TEACHING

Approach
My teaching practice is multifaceted and spans a variety of settings, including professional studios, community spaces, academic institutions and conservatories, both in-person and remotely. I welcome seasoned dancers and newcomers into movement research and creative practice in ways that honor diverse bodies, backgrounds, and ways of knowing. 

To create multiple access points, my approach is both playful and deliberate. I draw from a rich tapestry of improvisational methods rooted in dance and theater, somatics, and compositional tools, alongside practices from voice work, writing, and visual art. This eclectic blend invites participants to engage in processes of self-discovery and connection with fellow movers while simultaneously building strength, flexibility, stamina, and artistic expression.

We have opportunities to move with the complexity of our experience – holding joy and grief, strength and imperfection, whimsy and intention, effort and pleasure. Attuning to our bodies, we sink into the weight of our flesh while accessing lightness in our bones, and responding to internal impulses as we sense the horizon beyond the room. My hope is for us to discover our expansiveness through the moving body, while cultivating skills of noticing, listening, witnessing, experimenting, and resting.

Examples of Maree’s Teaching Include:
– Creating collaborative performance projects in conservatories, academic settings, community spaces
– Facilitating master classes, community workshops, and class series
– Serving as faculty at dance festivals and in academic settings
– Developing lessons with professors across disciplines that support creative process and embodiment
– Co-facilitating interdisciplinary community workshops
– Organizing residencies that invite communities into creative interactivity and expression across disciplines

Examples of Classes and Workshops:
– Moving Bodies/Dancing Lives
– MOVE-MOVE + WOWEO EXPLORATIONS
– Embodied Constellations: Growing Our Capacities Through Constellations and Movement
– Move to Feel: A Somatic Dance and Movement Experience to Relieve Stress
– In Practice Session: Tools for Collaborative Performance Making 
– MOVE IT Sessions Online

Select Testimonials:
Maree’s class taught me how to unapologetically be myself as a dancer and human. Her integration of activism through dance showed me all the different pathways art opens up. Not only that, but her infectious energy made coming to class a delight and not a chore. She is a rare gem of a teacher.
– Cecilia Benitez, BFA Dance/Minor Psychology ’20, Point Park University

I used to think of dancers as virtuosos: they leap and bend in ways that most of us cannot. Turns out that’s true, but not in the way that I thought. Dancers leap and bend in intellectual and emotional ways. It’s been a privilege, through Movement Matters, to listen to the human spirit on frequencies I didn’t know I could hear.
– Pamela Berenbaum, Professor Global Health, Middlebury College