AboutMoving Joy Studios is an organization that creates connections within and between people, communities, organizations, and cultures. We encourage people to move and feel through interdisciplinary experiences and performances. Using the fundamental experience of movement, we address the widespread cultural and global issues of dis-integration, dis-connectedness, and dis-ease.
MISSION: What we do
VISION: Why we do it
Moving Joy Studios is founded on the following beliefs:
Moving Joy Studios is motivated by the following values:
We operate all of this from a triple bottom line: People, Planet, Profit.
Maren has a lifetime of training in dance, including modern, tap, jazz, swing, and salsa. She received her MFA in Dance Performance & Choreography with a focus on somatics at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She studied modern dance intensively at the Limon Institute in NYC and danced professionally with Adrienne Celeste Fadjo Dance in NYC. She has also studied choreography and community with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, modern-jazz in the Simonson technique, and anatomy with Irene Dowd and Andrea Olsen. Her swing dance career began in 1998 – and hasn't stopped. East Coast and West Coast Swing are her specialties. She competed in national competitions in west coast swing, has taught swing to teens through seniors in schools, community centers, and at Sandra Cameron Dance Center in NYC.
Maren has performed in Boulder, Coloardo, NYC, Rochester NY, Ithaca NY, San Francisco CA, and England. Her choreography of solo and ensemble works for stage and for specific sites include Rochester’s ArtWalk, Art in the Heart public sculptures on the Ithaca Commons, and Ithaca's annual festival of art and science, Light in Winter.
Collaborating is her favorite way to create. Collaborations include projects with musicians, visual artists, and scientists.
She teaches contemporary modern dance, swing dance, and workshops in dance, anatomy, environmental connection, movement & writing, and stress management.
She is available for hire for group or private dance lessons, workshops, and performance collaborations. Her work focuses on community and relationships – relationships between people, negotiations inside of oneself, relationships between people and their physical environment. Drawing on her degree in anthropology, her work reflects a perspective on humans life seen through any or all of the following artistic lenses: critical, celebratory, analytical, questioning, emotional.
Maren is a NYS Licensed, CO Registered, and Nationally Certified Massage Therapist. She graduated in 2006 from the Finger Lakes School of Massage in Ithaca, NY, a 1000-hour program. Subsequent training includes Shiatsu, Cranial-sacral Therapy, Reiki and anatomy. Her treatment sessions integrate therapeutic massage, movement, and stretching, drawing on her years of training and experience in modern dance, yoga, and therapeutic massage. She offers table massage, Shiatsu/acupressure (floor work), and personalized targeted stretching for pain relief, flexibility, and relaxation. She focuses on stress reduction especially in the treatment of musculoskeletal pain, headaches, exhaustion, and high levels of general anxiety. Her treatments also address performance enhancement for dancers and other performing artists. She creates a safe, comfortable environment that provides an opportunity for rest, re-balancing, and renewed health, and learning.
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