In the Winter 2017, we started an artistic collaborative journey out of a common interest and sincere desire to reconnect to the stories, sensuous history and the "more than human” voices that still whisper to us in the places we inhabit.
Workshop at the Manhattan School of Music, 2019.
We also shared a commitment to rediscover and echo the chthonic and etherial memories that live in the deepest tissues of the human body. This unfolding process we called EARTHBODYPLACE. It continues to grow and inform the educational and therapeutic work we offer with Trilokya.
Peter Francyk
Peter’s unique approach comes from his self-integrated articulation of long-time artistic and somatic apprenticeships with master teachers and healers over three decades. While studying Dance in the late 80’s at the University of Utah, Peter discovered Vipasana meditation, an uninterrupted practice based on the observation of sensations, the grounding anchor of his somatic work. At 19, he was recruited from the dance program by Repertory Dance Theatre and soon after joined Pilobolus Dance Theatre. Due to the extensive touring and extreme physical demands of professional dancing he suffered a severe spinal cord injury, herniated discs and eventually nerve damage paralysis.
As a result, he dug deep into study and practice of Hatha Yoga and other somatic modalities such as Feldenkrais, Jin Shin Jyutsu, MFR (Myofascial Release) and Body Mind Centering, working and learning from many healers. This immersion became a twenty year inquiry into the nature of healing/nature/mind/body/spirit/reality and led him from the Amazon to India, culminating in a partnership with Dr Satya Natarayanan at the renowned Aditya Ayurveda Ashram in Kerala, India. He became the sole Western Yoga Teacher with whom Aditya associated and following his recovery, started directing a series of educational and healing retreats in 2008, now under the umbrella of ‘Trilokya’.
Out of his own healing process and together with his commitment to contextualize, translate and articulate these somatic systems into a clear pedagogy, Peter opened Salt Lake City’s first Yoga Studio: SOMA, where he rigorously trained and certified yoga teachers. At SOMA, Peter hosted much of the Somatic Avant-guardists of the Western states, including a decade of commitment to hosting Amazonian Ceremonial Teacher Christina Mendoza with whom he apprenticed over two decades. Ritualized transformational processes led him back to Theatre and he graduated from a two-year Meisner training at Baron Brown Studio in Los Angeles.
His love for understanding the interconnectedness of all things led him to join Bolad’s Kitchen in 2003 for a fifteen-year work-study with New Mexican writer Martin Prechtel. The depth of his experiences gives a true line to his educational and creative work and led him to develop and teach the curriculum for one of the first Yoga Studies Minor in the US. Through story, metaphor, somatic inquiry and breath, he explores archaic/indigenous understandings of body and cosmos. He is the co-creator of EARTHBODYPLACE with Camille Litalien.
Camille Litalien
Camille is a freelance Movement Artist and Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator. She has performed extensively as a dancer and as an actor throughout Europe and North America with companies such as the Royal Opera Ballet, Covent Garden, UK and The Young Vic Theatre. As a director, Camille won numerous awards, including the Discovery Prize at Mimos (France), Jerwood Circus Award, and has had works commissioned by Les Ballets de Lorraine in Nancy, France; the Art Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia; ACT International Dance and Drama Festival in Bilbao, and Seville Dance Bienale, Spain.
While she really enjoyed the immersive creative process within professional companies, teaching grew more and more important within her own creative and experimental process. Through teaching, Camille found refreshing understandings and articulations that both inform and are informed by her creative work. In London, Camille served as Head of Movement in the BA Collaborative and Devised Theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama -University of London, for six years. In 2015, she left a creative, challenging and inspiring faculty position at The Theatre School-DePaul University, Chicago, where she primarily taught practices of Embodiment for actors. After decades of city living and extensive touring, something had gone ‘’dry’’ inside and screamed for moisture. Drawn by the West, the lands of Open Spaces and Open skies, she felt propelled to protect the delicacy and fragility of her artistic practice and intentional life. Few months after this drastic lifestyle change, she started dancing compulsively, necessarily, just as she did when she was six years old and first discovered the magical lives that sprout when we dance; Her then buried practice slowly re-emerged from the depth of her physiological body; new creative spaces opened and EARTHBODYPLACE started its own unfolding process slowly after meeting Peter Francyk.
Since the beginning of her professional studies as a dancer in 1988, Camille has been deeply committed to her studies of Hatha Yoga and Somatic Practices. She continues to be an avid student of both and is particularly inspired by Natasha Nandini’s and Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen’ s guidance and teeachings. Camille created and directed the Yoga Studies Minor Program and Teacher Training Program at Utah State University, with the guidance and collaboration of Peter Francyk and continues to enjoy teaching Dance, Michael Chekhov Technique and Hatha Yoga. She is faculty at the Michael Chekhov School, Hudson NY and with MICHA, as well as a guest dance teacher and choreographer at NDI Dance Barn and New Mexico School for the Arts. She is full-time faculty at the United World College UWC-USA, NM.
Watch Camille’s TedX Talk
Links:
https://www.michaelchekhov.org/
https://michaelchekhovschool.org/
http://www.adityaayurveda.com/
https://bonniebainbridgecohen.com/