We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Sarah Sampson. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Sarah below.
Sarah, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.
My most meaningful projects take shape through collaboration. I’m learning that at my best I’m a weaver. Gathering all the creative threads and people together to make experiences that hold the potential for healing, empowerment and vision is where I feel most at home.
Through the Dallas Movement Collective, I host weekly gatherings that incorporate embodiment practice, connection circles, live music, DJed sonic journeys, sound baths, meditation and interactive altars. It takes village to make this happen. The whole thing thrives on volunteer hands, intentional artistry and inspired collaboration. These spaces are centered around a multi-generational movement community that celebrates diversity, welcoming people from various cultural, gender, and socioeconomic backgrounds to come together to dance in a sober and trauma-informed environment. We are building a net-work. A net that works. One we where can all practice holding and being held.
Building an immersive world together where we can all creatively participate in doing our individual + collective work (and play) together is what’s the most rewarding for me. I’m passionate about igniting the artistry that lives within us all as a healing practice and essential component to our human journey.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
The creative journey of teaching movement and directing an arts organization has been winding and full of unexpected turns. It also has been highly intimate + interrelated to my personal healing path.
Theatre was the art form I first fell in love with. My first experience was in elementary school, and my love for making performance art led me to study theatre at the university level, pursue professional opportunities, and later teach + direct. What I really loved was being a part of an ensemble and creating with a group of people.
In 2015, I made a purposeful choice to step away from theatre for a while in the heart-breaking realization that I was living a performative life. Quite simply, I’d learned to fake it – on and off the stage. At the heart of things, I didn’t know or feel connected to myself or others in a meaningful way. Realizing this was painful and disorienting. It opened a healing path of tending to my own wounding, particularly sexual trauma, that was leading to dissociation and the feelings of being deeply uncomfortable in my body and voice. I began to desire for my art, and my life, to be a place for revealing and healing rather than hiding and pretending. I’ve found performative nature, and disconnection from our natural expression, is something all humans encounter to some degree, for different reasons and most related to individual and cultural trauma.
Discovering modalities such as ecstatic dance, ritual theatre, song and drum circles, and most recently, the work of The 360 Emergence, has illuminated a vast longing for artistic explorations that encourage the expression of our embodied, raw, vulnerable, brave, and brilliant humanness. The practices I’m committed to studying and sharing are in service of understanding and accepting ourselves more deeply, creating safety within the body and within connection to other bodies, finding our voice to express the often inexpressible language of the heart, and uncovering our true nature. This work will always be essential, but I feel we are in a particular moment in our global landscape where developing the skills to see and be seen, feel and be felt, hear and be heard, as well as how to hold others and how to be held, are needed more than ever.
The Dallas Movement Collective was born from the place where artistry, healing and learning intersect as a community ritual. I believe practices that help us remember we are all artists and creators, as well as the spaces to come together to express ourselves in an honest way, hold a profound potential for transformative experience. I’m interested in accessing the arts as a way to remind us of our interconnectedness. Connecting to our own bodies is brave and powerful work that may be vital to our capacity to connect more deeply with each other and care for our environment. At the core, perhaps we are all simply longing to feel more at home in our own skin, together – on this planet we all belong to.
Our Collective, and the practices we share, are in service to this deepened sense of belonging.
We’d love to hear a story of resilience from your journey.
In 2020, I was working for full-time for a public school district as their SEL (Social-Emotional Learning) coordinator while running dance events and teaching yoga on the side. The work was often as rewarding as it was challenging, as I implemented mindfulness, emotional intelligence, and restorative justice practices into K-12 classrooms. However, I reached a place where I felt like I was pitching teaspoons out of big sinking ship, otherwise known as our education system. I found myself exhausted and a bit disheartened. After 6 years of working for this system, I chose to put in my resignation through following a gut feeling that it was time to go. The pandemic hit a week later.
In the pace of the shutdown, a collective downshift that none of us had ever experienced in our life time, my nervous system began to heal. No longer spending my days with children in the classroom and my nights with adults on the dance floor, my rest revealed both the underlying motivation for my passions, as well as the deep amount of personal work I’d been neglecting.
I remembered my childhood sexual trauma.
I saw many parts of myself I’d been hiding from.
I began seeing a somatic therapist.
I began studying with an amazing teacher.
I saw why I want to offer embodiment experiences.
It has been, and we always be, driven by my own longing to feel safe and at home in my own body.
The determination to heal and learn began a soul fueled journey.
And it was overwhelming, so I ran.
Away from my home, my family, my relationship, my work, the dance, from Texas.
I moved to California and cried in the ocean nearly every day.
When Monica Blossom, founder of Ecstatic Dance Dallas, made an invitation to come home back to Texas to carry on the work of the dance, there were many parts of me that felt afraid and reluctant. I kept running up the coast until I wound up in Mt. Shasta, a place that taught me a lot about how healing happens in connection to nature.
As the world began to reopen, the call back to Texas was strong and warm. So much of me wanted to keep running, but I also saw that the road was endless. I was then and I am now a reluctant leader, but there was feeling that my hands would be most useful and fulfilled holding regular space again in my homelands.
Stepping into holding and rebuilding the weekly dance was challenging for me in many ways that are still unspeakable. Showing up week after week, even when I wanted to hide, when I didn’t feel my best, or when I felt like I had no business holding space for others was a huge lesson in learning how to hold the steady drum beat of consistency that a real community needs to grow and thrive. It was also a huge lesson in the wisdom of acceptance, the beauty of being seen and loved through imperfection, and the power of shared vulnerability. I learned to lean into the practice and into the community.
Part of this learning was also in entrepreneurship, as I worked with the risk of pouring years of personal savings into a dream, navigating the new financial challenges of being a single woman responsible for buying equipment and booking venues out months in advance on a credit card, trusting that the whole process would work and that the impact would be worth it whether I broke even or not. I has a crash course in healthy boundaries and tending to community. Holding a space for about 100 folks weekly who are in various stages of their human journey brought with it complexities I’d never had to face. My daily inbox became filled with sincere requests for support, deeply personal reveals and cries for help. I had to learn my lane. Over time, I became more deft in knowing my place in the web of care while creating allies and resources to support where I am not qualified.
In general, in my first year of leadership, I tried, and failed, to do everything on my own. Over time, I’ve realized this more hierarchical and isolated form of leading was neither supportive to myself or the community I serve. The Dallas Movement Collective emerged in a desire to be a part of an organization with concentric circles of leadership. Held by an advisory board, team of artists, and a community code of agreements has supported these brave spaces in a way that feels much lighter and stronger.
The future feels limitless and flourishing. I love my team. I love my community. I am so grateful for my mentors. I am so thankful for this practice – it is the real teacher of resiliency.
In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?
Participate. Pick up the paint brush. Hum a tune. Shake your hips.
There’s this quote by Gabrielle Roth, the creator of 5Rhythms dance practice that says,
“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions:
When did you stop dancing?
When did you stop singing?
When did you stop being enchanted by stories?
When did you become terrified by the territory of silence?”
If we can remember that the inherent creativity that lives within us all is vitally connected to our growth and healing, perhaps we may begin to collectively value the arts in a deeper, more essential way.
There’s a remedy in the practice of communal dance and expressive arts that at its core teaches us to move together on this journey. Where hierarchical structures enforce separation and exclusion, dance ritual brings an experience of inclusion and wholeness. All are welcome to join the music and dance. Though we may not know where we are headed next, this practice teaches us how to travel embodied together in a good way.
Contact Info:
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Website: www.
dallasmovementcollective.com / www.sarahsampson.life -
Instagram: dallas.movementcollective / sarahsampson.life
Image Credits
Photo Credits :: Peyton Quinn Baker, Suellen Matteus