OVERVIEW
Our Story
Founded in 2008 by Nicole Klaymoon, Embodiment Project is a Bay Area Performing Arts Organization that began as a street dance theater company. We honor and express Black Social Dances and street dance forms and recognize them as healing modalities. We draw on other dance traditions including modern dance and use choreo poetry, documentary theater, live song, and video art to articulate and hold stories of liberation. Our work uplifts the narratives of Black Indigenous and People of Color, the voices of survivors of sexual violence, youth, and communities impacted by the carceral system. We are a diverse team that centers the experience of BIPOC through our leadership, Sociocratic organizational model, performances, community partnerships, and educational programming.
The Embodiment Project has a 15 year long history of telling the stories of survivors through our bodies. To source these vulnerable autobiographical narratives, we have created systems of care that allow performers to collaboratively work with all storytellers, who retain agency over their story and shape the narrative that is shared.
We recognize the body as the vehicle of awakening and value the histories we each carry. We act with compassion and grace towards the complexity of our lived identities and trust that the art will help transform these experiences into communicable stories.
We believe that relationships are the lifeblood of culture and the foundation upon which our work can thrive. We use restorative practices to preserve, expand, and deepen these relationships and to resolve the conflicts inherent in interpersonal work so that we may use conflict as seeds of opportunity.
We challenge the commercial veneer that’s been affixed to hip hop, and honor the ancestry and healing power of Black social dance forms within the ancient continuum of African Diasporic storytelling and art.
We honor the LGBTQA legacy and struggle and the ways it has shaped Black social dances and culture.
We repudiate that Euro-centric lineages receive more institutional support and recognition than Black social dance traditions. We work to reverse this by uplifting Black presence and artistry within the concert dance landscape.
We challenge the historical exploitation of dancers, especially BIPOC dancers, through a regenerative abundant culture through livable wages, sociocracy, consistent work, opportunities for advancement, collaboration, and shared leadership.
We believe we must advocate for children and the little ones within us all, in order to end intergenerational cycles of harm.
We work across racial lines and embrace the risk and vulnerability that it takes, and have systems and cultural norms in place to help deal with things when they get hard.
We believe that an essential task of art is to raise awareness which involves growing our threshold for discomfort.
We strive towards a culture of belonging.
Our Values
Our Process
We accomplish our work through a process called Liberatory Storytelling: our signature method of creating art where the unique power of the body is honored as a language-transcendent storyteller, capable of bridging differences, reaching communities of varied experience, and catalyzing communicability for stories that had been rendered invisible.
Through our work, we have awakened to the intricacies of the word “survivor,” and found that it is a constellation. Everyone who has perpetrated harm has survived one first. We recognize that we cannot tell the stories of survivors unless we are inclusive and expansive and find ways to acknowledge the history of harms. This creates work that resists the boundaries of the good/bad binary, which we accept as the work of the liberated survivor.
Our Path
We nourish the principles of Beloved Community, as illuminated by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and many other freedom fighters, through building deep, real connections, and long-term partnerships and collaborations across differences as a key ingredient to our work. We recognize that conflict, when it arises, is an opportunity to cultivate regenerative culture through Restorative Justice and our sociocratic leadership, which decentralizes traditional power structures to reflect the voice, aims, and domains of the group as a whole.
