationship to nature, to embodiment, to curiosity.
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A Reminder When You're Lost

9/30/2017

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"I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Do not search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer."
​
-Rilke
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Composition and Craft

7/11/2017

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Is there anything more beautiful than the improvisational product of neural networks? Can you imagine the hundreds of thousands of hours he's poured into proprioception, sensation, and sound? I love the synthesis of street dance and high art, a dichotomy that I am overjoyed to see collapsing.  What a statement to put improvisational vernacular forms and Picasso side by side. That's the world I want to live in. Certainly that's how I've always seen dance.
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Dance Manifesto

6/14/2017

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I dance to retaliate.
I dance to rebel against our sedentary complacencies.
I dance to reclaim the physical intelligence that neo-platonism has condemned.
I dance for awareness and presence.
I dance because our awareness and presence threatens the status quo.
I dance to be acutely aware of myself in the flesh, not the image I am conditioned to craft               myself into.
I dance to experience, when so much experience has been outsourced to the virtual.
I dance to reclaim my body from the capitalist standards that propagate shame to profit the             500 Billion dollar beauty industry.
I dance for empathy, compassion, and alliance with humanity and the natural world.
I dance as a mode of of self inquiry and process in a time of mass consumerism.
I dance to stay personally engaged in a time of societal distraction.
I dance to be free.
    

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Miriam Peretz: Dance as a Prayer for Peace

1/7/2017

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Miriam Peretz has shown me kindness, generosity, love, grace, creativity, community, and support. From her I have learned who a woman can be to the women around her, how dance can transform much more than the physicality of the dancer Through her and thanks to her I have the tasted transcendent potential of movement practice.

"When you find a good teacher you should try learn from them regardless of what they teach. A good teacher will help you discover areas of awareness that are completely concealed to you no matter what the form. A great teacher gives you a gift you can never repay, and that is an incredible privilege."
-Ido Portal

​Thank you for the incredible gifts Miriam <3
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The New Fusion: The Movement movement

1/7/2017

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I truly want to move like myself and develop my voice to the greatest extent possible. However, if ever I could move like anyone else on the planet it would be these two:
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When it's Good

1/7/2017

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Sometimes people get fusion right.
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"Retracing the Roma:" Research on the History of Street Dance 

12/28/2016

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 This stuff is my current research, obsession, and nerd vortex. This has been my little slice of questioning while my community has been held up in a huge conroversy over language, issues of cultural appropriation, and where to go from here. It has unearthed more questions, and only eliminated answers. Mostly though, I am interested in the arts and traditions of marginalized peoples across history, and why it is that so many of these communities have had such tremendous influence over so much of what is still most enduring today.  I am intersted in how we can right the wrongs of eracism and decolonize our approach to art making. I am interested in repairing the broken histories of music and movement lineages and pointing back to them as sources of what movements we hold dear today.

​Here's a little taste of where I am sitting with all of this these days:
(sorry I talk so fast in this video!)
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2016: A Year of Dance Events

1/3/2016

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I am extremely excited for the opportunity to spend the next six months deeply engaged in training in my art form among my favorite teachers and artists.  Over the past 12 years of my dance life I have been working very hard to stay committed, engaged, and challenged in my efforts as a practitioner and lover of dance.  This incredible time of intensive training could not have come at a more auspicious time.  January 1, 2016 marks my half birthday and the last half year of my twenties.  As part of my Saturn Return I am setting aside this time in my life to fully dive into what I love and dedicate all of my resources, time and energy to what means the most to me.

​Here is where I'll be on my last 20 something hurrah brigade:

January 16th & 17th

“Raqs Flow” Intensive & Certification Level 1, Denver CO

January 22nd & 23rd
MFA Audition, Boulder CO

February 27th - March 5th
Tribal Massive & Spectacular, Las Vegas NV

April 28th - May 1st
Elevation 2016 Dance Festival, Golden CO

May 28th - June 1st
8 Elements™ Intensive I Initiation, Portland OR

June 11th - 18th
8 Elements™ Intensive II Cultivation, Portland OR

A quick video preview: 
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    Leah Zia

    I am but a world,
    some flesh and bones
    to keep it in.

    woods.leah@gmail.com

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  • About
  • Performance
  • Choreography
  • Teaching
    • Classes
    • Schedule
    • Workshop Offerings
    • Teaching Philosophy
  • Media
    • Videos
    • Photos
  • Kinetic Cloud Blog
  • Contact