Elanne Kresser - bio

Elanne has been teaching and performing Contact Improvisation and interdisciplinary dance and movement since the early 90's.  Her passion for movement is driven by the recognition of it's potential for both individual and social transformation.  This underlies her personal movement practices, her teaching and her performing.  She approaches movement as a rich study ground in which we discover who we are, how we feel, how we connect, how we touch and are touched.

To her work Elanne brings a varied history.   She lived for ten years in the woods and off the grid where she built her own house.   There she studied intensively and collaborated with Karl Frost.  She is a Zen student in the Ordinary Mind school of Zen, in which our most basic everyday acts are our teachers.  And she has worked with children in many capacities, most recently as a pre-school teacher with two and three year olds.  She is particularly fascinated by the developmental movement patterns that must be mastered by everyone to some degree, and loves to watch children who are always motivated to move by comfort, curiosity and the sheer joy of it.

Her interest in Contact began as deeply personal -- as a path to healing the physical and psychic holding associated with physical and sexual violence.  Although her work with contact very quickly took off towards performance and teaching it has remained at its heart a practice of growth and learning.   Contact Improvisation lead her to become a student of Somatic Experiencing, the body and movement based trauma resolution work of Peter Levine, which has in turn greatly influenced her practice and understanding of CI.

As a teacher her strength lies in creating a safe learning environment while at the same time promoting rigor and discipline in constantly refining one's skills, capacities, and presence.  She is a student teacher of Feldenkrais Awareness through movement, in which functional movement is synonymous with aesthetic pleasure.   She teaches classes that are a blend of Feldenkrais and Contact Improvisation, and classes that are solely Feldenkrais, Awareness through Movement.