CV Resume for Stuart Phillips Dance
Stuart Phillips
5109996166
Location: eugene oregon us & victoria bc canada
Experience:
Freelance Dance Improvisation Teacher Worldwide, US, Canada, New Zealand, Europe, 1981 - Present
Dance Improvisation Performer / Producer Worldwide, 1981 - Present
Healer (Physical/Emotional) / Therapist / Counselor, 1987 - Present
Baker/Cook/Chef, 1984 - 2004
Client Advocate at Group Homes & programs for emotionally challenged youth & adults / Social Work for after school programs, 1984 - 1988
Therapist / Counselor Intervention Programs for youth & adults, 1983 - 1985
Dance Instructor Ballroom & Social to youth, 1978 - 1980
Education:
Bates College BA Psychology / Dance, '84
Downeast School of Massage, LMT, '87
Neuromuscular Massage Training, St. John Method, '89 - '91
Vywamus Foundation, Intuitional, Psychic & Emotional/Energetic Tuning & Release Training, '90 - '97
Testimonials:
provocateur
joni
I long for connection and think your classes foster that in such a unique and attractive way. 4 days of Stu dance .. wow explosive.
steven
your workshop was one of the best experiences i have ever had in my entire life.........
i have studied with several fully awakened gurus, ones that can actually trasmit god energy and one doesnt even need to understand what they are even saying......
but i Want to understand what one is saying...... i want something i can take home with me to chew on and learn from. Your simple words, infused with the guidance of whatever arises, stuck. they illuminated the same truth that mooji and other gurus of greatness point to..... yet, they were possible for me to understand..... possible for me to take home and contemplate and integrate into my life..... i Want that connection and practice, awakening and understanding more than anything else!
emmy joy
so..... this you should know. your gift.... this workshop. You. is a gift.
I like the raw emotionality in your classes, the brutality of how you open people. Nothing like that anywhere. It's the most valuable, to me...I like you for learning and for facing hell.
Your teaching is so deeply applicable to life as it is. Remembering things from class that are directly serving. Receiving self amidst whatever dance other does, it's wonderful. My emotions and me are right here.
kristen
Stu sets such a powerful intention and container for people to become more fully and lovingly themselves! Highly recommended
noam
Was reminded while teaching of how vital your teaching is, of how much I have grown from being your student. Grateful. Few real teachers, you are one
kristen
The session was akin to receiving a psychic chiropractic session
jodibeth
You have a rare gift
lacey
I love how you teach. Very impactful and meaningful. Really changed the course of my life and how I exist
ru
Stu, Thank you for the session yesterday. I don't think I have ever been able to expand into that particular territory before. Thank you for holding such strong and real space so it could happen. I loved when you said "don't heal yourself" and "don't be a goddess," I just exploded with the laughter of recognition inside me. I didn't get what I thought I wanted but I did get what I needed. I am learning it is ok to express me. I didn't really know that so much before. Thank you.
Inside me it is expanding and being allowed to be not awesome as well as being allowed to be awesome. It is expanding at all ranges and being very average. Thank you so very and deeply much. Last night was especially hard, and especially good. Filled with utter disgust at times, just wanted to almost throw up, happy to get to dance there and not just in the fetishized "joy" that I feel is such an ideology in many circles. Thank you for not only permitting "joy." It means the world.
Kristen Lewis
Innovative & Technical, I feel liberated. Kees Lemmens
"I was having conflict for years w/1 friend, during stu's class we were guided to dance w/each other for an extended period of time after which we've had no problems at all facing each other, the problems were completely gone" Julia Sewitt
"After his work I've gained the calmest confidence in intimate and social relationships, though we were simply moving. IMPORTANT WORK!" Margarita Kozhevnikova
“I found the Emotional Release and Therapeutic Movement Workshop facilitated by Stu Phillips to be deeply healing, in a way unlike anything I had ever experienced before. I feel like Stu is truly intuitive, a very gentle and genuine therapist. I feel like experiencing emotional nudity and raw expression in a safe container - the sort of dynamic which was fostered within the workshop - is hugely medicinal. I am eternally grateful for the connections I made with my fellow workshop-goers. I feel like this experience was so nourishing - a week abundant with many shades of radical beauty.”-Laura Alter
"It was fantastic. Stu is a one-of-a-kind teacher and very considerate human. His teaching helps create a foundation for my own satisfying exploration more than any other movement teachings i've encountered. I feel like it is super valuable for humans in today's world.
I highly HIGHLY recommend taking a class with Stu if you haven't before. His approach to improvisation has been deeply nourishing for me in a way no other teacher's approach has-- and it just keeps getting more satisfying the more I dance with him. Something about his gentle guidance makes room for me to Unravel-- in a deeply life-affirming, empowering, and liberating way."
Stu is the only teacher i want to study with.
Noam
Life changing learning to be more authentic
Margaret
I cannot recommend any teacher more highly than Stu. He gently guides you into your own depths, your own truth, your most authentic self, easing out of you the realest of dances you will have ever danced, and the most satisfying of connections you will have ever experienced. Dance becomes a metaphor for the greater scope of your life; as you shift on the dance floor, notice the shift in the vastness of your life.
Arunima
Class has so much inner essence
Elle
By far my best dance ever
Abdy
His Contact Improv Class is like being in a dance class with a therapist.. And it's the most gentle, supportive and real therapy you can imagine! If ANYTHING is ailing you mentally or emotionally, take Stuart's class! (and/or go get an individual session)You will save A LOT of time and money on conventional therapy.
Your guidance/voice was extremely useful...it continuously brought me back from my own inner battle with feeling insecure and seeking authenticity.
Nicole
He's such a masterful guide in cultivating mindfulness, balance & freedom IN MOTION & RELATIONSHIP. He welcomes & works skillfully with all edges & levels of contact & dance experience. If you want more ease with being authentic & IN TOUCH with self, other & community; Stu is a wonderful facilitator of that!
maureen freehill
"Stu has the most unusual and beautiful solo paractice that makes his style unique from the rest. When I first saw him among the churning, orbiting dancers, I named him vertical man, because his dancing seemed relatively still and generally on his feet. I learned how to integrate with his style and loved how it made me move. I asked him if there was anything in particular he wanted to perform, and he said, Let's do what we do, but don't forget the emotional honesty. Performing with Stu was one of the highlights of the festival because I danced unlike I normally do, felt charged, responsive, available and heard by him. It was exhilarating. Particularly suspenseful for me, was one pause that seemed to last forever."
Sue Lauther
Best guided experience I've ever had.
Caryn Love
thank you !
i keep a luminous memory of this day;. (even in the black box !)
love,
this day was a present for me.
very bright, clear focus
anne dolorès
"I felt the words inside my body, like a mantra"
thankou, Felt very safe to be myself and express myself in that class. That is why i like it actually, i feel 100% safe.. like even if i'm pissed off it could be expressed in a way that we could even sometimes end up laughing about. Rare find in a class.
tommie
"class is frequently hard for me but i always come out feeling reset, better, my favorite teacher"
arunima
I love what flows through you
christina weinhold
Descriptions:
Drawing from the Emotional Pool to Motivate Movement
Deep Experiental Metaphors for life transformation
Never guide your energy, let your energy guide you
Bypasses ego conflict
Creates mental space without disconnecting
Minimum facilitation with maximum effect, neutral, clean, phlegmatic delivery
Guided meditation through movement
Forging internal connections through dance
Rearrange Personality so Truth becomes more Dominant
Psychological Approach to CI
Referential contacts available upon request:
anne-dolores expose larret workshop: (rough translation from french)
"What is the strength of Stu Phillips’ work? Is it because it places us directly before the relational work to be constantly readjusted, that it puts us out of our "search for pleasure" and the satisfaction of dancing, when it offers us, for example, to choose the partner with whom we feel the least comfortable, who "scares" us, who will place us in greater difficulty - and in doing so, removes all illusion from us, stating that each thing that happens will be enlightening ? Because that’s what strikes me most about Stu’s work, it’s its clarity, its luminosity. A light that emerges after each dance, in each workshop. Before starting this new workshop with Stu, I ask the question: is this putting us in front of the task and removing ourselves from our search for pleasure, which is consistent with his rejection of "improv contact" with music, which means that each dance, in the end, no longer scares us, that we can be there, in front, abandoned, ready, willing, to welcome whatever comes? Day 1 - I'm in bed, with another Japanese woman who is also Japanese, in a bed of soft white sheets, we stroke each other's hair, there is eroticism, I work on letting go and taking the contact, gently, everything is gentle. She, my partner – she shared this with me in the two-person talk afterwards – is in a uterus, the walls of which she touches. I see that I feel good, that I have a lot of pleasure in this dance, that the pleasure comes, while we intended to work on... the theme. I forgot there. On a theme. There it comes to me, on the theme of solitude. And while Stu asks to place us on a scale following our experience of being alone, very alone in life or on the contrary, of feeling full of various relationships, I notice that I also give solitude a positive "content" , I like solitude, I don't know where to place myself, I place myself halfway, and I am chosen by the participant who feels "the most alone" and whom I make feel "the most alone". But paradoxically, while we are both on all fours at the start, and his head begins to gently touch mine, I feel a powerful and poignant desire for contact. And throughout the session, I experience this whirling between the starting posture of me and the partner, supposedly antagonistic, but who become one, who mix. So, for the 2nd proposition, on the theme of paranoia, I am chosen again, by the one who feels the "most paranoid", and for whom I am the most threatening. There, in this duo, I start to feel agitated, and I tell myself that this partner is also the one I would have chosen as being the most threatening to me. But now he falls asleep, next to me. That is to say that I am standing, firmly anchored in the ground, but in a pendulum movement with emphasis on the right side which opens to him who is lying on my right, but therefore he falls asleep, and I tell myself that it's not normal for him to have this confidence to fall asleep while I'm fidgeting around him. Then I let go, I even melt, I melt away, and he is still there, lying down, sleeping, with only one point of contact which is his foot on my right ankle. I have him in full view, and it's the image of my previous companion who is there, sleeping, I still love him but I see who he is, especially at the end of the session, during our talk , when my partner says he took a nap, but regrets not being able to explore the theme in movement. I say that it is powerful to have fallen asleep, that it speaks volumes, that it says a lot about his process on the theme, he replies that he already knew that, falling asleep to escape, and that he does not 'didn't learn anything. Stu presented his workshop at the beginning in this very Cartesian way: 16 hours of dance, 16 themes, one theme per hour to explore as a duo; 1 half hour of deep common talk before starting and the same thing after the 4 hours of dancing, so, 4 hours of “deep talk” in a circle all together, and on the last day (we have 4 days), it will be somewhat different, we will do solos. Stu comes up with the theme, and the “extremes” of that theme. For the first day we explored: loneliness / paranoia / tension / captivity. Feeling alone or connected / having the impression that everything that is going to happen to us is good or the opposite / being very tense or being very relaxed – and there he takes the example of transit, the one who easily lets go of what he has eaten and the one who restrains / feels master and free in his life, or feels prisoner. For these last two themes, I choose the same partner. Firstly because I had put myself as "tense", and I chose - I was paradoxically the most tense, whereas in my dance, I am very often in a state of relaxation close to... the one who not the most relaxed, but on the contrary, whose tone was the most disturbing for me. And so who was reaching out to me. And indeed, his desire to “dance” in a “usual” form of improv contact made me very tense, and put me in resistance, in a state of blockage. At one point, I let go, we let go, it seems to me that it’s a powerful moment, that she has learned something. I feel that things are giving up, we settle down, we are transformed, I transformed her because just before, I gave her 100% confidence in everything she did. I began to contemplate our faces. In fact, I haven't transformed anything at all, it's her who thinks there's something going on inside me, she wants to find out who I am. I choose this partner again for the 2nd session, that of captivity. I continue to feel captivated by her. I think of the mother-daughter relationship. Being captive of your desire to mother the other. She falls asleep on top of me, next to me. I also let go, before feeling like a lizard that has shed its skin, or a snake, with an old skin next to it sleeping, and I try to free myself from this old skin, I feel guilty for not letting go. take care of it, I come out, like a chrysalis, I am a leaf. IN the talk, she told me that she had a great time, that she fell asleep. That she gave up on what needed to be done. And I too, at one point, I said to myself, what's all this talk about Stu's workshop, just listening to each other, and that's the only thing that works and we don't have to taking the piss, but then I see how different our dance experiences were, completely uncommunicative, even though we were together and close. And I thought, what time does it take, so many imaginary journeys, before arriving, to manage to be present, to be who we are, to be there, for each other.
For the last dance, dance number 8, I was chosen: I had positioned myself as "informed", and my partner was the "uninformed", the one I would inform the most. Quite quickly, I lost my feeling of being informed, on the contrary, I felt misinformed, looking for his bodily information, for the wound in my coxcys that called out to be touched. And she was touched for a long time, and it seemed to me that I was encouraging my partner to stay in contact (with his neck), with this place, but during the talk, he told me that he too was paralyzed in this position, caught , in an unmistakable feeling of well-being, and that at the start of the dance, while he was uttering grunts which made him want to vomit, at that moment, I too, had it. neat ". And there all the ambivalence, all the complexity of the contact work where Stu constantly reminds us to put ourselves in tune with ourselves, not to let ourselves go to fulfill the needs of the other, and to see how much, at the same moment , our needs are fulfilled, especially when there is a hole. And that's what I wanted to come to, during this end-of-day speaking circle, no one wanted to enter into speech, everyone probably in this place of self-presence, without trying to say or to explain, or understand, so I took my hands to show our process journaling, with just one word “contradiction”. But that word wasn’t the right one, it was rather “contraries”. The connection in opposites. And since I want to talk about each dance, I will say that, between the two, there was the theme "crushing", how much I feel crushed by my own existence, or, on the contrary, how light I feel, everything being resolved (even my life after death, as Stu had fun saying), and that there, being this time in the position "most crushed by myself", and therefore in a position of choice, first wanting choosing a partner that I had already chosen twice yesterday, I ultimately chose, Stu; and in dance no. 7, which said "how open I am" or how closed I am, I "fell" on a partner who was in principle "closed", me "parrying the openness", but in the end, I I was in a ball, and she put my legs on my back, which felt heavy, and I saw that, even in the closed position, I was ok to receive a weight. I was open while being closed. AND she was closed while being open, during the dance, receiving the weight of my own legs, and for her, it was like a vise. She hadn't liked it, but had been able to enjoy feeling her own, the coherence between oppressive thoughts and an equal experience. Our trips had been different, almost opposites. Until the end. Day 3 - I'm in the sun, it's after 4 p.m. The theme is alignment. I told my partner that I needed to go outside, and she assured me that she could work alone. I first lie down facing the sun, then I gradually turn, a bit like the hands of a world, thinking that I am aligned with the sun. It's good. I have a little guilt for letting go of the WS. I wonder how I'll get back in, but at some point, after I've completely taken what I need, I return to the studio. I place myself lying in a line in front of my partner sitting against the wall. The atmosphere is electric, a duo goes wild, talks, experiences extreme situations, they capture all the attention of the room. I feel disconcerted by what I feel is an invasion of space. But I am good with my partner, after trying to “mime” an alignment dance, I fell into a circle, into a circle, into a baby-child relationship, into a new joy. It was dance number 12. Dance number 11, I was chosen by a partner as the one that would most stop him from “doing what he wants.” The theme is “restraint”/the ability to take and do what comes to us, without embarrassment from others. This duo started out juicy for me, until my partner left me with an imprint, a tear in the plexus area, and I felt “guilty” for not taking care of it. In this mixture of self-satisfaction and feeling "obligated" by the other, I make contact, and this double direction remains in the movements of struggle, of wanting to free myself, while wanting to remain in the arms and contact l 'from each other. We were in sync, my partner said that he enjoyed these movements which, however, were not pleasant. It is the 3rd day of the WS. We started with a talking circle, which started "underground", silent, then which became lively, a debate on what we are doing, and also, questions from the participants, on what is going to happen , what does Stu expect from us. One then the other says that he/she is bored, impatient, can no longer stand the immobility, the lethargy in which he/she finds himself immersed at all times. One says that “putting himself inside himself” gives him no impetus to reach out to the other. What are we doing ? They are waiting for something to happen. And I listen to this, I don't understand the necessity, the need to "do something", to move if the desire is not there. I don't feel this impatience to move. To move or not to move, that is not the question for me. Stu repeats that he invites us to go visit our “shit” – shit, bolshit, these are words that come up constantly – and then have fun. This is the first time he talks about having fun. And it's surprising that, at the end of the day, this is what happened, for at least one duo, a duo who are having a blast, who are completely into what they are doing, without concern for others, for the another, a “going for it” duo. Who takes off, who flies away, who is here, who makes noise, who takes up his place. Before that, in the morning, we had worked on “abuse”: how much I feel abused by life – it was dance no. 9, and I have these images of chiaroscuro, black in the sun, and I think I should watch the movie “The Dark Part of the Heart” again; and in dance #10, we move on to insecurity: how safe I feel. It’s Stu who I’m going through this with; it is a transformation of my body, which first contorts itself, stands upright, which bends, adapts, submits to the other, which I feel as destructive of myself and when, having gradually tamed the relationship to the other, in movements that begin to resemble swirls, when I think that I will be able to connect, that he will be there, I come across absence, emptiness, departure. It’s a shock that makes me finish my dance in a ball, heavy, and I can stay like that during the break, in child posture, without worrying about anything, in survival, heavy, disappointed, broken. I still feel this heaviness inside me. And now that we are attacking the 4th day, which will be different with solos, I have no desire to go there. The night was a restless night; full of questions. I will arrive very heavy, in contrast to the laughter, the letting go, the happy transformations of the other participants."
Website: