“For 25 years, my steadfast focus as a performer includes using dance and other arts as a path to more freedom and stability from an integrated orientation of body, mind, and soul. Each performance is an initiation or marked entry into what I am creating in my life and often without knowing it’s transformative purpose until it’s carried through. The creative process that leads to stage performance involves personal inquiry in the context of the work often with a foundation of Tamalpa frameworks such as, Body Part Mapping or the 3 Levels of Awareness (physical/emotional/mental).
Continually framing my choreography and pedagogy are issues of identity, relationships, ecology and socio-political relevance. By destabilizing assumptions related to race, class, gender, sexuality, body type, ability or religion, by never accepting them as given or universal, I look for ways to interrupt physical and mental patterns of oppression to generate new movement in our individual bodies and collective unconscious. Accessing site-specificity, creating collaborative scores, including audience participation or creating a ceremonial context can serve to build community and to innovate.
I also work without a performance goal in mind as a somatic counselor, movement researcher or facilitator of individual and group processes. Much of the purely “process oriented” work I do involves placing myself as the witness and guide for one or more movers in a natural, clinical, or studio setting with an emphasis on the present moment and the stories that need to emerge rather than placing aesthetic value on the healing process. We work to build resources for greater movement vocabulary, nueroplasticty, somatic awareness, inter-personal exploration, self-regulation in the context of the physiology of trauma/stress and for creative expression in the context of evolving personal narratives.
Movement combined with mindful witnessing in a safe environment provides a direct access to the “here and now” and a journey into Soul. Anna Halprin, co-founder of the The Tamalpa Institute in 1978, generated what is called the psycho-kinetic imagery process used in the field of Expressive Arts Therapy. Beginning with the body in motion we transition into the other arts (drawing, poetic dialog and writing) transitioning out of the abstract and illusive nature of movement improvisation into a tangible, documented, symbolic or verbal self-portrait of who we have been, who we are now, and who we are becoming. The movement process then becomes the laboratory for exploring the blessings and burdens of our lives, a place to flex and tune the instrument of the body and to expand our ability to heal and create with the themes we are living with.
Similar to the teachings of Daria Halprin, it is my belief that when the three levels of awareness (body, mind, emotion) are integrated in a moment, we can at the very least, identify life themes and histories that limit our present choices and reactions in life… and at best, integrate into a fourth level of awareness of the “soul” or “spirit”. Here, in this integrated landscape of transformation, we can embody wholeness, and make changes based off of a deep level of self-acceptance from a lived and new awareness.” Liz Duran Boubion
Liz Duran Boubion, MFA, RSMT (she/they) is a multimedia dance-theater artist, presenter and Registered Somatic Movement Therapist dedicated to the practice of liberation through the body in relation to self, other and the world at large. As a Chicana and queer choreographer currently based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ms. Boubion is making a bridge between several communities by placing value on identity, ecology and radical aesthetics through personal narratives, ritual performance and political art intervention. Her teaching and practice is based in Contemporary Dance, Tamalpa Life-Art Process and Contact Improvisation.
With Boubion’s focus in contemporary dance, her background in Expressive Arts Therapy, and graduate work in Interdisciplinary Art, she maintains a commitment to the coalescence of performance, somatic therapy, community and cultural wellness through the arts. Boubion applies theory and practice of the Tamalpa Life-Art Process in her individual Somatic Counseling sessions, pedagogy and choreographic processes.