Soul Motion
Vinn Marti returned from the Vietnam war at the age of 26, with a goal to study early childhood education. A chance encounter with a Jazz dance class at his college (to fulfill a physical education requirement), however, threw Marti into a tailspin. “I remembered a mystical experience I had, when I was four years old watching a dance performance,” he recalls. “It was a kinesthetic, psychic response to the beauty of the movement.” The (metaphorical) duck back in the water, Marti plunged into the world of dance, taking pleasure in the strength and joy of physical movement, yet also seeking something more. After years of professional dance and choreography, and yoga practice, Marti evolved his body of work into Soul Motion. In a vein similar to 5 Rhythms, Soul Motion views dance as a gateway to the divine, to the sacred. While 5 Rhythms talks about the waves or movement patterns, Marti describes his version of conscious dance as the dance of relational landscapes. There are four landscapes, i.e. the first one, he calls Dance Intimate, where we move alone. This is the starting point, says Marti, of becoming at ease in our own bodies, it is about internal space, i.e. the space behind the eyes. The second is Dance Communion, where we move with one other, Dance Community, where we move with everyone and Dance Infinity, where we move our practice to the everyday, a sphere that Marti says allows the dance to become a daily, life practice. Soul Motion, like many other conscious dance are open to all levels of students, from couch potatoes to professional dancers. It is a welcome, healing space, where you follow a specific series of movements, some choreographed, some free form yet with guidance. The biggest takeaway, “the power of the pause,” says Marti, by moving through a Soul Motion exercise, where he teaches dancers how to take a moment become aware of their breath and spirit and then initiate movement. “The quality of ‘savasana’ (corpose pose) is present throughout,” he smiles with meditative contemplation...