Art Portal is the name I’ve given to a 3 to 4-month long exploration of a broad, esoteric topic. This intimate and longer format, multi-media offerings are my preferred way of working with people. We all benefit from commitment, a coherent community, and depth.

Done in small groups, we use a lot of movement, immersive environments, sharing, art making, metaphoric meals, and immersive environments to better understand ourselves and the world.

In the spring of 2022, we explored Nostalgia, Dystopia, and Utopia as deeply personal concepts that underline our basic understanding of the world. Using a mixture of movement classes, deep dive explorations, a private experience of art making with me, we are unwound and expanded our understanding of who we are and the stories we tell ourselves (nostalgia), what we think is bad (dystopia), and what we think is good (utopia).

The focus, as it always is, was on ever-increasing self-agency.

In the fall of 2022, we dove in to an exploration of the Seven Deadly Sins. We spent three months uncovering our own relationship to sin, existential kink, the founding myth of Eve, and the ways we understand good, evil, desire, need, and want. It was a life changing rewiring of our basic concepts of what we think we deserve, how we judge ourselves and other, and how we view right and wrong. We concluded our portal with art making with each woman and a fabulous metaphoric feast for the senses.

In 2023, we did a deep exploration of the Master Archetypes of Mothers, Protectors, Realm Walkers, Creatrixs, and Alchemists – and a reframing of how we view these energies in the worlds, in myth and history and most importantly, in ourselves. The series connected us to the most ancient stories about each archetype.

I’ve devoted 2024 to Awe, and we are unfolding this year as an exploration of all that evokes wonder in our bodies, particularly that which brings us in to deeper presence. We have been in an ongoing explorations of the natural world, with the theme that We Are Nature. Both Community Dance, which is open to all people, and our year long Temple Keepers program are exploring that which is older and wiser than us – nature.

In our art portal work, we have been walking through Simplicity, Complexity and Chaos and spending time with Mushrooms, Consciousness, and the Mind in the Spring of 2024. We will return for Fall Art Portal with a new exploration, with a theme to be determined.