Hello all.
My name is Daniel.
I live in Western Massachusetts.
It feels like I've lived many different lifetimes, and very few of them conventional. Where to start? Maybe with various kinds of eye candy.
Here's a recent picture of me with my dragon child.
Nua is the 4-month-old joy of my life, so in this current chapter of my life, everything revolves around Nua. I'm sure I'll write about fathering in future posts. I think for this intro, I'll stick mostly to pictures...
Here's a Random Clown Gig Dressing Room Pic
I work now as a Somatic Coach and Movement Educator. In previous incarnations this lifetime, I have worked as a college professor, massage therapist, international dance teacher, performance artist and choreographer, clown, and acrobatic stilt-walker. I have performed on a submarine in Copenhagen, in the desert in Joshua Tree in a Playboy Leisure Suit, in a cabin in the woods for audiences of one person at a time, in prisons, and with military veterans sharing their personal experiences of war and the military. I have directed performance ensembles of military veterans and non-veterans in creative collaboration, as well as performances based on personal stories with incarcerated men and women and with college students responding to interviews with Palestinian artists, activists, and refugees. I have taught and performed throughout Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia.
Here's some photos of some of the fantastical moments in my performance and teaching life.
Performing at the Forum de las Culturales Universales in Monterrey Mexico with The Carpetbag Brigade.
This is from a dance film called Hotel Labyrinthos, filmed in an abandoned hotel in Crete in collaboration with Georgia Petrali and Fysalida Dance
Here's a link:
From Simpleton's Thaw, a solo performance involving clowning, butoh, audience participatory twerking lessons, and a video lecture about trauma and the nervous system.
From On Pina a performance honoring the life of Pina Bausch choreographed by Nita Little.
From porous. A performance exploring Fascia (connective tissue) as a lens to understand connection and separation in our collective body. Choreographed in collaboration with Rebecca Bryant.
A performance on a zip line over the ocean in Copenhagen. My collaborator is playing an Accordion. There are jellyfish in the water below us, illuminated by an underwater light. Performing with Live Art Installations.
From Anatomy of a Cloud. an evening length performance about Alzheimer's Disease.
From Des-Echoes, a collaboration with Caro-Novella
Publicity Photo for a Contact Improvisation Workshop
Teaching a Contact Improv and Axis Syllabus workshop in Moscow
I haven't taught in-person workshops or done performance work since the pandemic began. In an interesting turn, my focus on improvisation, curiosity about the human experience, crafted ability to track subtle changes in another person's body, and love of composition have all been redirected towards working with people's internal compositions and building relationship and trust with their own bodies as a pathway towards resilience and agency.
My livelihood and life's has always been to support people to experience more joy and agency in their lives. I used to do this primarily through performance work and dance classes. Currently I do this by fostering client's curiosity and collaboration with their own bodies through one-on-one sessions in Somatic Experiencing. Somatic Experiencing (SE) is an approach to renegotiate trauma and reclaim the immense energy tied-up in incomplete survival responses. The patterns that shape our lives and habits often form beneath the cognitive layers of our experience and emerge through the slower, subtler, and usually subconscious language of the body. I also bring in tools from cultural somatics and animism that recognize the larger web of human and non-human relations in which our experience is situated. Sessions often thread the personal within the larger webs of ancestral lineage, nature, culture, and so much more. This part of my life doesn't present as well in picture form, so if you want to know more on that, you can visit my website here.
I've always been interested in challenging social norms and easy assumptions. In high school I used to wear bath robes to school with the fierce determination that they were the same as overcoats, but made out of a different fabric and with the social coding that says they shouldn't be worn outside. I cut off my jeans at three quarter length and wore a hat with doggy ears. (Note that all of these were pre-cursor predictors of women's fashion and fashion in general years later - see sweater robes, capri pants, and the prevalence of animal hats in west coast US festival culture a decade or so later).
Perhaps this drive to question norms is what brings me to crypto and to hive. The possibility of challenging the norms of information ownership and economics that we've been told are immutable and unchangeable. Whatever got me here, I'm grateful to be here in a community of change makers and paradigm shifters.
What's Coming...
My intent, in future posts, is to post writing about somatic wisdom, along with some poetry, photography, and ponderings. I'd love suggestions about curators or people to follow or tag that will connect me with beautiful writers, communities of writers, and thinkers on body, nature, and collective intelligence. Also, if you'd like to hear more about any of the performance contexts or topics I have mentioned, let me know. I'm happy to let your interests guide future posts.
Here's a final poem to leave you with.
This was written on a ferry boat on the way to Crete, Greece.
She is teasing me ~ running in and out from behind her dark cloud garden.
We have already professed a young and unobstructed love tonight - on the deck of this ship, feet on the rail, watching the city lights and everyone i know get swallowed in the distance. This vast sky, continuous-black with the sea forms a secret cabin where we exchange pet names and tumble each other with glances, making play things of heavenly bodies.
I can feel the boat groaning under me.
The occasional fellow traveler sees me alone in my revelry. Their dull and unimpressed faces can not darken my persistent smirk.
The moment tickles me.
I, alone, in love again
with no object and no objections.
I will confuse them with my joy.
Inside, thousands of little men and women act like children as grown people should - lifting each other skyward, lips kissing feasting and toasting, tossed on my drunken sea blood.
Tonight my heart is a pirate and will make off with what it wills, swills and swaggers and feeds ferocious on this lamb my thoughts. Straight from the spit he tears off a flank of sweaty flesh and licks and shreds and devours gnashing righteous life in greedy jowls. His jaw swollen with joy and pride.
There is nothing on this earth that does not nourish this heart tonight. Not one speck that does not beg, “Beat on, mighty drum. Listen to the echo in all these caged chests. There are birds inside, coloured like the sun. Maybe, just maybe, when they hear the impetuous rhythm of yearning strewn out upon this otherwise vacant expanse, they will not all turn away.
Maybe someone will see this uncompromising smile, feel this heart that swallowed the moon and will come closer."
I think I understand the fireflies. My electric body proclaiming to the night sky that I am, in fact, ready. That if I do not exalt in bursts of radiant laughter, it’s possible I’ll explode or burn or worse - slowly fade. I look to the sky for others like me. And we dance (like fireflies) in the moonlight while in the cabins below, responsible adults lie sleeping untroubled in the stoic familiarity of four walls. a small window, the blinds pulled so the moonlight won’t disturb.
I wish so often to strip them of their bedclothes. To tear back the covers and wrench them from their comfortable oblivion. To pry their eyes and point them towards the sky, the sea, or their own miraculous bodies.
But not tonight. Tonight is for the moon and me.
Welcome soma-nerd!
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Hello @soma-nerd ! This is @macchiata from the @OCD(Original Content Decentralized) team. That's an interesting work that you do. I am not aware of somatic movement at all. By the way, where did you first found hive?
There are some information that I want you to have a look:
If you have questions or concerns, you can hop into OCD's Discord server or you can tag @macchiata if you have further question. I'd be happy to help.
Have a nice day and have fun exploring hive!
The author confirmed it through an e-mail and that this is his account and he wrote the introduction.
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