To Hum is Human

Tuning Into Your Body: Intuition Beyond the Mind

• Donnabelle Casis

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What if your body isn’t just something you live in, but something that lives through you?

In this week’s episode, I’m joined by Jennifer Polins, dancer, choreographer, educator, and founder of the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought.  Together, we explore the quiet power of movement as a form of healing, creativity, inquiry, and intuition.

Jen shares how dance can be a space for transformation and truth-telling—one that invites us to listen through sensation, not just thought. From the choreography of daily life to the stillness between steps, this conversation serves as a reminder that your body is wise and always speaks.

Movement is a birthright. Healing is not linear. And presence begins in the bones.


Find me on Instagram @ToHumisHuman and www.sonorouslight.com



SPEAKER_00:

Hi, friends, and welcome back to another episode of To Hum is Human, the podcast where we explore the transformative power of tuning into our intuition to express our passionate purpose. I'm your host, Donabell, and I'm thrilled you're here. Today's episode, Tuning Into Your Body, Intuition Beyond the Mind, is about something I believe we all need to reconnect with, our bodies as intuitive guides. So often we think of intuition as a whisper in the mind or a gut feeling, but what if it's also in the way we move, breathe, and inhabit space? Our bodies carry deep wisdom, and when we learn to listen to posture, sensation, energy, and We gain access to a form of knowing that's ancient, personal, and profoundly creative. To guide us in this exploration, I'm so honored to welcome my next guest. Jennifer Pollans is a dancer, choreographer, educator, curator, and the founding artistic director of the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, or SCDT, based in Northampton, Massachusetts. Jen's work centers movement as a vehicle for imagination, joy, and transformation. She blends rigorous contemporary dance practice with somatics, improvisation, and healing arts, drawing from over 25 years of experience in the field. From her early years performing with companies like the Joffrey Ballet, Milwaukee Ballet, and the Zurich Opera House Ballet to her groundbreaking contributions to experimental performance and education, Jen brings an embodied brilliance to everything she does. Through SCDT, Jen has created a vibrant platform for performance, community dialogue, and artistic growth for children, teens, and professionals Thank you so much

SPEAKER_02:

for that wonderful introduction. I'm so happy to be here with you today.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's a joy for me to have you on the show. And I'm going to do something different for this episode. I'd like to just take a moment and start with a breath. So let's just both take a nice deep inhale and exhale. It's always nice to arrive at a place in this moment. So Jen, when you tune into your body right now, what is it telling you? Oh

SPEAKER_02:

boy. When I tune into my body right now, I'm feeling multiple sensations at the same time. I'm distracted by the state of the world. I was just reading the news. I'm really excited to be here and honored and yeah, just to be able to have a chance to talk about the work that I'm doing at every moment. I'm in my house with a bunch of Teenagers or almost not teenagers sleeping upstairs. Yeah, and it's cold and raining outside.

SPEAKER_00:

Those are a lot of sensations. Yeah, a lot of sensations. Lots of things, lots of things. Well, you describe movement as inquiry. Yes. So what was the first question your body ever asked you and how did you answer? The

SPEAKER_02:

first question, well... I have a very, very early memory of looking at myself in the mirror when I was about two or maybe even younger. It's one of my first memories. And looking at my like sort of, you know, like a toddler would just running around busy, busy, and then stopping and seeing a mirror and seeing myself and having this realization that that was me in the mirror. And that like curiosity of who I am, maybe in this version, I don't know what I believe about life and death and all of that has sort of propelled me and the version continues to expand or change as i discover more about myself and i feel extremely lucky to be able to be a dancer in this version of this life of whoever i am because it's given me opportunities to understand What it means to be alive and be present in the moment in a way that I feel like people are sort of robbed from in our culture.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, it's a very go, go, go culture. And sometimes being just being is sort of overlooked. Now, many of us treat the body as a vehicle or a tool. But not always as a teacher. What does it mean to listen to the body as an intuitive guide for you?

SPEAKER_02:

It means that there's intelligence and understanding that is integrated with our mind, with our intellect and knowing in ways that we might not understand unless we start to inhabit what our actual brain does. feels like in the back, in the front, in the center, where our brain, not our mind, but our actual brain that is our mind, where it sits in our, in our skull actually, and where our alignment is and how our spine, you know, like how alive our spine is and where our organs like engage with our posture. It's a never ending exploration. And a lot of that work, I discovered in my early 20s through work of Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen and the body-mind centering work that was located in Western Mass for many years before she moved to the West Coast. And that work has really profoundly affected me. So this intelligence of the body-mind, the mind of the body, and how it shapes the our days and our lives and our ability to perceive what's happening in the

SPEAKER_00:

moment. It's very physical. It's very visceral. I feel as if when we were moving through our day, a lot of it's up here. Just... just in the mind and we can go along and about our day. But how often do we actually tune into where's my brain situated in my skull right now? Or how are my organs being squished in this outfit? Things like that. What does that feel and how does that make me be in the present moment? And

SPEAKER_02:

how, when I discover that there's a front of my spine and I can sort of Listen from that place. How does that change how I listen? How do all of these discoveries change how I can listen? Has been a huge long-term somatic question for me.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I rarely think about the front of my spine. Right. And when you think about when you're even speaking to someone, are you fully engaged looking and being with that person, keeping the spine directly in front of them? Wow. I just learned something today. You just helped me think about another way of perceiving. And that's so cool. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And these perceptions aren't like it's not like we discover them and then we can put them like these are just now tools. They're gifts. Right. That that you can have with you all the time at the supermarket. And I think another overarching question for me, which definitely formed a CDT, was how do we take all these beautiful things? secret practices in the dance studio dance studios are often hidden up five flights of stairs you know like far away from the hustle and bustle and normal normalcy of culture of our human culture and also dance performances are often unless you're in the know I've heard so many people say I like dance but I don't understand it I'm confused it looks like you all know what you're doing but I'm I don't know what you're doing, right? So there's this question that I've continued to hold maybe since my time at the Joffrey actually, which is how do we bring this power and this intelligence and this beauty and this opportunity into our daily lives? So outside of the studio. and engage these practices as we're alive, not just as we're on the dance floor. Right.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, I would love if you could take us back in time to when you really felt the pull to study dance.

SPEAKER_02:

I started studying dance when I was four. It's not a unique story of mom sending daughter to ballet. I do remember not being a able to connect right away that we were pretty much planning a performance. We were rehearsing. So I was just so in the moment. So I remember my first few performances, I was very confused when I was on the stage at like four and five. I was very young. But I do remember that. So now I teach little kids and I have this understanding of their immediate experience and then How we're sort of building something towards a future, you know, is an interesting thing with the little kids. And I had that experience. I think I started to really think I wanted to be a dancer when I was about 14. So it took a long time. I was practicing ballet. I was only doing ballet. And I liked it or didn't, you know, depending on the year. And then... I think I saw a VHS because I'm 55, so I'm old. So my mom had a VHS tape of Swan Lake and I watched that. And there was just something about both the incredible physicality, the virtuosity and the music I was pretty obsessed with. And I just decided that I was going to be a ballet dancer.

SPEAKER_00:

Wow. I mean, there's no question. You're just like, yep. And so would you attribute that moment watching that when that sort of light clicked on. You're like, oh, yeah, that's it. That's totally it. Well, you founded the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought in 2013. And it's just known as a vibrant hub for performance, education, and public dialogue. And it's a place for emerging and established artists to deepen their craft. What was happening for and around you at that time?

SPEAKER_02:

Just finished grad school. So I was a professional ballet dancer and did not go and get an undergraduate degree. I graduated from high school a half a year early and moved to New York City to dance with the Joffrey Ballet when I was 17. So I had a professional ballet career from 17 to about 24, which brought me to Europe. And in that short span of time now, but it was very intense, I realized that my interest wasn't ballet. It was dance. just physicality and understanding our body more for art, for efficiency, like for clarity in myself. So ballet is the practice is very clear. It's like it's very pure. It's like to do it, you have to be extremely tuned in a certain way. So my desire for understanding about how to be more tuned led me away from ballet and towards somatics, which is a large field of studying the mind of the body through a variety of different approaches and techniques and forms. I moved away from performance as my priority and more towards bodywork and healing and still centered around creativity, like understanding creativity and started to teach and wound up in a grad school, found the only grad school for dance that gave life experience credits. So I have to really credit Donna Faye Birchfeld, who founded the Hollins University MFA program that has a low residency program. So there was a bunch of us that had been professional dancers in our early careers and not had our bachelor's degrees that were able to come into American Dance Festival in North Carolina and work. And it was from that culmination of that incredible two years of time. It just, it was like sort of born after that.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, the name itself includes contemporary dance, but also thought. Yeah. That's very curious because most people don't associate those two things necessarily in a school. Yeah,

SPEAKER_02:

right. So I did that on purpose. And I think it's really effective. I love things that are effective very quickly, you know, sort of resonate and engage humans, right? So that I'm glad I thought of that title. It's a little bit long, the School for Contemporary Dance and Thought, but it definitely encompasses everything. What I've found, especially moving away from ballet and into the somatic world and then found improvisation, moved to Western Mass because of Bonnie Bainbridge-Cohen, Nancy Stark-Smith. Thank you so much. of being in a body? What does it mean to be in a fall and be in relationship to other people as we're falling through space into unknown territory? What does it mean to train our reflexes to not always be in fight or flight, but to be able to be open as we're moving into very unknown spaces together in a collaborative way? So all of that stuff was so exciting to me about being able to moving to Western Mass. It also felt like I met a tribe of movement philosophers. Yeah, so really intelligent, really curious humans that were using their bodies to study what it means to have a fulfilled life.

SPEAKER_00:

It must have been such a profound experience and to be able to actually have a community that supports you in that way. I know very little about contact improvisation. So could you tell our listeners what that really means?

SPEAKER_02:

I had the opportunity to work closely with Steve Paxton, who also passed away last year, about a year and a half ago, for a long time. He said that he created contact improvisation in the late 1960s. He was one of He was the instigator of contact improvisation in New York City as part of this Judson church sort of lineage. But he created it to bring the wilderness back to dance, is what he said, which is really beautiful. Many quotes of his are so beautiful. I feel like it's an evolving practice, not even a technique, but an evolving practice exploring one's relationship to gravity. It's like the duet between yourself and gravity or a group of people moving and gravity. So that's the basic premise of it. It has evolved. Contact improvisation is also a dance form that is more accessible to people that aren't necessarily trained dancers, which is a wonderful thing. So like in a ballet class, if you haven't had some development of the vocabulary, it's hard. It's like you have to start at the beginning. But with contact, you can quickly be rolling a point of contact with someone else's body. There's still a lot of skills to understand so you don't get smushed. There's still nuances and a lot of things to understand about the technique of it, but it's an accessible form for people that haven't had contact. the ability to have dance, formal dance training, which is also a beautiful, beautiful thing. Steve talked about reclaiming touch. So not just from being sexual or sensual even, but just sort of that touch of mother and child, that touch that we have as children and using that as part of the territory to explore in a creative art form.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. That's so primal when you think about That's ancient. That's just from the beginning of human existence and understanding a connection that is nonverbal, something that is just purely contact. And it's beautiful. So SCDT, the most amazing thing about it is you're challenging people. conventional models of, if you would call it concert dance, I don't know if that's such a thing, or being a champion of more inclusive vision of embodied art. And when you came to that decision to make that part of your school, what was the reception to that? How did people respond in the community?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, when I started in 2013, Northampton was different than it is now. So it felt like there was a lot of space for SCDT to form. I started with Jennifer Nugent, who was in the Western Mass area for a little while, who's now back in New York City and is my age. I just have so much respect for her as an artist, a movement artist. She's a beautiful, wonderful dancer. And we started small. We just said, what if we could create a school purely based on the things that bring us the most joy and just start to invite in artists that we knew. I had like this whole career in Europe. She had this whole career in New York City. And I had just come from my MFA program. So I had all these new connections. And what if we just bring artists in and invite them to share with the public what they're busy with in the moment, what they're most interested in, what they're really like where their appetite is right now. And let that be the impulse for the school to start. And it just immediately took off. It was easy. It felt all very easy for a long time. Classes were full. We started a lot of the programs that still exist now. And it just It just almost exploded into being, it felt like at the moment. And it was very exciting. The youth classes were full. I had been working at the Pioneer Valley Performing Arts High School for 16 years and had left and wanted to keep working with teenagers and started hatchery. We immediately had 14 kids. So it just sort of went

SPEAKER_00:

boop. Well, when you have something that's aligned with joy, it just feels easier. I'm up for that. I'm up for joy. Yeah. When people think about dance, there's a lot of impression about perfection. Yeah. What do you see emerge when people engage in movement practices with presence and permission?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, perfection transforms.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02:

And we could have a whole hour long discussion on what perfection is, right? So perfectionism can be limiting because it can sort of point you in a direction and then you miss a lot of the things that happen along the way. So I think a lot of the practices and trainings that SCDT is grounded in is noticing what's happening along the way and having that journey or those experiences be more more amplified or more engaged with than perhaps in a normal dance class you know that feels like a difference in in the training that we're offering again it's it becomes more accessible because everybody can participate you know you don't have to you know be able to touch your toes with your legs straight or like have like a certain base of coordination necessarily to be able to feel what it feels like to let your body release into the floor or close your eyes and sense what's happening on the inside. We all can do that to a variety of degrees. And that is an endless game or practice. It is constantly changing. And every time we engage in these somatically based underlying physical practices of inquiry, we're creating more of a map of sensation and understanding of ourselves.

SPEAKER_01:

So

SPEAKER_02:

it's a little bit more like what we do in yoga in a way. And then from that place, we take it into maybe learning a phrase. But it's coming from the inside out rather from the outside in. Worrying about what

SPEAKER_00:

it looks like to other people.

SPEAKER_02:

Right. It's not about what it looks like. And it looks beautiful. Yes. It's about what it feels like and being able to appreciate that. the beauty in being in a room with a bunch of other people practicing that together.

SPEAKER_00:

Now, you've spoken about movement as a way to process emotions, and you work with many people navigating trauma, growth, or transformation. How can movement become a portal to healing or remembering? Oh,

SPEAKER_02:

so many ways. I mean, a lot of people have trauma with touch. And I just feel like if we can be present in a classroom and In the moment, it's a play between what we have to hold on to from our past and what we can let go of, right? So that practice of noticing what we're holding on to and what we can let go of on very small levels or very big levels feels like a healing practice related to personal trauma and psychological turmoil, which we all have to varying degrees. It's delicate. It's a For me, the dance studio was always a safe space. It was a place where I was so excited to explore the boundaries. But that's not true for everybody. So I feel like the field of somatics has been really evolving and changing in the past 10 or 15 years in good ways to understand what safety is and how we can create safe spaces, even within the context of a classroom environment.

SPEAKER_00:

Well, when you... also include others within your own personal transformation. I can imagine it's a very different experience because there's a holding of and support of whatever you happen to be going through at that time. Yeah, and

SPEAKER_02:

that's a tricky thing too, to figure out how much we hold our own issues, to participate in a group experience, how much we make space for personal issues with the group experience. I've been doing this for a long time, so there's so many stories and just different versions of how classes unfold. I will say dance is so communal. We take class together. So there is something about being able to witness, to be seen, because that's a crazy thing about dance is our whole body is seen in a dance class as we're trying and learning and fumbling through and exploring and experiencing. And we're also seeing others. So we're in this vulnerable space state together, which is quite unusual and

SPEAKER_00:

beautiful. When you think about bringing all those pieces together and then having a performance, how does performance and pedagogy intersect for you in helping others reclaim the wisdom of their bodies?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, that's a very interesting question. We talk about it a lot in our board meetings right now. The SCDT board is made up primarily of other artists, working artists, and then business people and lawyers and financial people. And we're talking about accessibility all the time with how our programming engages the public. Because the cool thing about live performance is it's not just now the dancers in the room together, the performers, the artists in the room together. We're all in the room together. The audience is sitting there or standing there or walking around or whatever the structure is of the performance together in a space, right? Which is really different than how most of our Our living is going at this point virtually. And so we really look at that. We look at how we're engaging the public. Performance can be looked at as a consumer event. So it's like if you go to a Broadway show or you go to a ballet, there's a certain level of experience that you can count on. And then if you go to a very alternative experimental performance, there's a whole other aesthetic and experience that the audience has. We're interested in the full spectrum of entertainment, like entertainment being one end of the spectrum and experimental artist-centered work on the other. When people don't understand, like when a language is more foreign or there's less explained, some people tend to get really uncomfortable. And so part of our job, I think, as an experimental movement performance art space is to help people find ways in to a less defined performance space. And that's really interesting and forever we'll be talking about it and trying to understand and explore it. It feels really important to be aware of that for SCDT and to be right at the edge so that We're including the audience and giving the audience an opportunity to discover what it means to be in a generative space where we don't necessarily, none of us know what's going to happen next, right? So that experience feels real and potent and difficult to navigate with this captive audience as we prepare performances. Hatchery is a great is a great tool because it's family friendly and there's always more cohesive. Like it's more like here's, here are these things that we're developing and we'll, we'll give them to you as the audience. Um, and we sneak in lots of experimentation. We sneak in little surprises along the way. And then hut, which is the most experimental of what SCDT does feels like the opposite. It's like, you're welcome here. And we're not going to take care of you at all. It's like it's up to you to find your way. And this is a sacred space for the artists to have a chance to explore their world without having to caretake the audience at all, which is also a very beautiful thing to have. the public be able to be exposed to. Definitely. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

So the hatchery, is that the teen component of the school? And then Hutt, if you could explain what Hutt is, because I've been to several and they are so invigorating. There's something that's so alive in those performances. If you could tell us what Hutt is.

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. So Hutt is 10 years old and it's a program that was created by Jake Maginsky, who is a sound artist and a professor at At Smith College and myself, along with sort of rotating poet curators as well, it's a performance where there are three artists. There's a movement artist, a poet or an artist that works with words in some way, so it could also be theater, and then a sound artist. And each artist gets a 20-minute set. to share their work with the public. And there's little breaks in between. So the artists don't work together. It's like first it's dance and then you have a break and then it's poetry and then you have a break and then it's sound and then you're done. And the idea was to bring in different publics. So often music and sound artists don't go see dance or poetry, you know? And so there's this mix in the public that is really exciting. And then we get to see So, yeah. Even though they're very, very different, there's often some through line that we can detect. But we don't really introduce or welcome the public. The thing just starts and then it ends. And it's my favorite.

SPEAKER_00:

I'll have to say it's my favorite, too. I love... the juxtapositions because as people attending the event, we're sort of programmed in a particular way. It's like, well, why did these three people get put together? Or we try to make sense of the grouping. But then you also experience them each separately and they're always so unexpected. That's what I love about it. It's like, I've never seen anything like that. I've never experienced anything like that. It takes a little while to integrate because your mind is just being, your whole everything is being exposed something so new and novel. Yeah. It's just so exciting. I love that you're doing that

SPEAKER_02:

too. Yeah. We try to take advantage of people coming through for the five colleges or people are always contacting us at SCDT to share their work. So we have this sort of professional guest artist series that we weave into our seasons. HUT is the ongoing series that is highlighting professionals in the fields. We have works in progress series where professionals come in, but it's works in progress. So you're not seeing finished work. And we have a lot of support programming for artists at all levels. But this feels like you really get to come in and see these seasoned, dedicated, experimental art forms. And there's a resonance that as you started this, this talk with is beyond the intellect to, you know, intuitive resonance that we're wanting to just let be and not like get in the way of as much. And

SPEAKER_00:

there's, there's a lot of freedom in that. And at the moment you, you, Right. practices or rituals that help you stay attuned to your body's wisdom, especially in these chaotic and demanding times?

SPEAKER_02:

Well, I try to be physical every day. I mean, it's really different as I'm aging and have such an administrative load at this point. And I have said before, I feel like maybe it's like a survival skill I have created, but everything feels like a creative practice to me. So that's mostly where I'm at at this point is like Noticing, especially when I have aversion, resistance, fear, fatigue, when I lose hope, noticing that as as a physiological experience and getting curious about those places, as well as the times when things happen really easily and everything works and I have an easy day or I write a grant and it just flows. Sometimes I'll just take a walk and notice the things that I pass by. Yeah, the things that don't have much important so that I'm not labeling as important and try to neutralize everything in that way so that maybe the things that I'm focused on or hyper-focused on or most concerned about, if I let that go, this idea of letting go feels like it's a theme in this conversation, what's around me? What else is happening? What else can I see? What am I missing? And that just feels like a very much of a delightful and grounding practice I have as much as I can.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Well, and just to see the beauty and joy that's right in front of you, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah. And just see everything a little bit like maybe it's not beauty and joy, but it's still... And it's not all consuming. It's not everything. There's many ways to experience an experience.

SPEAKER_00:

Most definitely. Right. If someone listening right now feels disconnected from their body, you know, like you're saying, being tired or numb or afraid, what's one small invitation you would offer them today?

SPEAKER_02:

Jump up and down 10 times. And then lie down on the floor and breathe. 10 times, notice how many times your mind drifts away and where you go. Put one hand on your heart and one hand on your belly and take a breath in and out and just continue to know that we are in this wild collective planet all together. And every human is in a state of a dance of struggling, feeling disconnected and feeling connected. I don't know. There's so much right now. I mean, we're so privileged to be able to be giving advice. So yeah, partly getting into a yoga class, going for a walk, looking at a flower.

SPEAKER_00:

Yeah. Now is the time because everything's in bloom, but it seems like a call to presence. Yeah. A call to really just, whew, just be in the body for a moment and just see what it's telling us, right?

SPEAKER_02:

Yeah, yeah. And I think part of why we are where we are in our culture is because it's important to know what is happening on a deep level and understand that. And the more we can all do that individually and start to do that in our culture, maybe we have hope about how we can navigate all of these huge challenges right now. and move forward together. We're not alone in it

SPEAKER_00:

at all. Well, Jennifer Polland, thank you for joining us today. Your presence, your wisdom, and your devotion to the body as a source of knowing is a gift, not just to dancers or artists, but to anyone longing really to come home to themselves. You remind us that movement is not just something we do, but something we are.

SPEAKER_02:

And something we all have the right to do.

SPEAKER_00:

Exactly. Wow. So much to think about from today's episode because there's something really sacred about being witnessed in motion when the body says what the heart can't find words for. So I really appreciate you bringing that awareness to us

SPEAKER_02:

today. Well, thank you. Thank you for having me on. I feel like we're just at the tip of the iceberg of this conversation. So

SPEAKER_00:

much to unpack and uncover.

UNKNOWN:

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00:

You can also find more episodes and updates at sonorouslight.com. or on your favorite podcast platform. Until next time, keep humming.