Bio

Katherine Brennan is a psychotherapist and movement artist. She has a MSW from Baylor and became a registered dance movement therapist through the Harkness Dance Center. Katherine danced professionally in NYC and Miami before returning to Kansas City where she maintains a private therapy practice and creates site specific performances.

Artist Statement

My work uses the embodied self to explore internal and external landscapes and thus, invites others to discover their own intersections across these realms. My vocations of performing, creating, and facilitating therapy through movement inform each other in a constant feedback loop. My creative artistic practice is vital to my own inner regeneration surrounding my therapeutic work. Within this cycle, my mind-body connection is deepened, enabling me to have the kinesthetic empathy vital to work with clients and performers. The MF tenet of “Know the body as an intelligent source for direction and information” is constantly applied.

My relationship with nature’s mysteries becomes a portal into a journey through layers of the environment and self for performers, clients, and audience. In creating site-specific performances, the MF tenet is present: “Practice, create and perform anywhere.” I collaborate with dancers exploring a landscape’s history, textures, and cycles, creating synergy in the shared process of awaiting the surfacing of story and inspiration from within. Meaning-making happens in the body’s expansive and subtle movements responding to nature. Both my artistic and clinical work offers this inquiry regarding one’s alignment with self and environment, a tenet of the MF paradigm.

This creative work often engages both the suffering and the inspiration gleaned through my “dance” with each client in therapeutic practice. The practice of witnessing (phase 4) is critical for all involved; through witnessing, I cultivate the impact that movement has on the human experience and help the audience or client find their own inner witness. Each individual is not in isolation, so their environment and its subtleties must also be witnessed and heard in order for a response in movement to be truly embodied. MF has become a framework and guide in relationship to self, client, audience, movers, and the dance we create together.

Contact

Website: www.integrated-mindbody.com
Email: integrated.mindbody3@gmail.com