Artist Statement
I am a dance/movement artist and somatic psychotherapist. My creative and therapeutic practices inform one another and are concerned with developing deeper connection to our bodies and environments. Our bodies and our lands make up the literal ground of our being, yet in my therapeutic work I notice many of my clients are disconnected from both: they live in their minds and their screens and find it difficult to tune in to the below-the-neck landscape of sensation, emotion, instinct, and other body-based experiences that ground us in the world.
My mission as both artist and therapist is to encourage others to (re)connect with their own bodies and the bodies of land in which they live through movement and embodied awareness. This (re)connection is necessary for our personal, communal, and environmental health; it allows us to see ourselves as part of a larger whole, beings who impact and are impacted by the world we inhabit.
I have sustained a practice of place-based movement in the agricultural fields of my homeland for over a decade. Through this practice, I attend closely to my experience of the environment and follow movement impulses. I film these movement experiences and watch them later, noticing my rhythms and movement patterns as they relate to the environment. Over time, this has both helped me recognize how the land I live in has shaped the way I move and feel in the world, and deepened my relationship with my body and the land.
Bio
Rachel has over 19 years of movement training and performance. She has trained in a range of dance vocabularies, with specialization in Simonson technique and forms of the African Diaspora. As part of a three-month apprenticeship in 2008, she studied folkloric Malian dance with Bintu Keita of Les Ballets Maliens in Bamako, Mali and returned to continue these studies in 2010 and 2011. She performed traditional Ivorian dance from 2012-2015 with Vado Diomande’s Kotchegna Dance Company in New York City. In collaboration with multimedia artist Derrick Adams, she performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in Adams’ The Channel in 2012. She has featured in music videos for artists Jeremiah Meece and Bero Bero, and in 2018 co-starred alongside Ikechukwu Ufomadu in Yanvalou, an award-winning short film by Angeline Gragasin.
Rachel’s written work has been published in Emrys Journal, 21st Century Ghost Stories, The 2017 Scythe Prize for Nonfiction, and The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction (Summer 2015 Award). Her Blue Pajama painting series (2020-2021) was exhibited during the 2023 Sound Mind festival for mental health awareness in Brooklyn, NY and published in Intima: A Journal of Narrative Medicine (2022) and Alien Literary Magazine (2021).
