The Wild and Wonderful Nervous System

There is no age limit to learning and living with purpose. Our Adult Enrichment opportunities vary from guided travel across the country and globe to exploring movement and more right here at home.

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Schedule: 10:00 am - 12:30 pm | Saturday 4 January 2025

Course Description: The Wild and Wonderful Nervous System is an experiential anatomy workshop building on the concepts of touch, perception, and the nervous system. In this one-day workshop we will explore our proprioception, practices of disorientation and reorientation, and ways of expanding our awareness of space through the use of props and imagery. Through a variety of movement explorations, conversations, and tactile feedback we’ll practice attuning to the body we are in right now.

We will be working individually, with partners, and collectively to cultivate a collaborative spirit and to tap into the wisdom of the group.

Location: Center Building Dance Studio | Carolina Friends School

Other Details: Dress comfortably and participate either sitting in a chair or standing and traveling through the space. Please bring a water bottle, a yoga mat if you want it, a notebook and writing implement, and your curiosity!

For participants who have taken previous workshops with Annie and Leah, this iteration will continue to build on the awareness of the whole body being connected, just through a different lens.

And for folks who are new, welcome! No previous movement or anatomy experience is needed, and our groups have ranged in age from 23 to 88!

Questions? Please email Annie at anniedwyer4@gmail.com.

Mark Your Calendars! Annie and Leah are planning the next body movement workshop for the weekend of 5-6 April 2025!

Annie Dwyer

Annie is retired from 32 years teaching dance at Carolina Friends School where she shaped and facilitated a preschool through Upper School dance experience. For six of those years she had the joy of teaching with alum Leah Wilks and delights in any chance to build on that foundation.

In the last 13 years Annie has woven somatic practices into her teaching and designed a teacher research project with Lower School teachers integrating movement and somatic understandings into the classroom.

While in the CFS Upper School she designed an Experiential Anatomy class where students explored the sense of interconnectedness within their own body. This class fundamentally made a difference in the way that each student engaged with movement.

For the past four years she has been deeply involved with Culture Mill with Tommy Noonan (CFS '01) and Murielle Elizeon in Moving Through, a structured approach to utilizing tools, techniques, and practices common to Contemporary Dance to benefit people living with Parkinson’s.

Annie has studied extensively with Caryn McHose, Andrea Olsen, Nancy Romita, Allegra Romita, Bill Evans (certified Evans Technique Teacher), and countless others who continue to shape her perspective on the body. Her ongoing passions include moving with others to discover and nurture practices that bring us into a specific sense of the body we inhabit and the possibilities that exist in each moment.

The American Dance Festival dedicated its 2024 season to her and to fellow Triangle dance educator Gene Medler.

Leah Wilks '05

Leah, a 2005 Friends School graduate, is a dancer, choreographer, musician, and teacher currently based out of Brooklyn, NY(Munsee Lenape and Canarsie land). She became an educator under the guidance of Annie Dwyer, and helped design courses for, teach in, and run the CFS Upper School dance program for six years with her. She is so delighted to get the opportunity to co-teach with Annie again!

Since her time at CFS, Leah has taught and shared her work in a variety of locations, including the American Dance Festival, Elon University, University of Michigan, Ponderosa Tanzland festival, Lawrence University, Gibney Dance, PROTEO|media+performances, Post/Futures Festival, and Montclair State University. Most recently she has been a collaborator/performer with Beth Graczyk Productions, Tatyana Tennenbaum, and real.live.people with Anna Barker.

She holds an MFA in Dance from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and has been an artist-in-residence at MOtiVE Brooklyn, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, and MacDowell. She loves nerding out about anatomy and discovering new possibilities for movement through humor, exploration, and curiosity with others.

For more information about her work, please visit leahwilks.com.

Photo Credit: Anna Maynard