Soma Research
Practice is where the inquiry begins.
My research emerges from embodied practice, developmental psychology, and years of observing how movement, attention, relationship, and environment shape human development.
Current Questions
- What happens when arousal has nowhere to go?
- Can movement function as a developmental technology?
- How does imagination become a psychological capacity?
- What distinguishes visible compliance from genuine integration?
- What conditions allow experience to become internally usable capacity rather than performance?
- How does the body carry what the mind has not yet named?
The Work
I study how movement, relationship, attention, and environment shape human development. My inquiry grows from more than thirty years of embodied practice and is informed by developmental psychology, sustained observation, and teaching.
I am not a researcher who also does somatic work. I am a practitioner whose years of observation generated the research questions.
Ballet Lab
Sites of Practice · Curriculum · InquiryThe ballets I make are not illustrations of a finished theory. They are sites of sustained observation: environments in which developmental questions are explored through embodied, collaborative, and symbolic practice. Each production makes something visible that theory alone cannot reveal.
Ballet Lab
Year-round movement curriculum for children — embodied learning through dance, story, and imaginative practice. The primary teaching site where developmental questions are explored in real time.
Embodied Threads →Soma Flow
Year-round movement teaching for adults — movement intelligence, somatic awareness, and embodied practice. The adult counterpart to the children's curriculum.
Soma Flow →Wildwood Curriculum
Embodied, place-based curriculum development at Wildwood Acres Farm and Forest School — RDT applied to nature-based education, West Brookfield MA.
Wildwood Acres →The Magical Divide
A children's book emerging from the original ballet — the first creative work in which the developmental theory began to name itself through story and image.
Read More →Research
Interest Areas · In DevelopmentAbout
I have worked with children and adults through movement, dance, and story for more than thirty years. What began as practice became observation. Observation became inquiry. Inquiry became a framework.
For much of that time, the primary sites of my practice and observation were dance studios, rehearsal rooms, classrooms, nature-based learning environments, and everyday life. I watched children struggle to enter learning not because they lacked intelligence, but because they lacked access to the embodied conditions that make learning possible. I watched adults carry patterns they could not name because those patterns had formed before language. I watched myth, music, movement, seasonal rhythm, and responsive human presence reorganize experiences that argument and instruction could not reach.
Regenerative Developmental Theory emerged as an attempt to name these observations before I possessed a formal scholarly vocabulary for them. Graduate study in developmental psychology is the current phase of that translation: bringing practitioner knowledge into conversation with established research, identifying where the observations align with existing theory, where they may extend it, and where they generate questions that require further study.
The questions arise from what decades of practice made visible. That is not evidence that the answers are already known. It is the epistemological foundation from which the research begins.
From Embodied Threads · Essay
EEF — Excess Energy and Frustration
A first-person account of what unmetabolized somatic experience actually feels like — and what it reveals about how screens, stillness, and the decoupling of arousal from motor completion may be shaping the nervous systems of children and adults alike.
Read the Essay →