More, Please!
Nita Little investigates embodied attention within improvisational movement practices with a concentration on the technicities of both creative and relational practices. Through ensemble dance improvisation and Contact Improvisation, practice and performance, she works toward a future that recognizes our environmental entanglements and values many forms of embodied communication.
A dance researcher, theorist/artist, and one of the founding developers of Contact Improvisation (CI) she teaches around the globe, guiding one of its forward leading edges. She began 50 years ago, working with Steve Paxton on materials that became CI (1972) and was a participant in the earliest performances and teaching that helped it to become significant within dance and dance communities. Within CI’s first year she developed a curiosity about the relationship of the (physical) mind and relational events. Now, she investigates ecological actions of embodied attention, particularly with respect to somatic communication between humans and between humans and the non-human.
Nita received her PhD in Performance Studies with a focus on the articulation of presence and creative actions of attention (2014). Her life work is inclusive of mindbody training, performing, choreographing, researching and writing about the ethics, politics and entanglement of somatic relations. With a world-wide audience for her teaching, dance making, and lecturing, she is an activist for relational intelligence and an advocate for dancers as embodied researchers. She looks forward to returning to direct the international Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC, 2016), a network of laboratories populated by dancer researchers and associate research experts from diverse fields. She lives near Seattle, in the USA. During the years of worldwide retreat she initiated online classes of “Relational Intelligence” and “Composing Emergence” as well as private coaching. She is currently in process of producing an e-course series and has returned to international touring.
Generating Joy
This is an exciting moment when circumstances co-create our possibility and our imaginations must find new, hidden treasures. Nita is in touch with dancers and theorists on almost every major continent of the world. Dancers from over thirty nations join Nita Little’s weekly online classes – Relational Intelligence. Nita is able to focus not only on the mindbody but also the bodymind, equally.
Nita is registered with the State of Washington as a hypnotherapist and an NLP coach – and actively continues her education in Critical Race Theory, and other skills. Meanwhile, Nita is available to meet people from all continents and walks of life for embodiment one-on-ones – just ask.
Generating joy has become my motto, my goal and my core concern in everything I do. Why? … because that is what the world needs in order to be willing to make the changes necessary to have deeply restorative and generative relations with one another and our world. Moving as humans, beyond a purely human-centric concern, even opening up to rethink what it is to be human, and gaining skills that extend that more-than-merely-human care means attending to well-being and joy in all our embodied relations – our thoughts and actions.
Generating joy means being deeply response-able to ourselves, and our worlds.
