I work in movement improvisation.
I am in a year-long embodiment-through-movement training in Somatic Dialogue, supervised by Berrak Yedek and Beliz Demircioğlu. Around 145 hours of intensive workshops and weekly sessions. It is part of a longer path toward teaching the work.
Berrak founded the discipline. I began working with her in early 2023 and trained with her for two years before this. She is an extraordinary teacher and has been a real mentor to me. I met Beliz at the end of 2022, and it was our conversations that led me to Berrak in the first place.
Somatic Dialogue approaches improvisation from the ground up. You start with the simplest thing — observing a movement, and unholding. Everything else follows from there.
Transitions, mostly. Carrying my weight to wherever I am. Settling into a movement, giving it the attention and time it deserves, seeing it through to completion before the next one begins. Transitions are where I lose myself, and they are where most of the learning is.
Alongside that: space in the jaw, and the contact between the feet and the floor. Both unglamorous, both slow.
And a question I have not resolved — the difference between an audience and a witness. Between wanting to be watched and wanting to be seen. I am still working out which one I am reaching for.
I owe the improvisation work to Frances Wessells. I met her in Virginia, first by accompanying her on stage, and she invited me to audit her improvisation class at Virginia Commonwealth University, where she taught for decades. She was still performing into her nineties.
That class is where movement improvisation entered my life. She died recently.
From the end of 2003 until I moved back to Türkiye in mid-2006, I danced with the Latin Ballet of Virginia — performing, and working with young people. Ana Inés King founded the company. I danced with her on stage, and she remains the most generous and delightful person I have worked for.
Before that I started dancing at Budans, the dance society at Boğaziçi University, where I performed and taught latin and ballroom between 1998 and 2001. During my MBA at Maryland I took two semesters of jazz technique, the first with Nejla Yatkın and the second with Karen Katrinic-Gardner.
Attention at thresholds. The tension between control and surrender. What a body knows before the mind catches up. These are the same questions I end up asking about how people learn, and I am trying to write about them properly. See writing for where that is going.
Write to me if you work in this field. I would like to know more people who do.