Space, Story and Dancing.

I took a Somatic dance class and it made me think about space and story and how it's all connected.

On Sunday I took an online Somatic dance class with Sah D’Simone and Nathan Hirschaut.

I have always loved dancing, freeform, on my own in my bedroom as a teen and in my kitchen as an adult.

In my teens and twenties I signed up to Five Rhythms, Funk, African dance, Contemporary dance classes and loved going out dancing. Clubs made me feel slightly overwhelmed and lonely, but gigs were fun.

At drama school we did ballet, jazz, tap and contemporary. I’m pretty terrible at following coreogrpahy but I loved it. What I have in rhythm and physical ease, I lack in understanding left or right (also the main reason why I don’t drive).

Whichever way, I have always danced, it has always been a big part of my life.

Until I turned 40 and lost the ability to dance or run.

It was one of the many symptoms of, what in retrospect I think may have been, a prolonged nervous breakdown.

Recovery began when I gave up drinking in February 2025 and allowed myself to sit with years of accumulated pain.

Two months later, the deities bestowed me with a studio. Not just any studio, but one with tall ceilings, old beams and a view of the hills. After many years of searching for a studio space to create in, the timing felt significant.

In acquring the space, something within me shifted. I started playing music on arrival and would find myself dancing, timidly at first and eventually with bigger, sillier, bolder moves.

In December, we went away for six weeks, and I gave my studio keys to a friend. One evening she messaged to tell me that whenever she visited the space to work, she couldn’t stop herself from dancing.

Several days later she sent me another message to tell me that she had realised why the space felt familiar: it was where she had attended dance classes as a child.

It is a dancing space, in many ways.

So, now that you have this context, I can tell you about the online somatic dance class I attended on Sunday evening.

I had come across Sah D’Simone on instagram, and I immediately knew I needed what he was offering: a guided dance class for unlocking the places where our bodies store emotion. I have benefitted from talking therapy over the years, but I knew that what I needed right now was to work with my body.

I signed up and followed the class, along with hundreds of others across the world, from my studio. He asked us to take a selfie before and after, see mine below.

The class instructor told us to take a photo before and after. This is me before the whirlwind of movement, tears and laughter. And then after.

It was exhilerating, at times uncomfortable, definitely powerful.

One of the things I found interesting was how he repeated over and over again that this was about getting ‘out of your story’ and into your body. And it made me think about how my work is so deeply rooted in story, and could seem at odds with this idea, but how, ultimately, creative practices are always connected.

I thought about how the first few chapters of Tell the Story of Your Home are about immersing yourself in your story, to discern what you want to keep, celebrate and explore, and what you want to let go of and release. It can be an emotional process and I always ask clients to be gentle with themselves.

We then move onto function and how your space serves you. How you move in the space and how to stramline your environment so that it can serve you in the best way possible.

It made me think about understanding our story, thanking it and honouring it and then moving into a place of instinct and feeling.

Which is very often what I see happen with client 1:1’s. We begin with the story investigation, the inner excavations of memory and story.

We then look at a space pragmatically, we pin down function, design and we discuss colour, texture and styling techniques. We do a lot of planning, discussing and strategising.

And then I witness something happen, every time, where the person I’m working with moves into a state of flow. Of a different type of understanding rooted in instinct and feeling. They understand the space in a different way, they sense where there is imbalance, they allow themselves to play, experiment, get it ‘wrong’.

And that’s where the magic is, that’s where the story ‘notes’ can be left aside and the true connection with the space begins.

The function is the skeleton of the space, it holds everything up. The design and style are the flesh of the space, they do a lot of the heavy lifting. The sensory aspects such as lighting and texture are the nervous system.

These all need to be in place so that you can then play, feel and continue to dance with the space, your ever evolving story.

If you find this approach to your space and your story interesting, I have a limited number of slots for 1:1’s in June (May is fully booked). I offer them as a set of three consultations or a one-off 1:1, all accompanied by the Tell the Story of Your Home workbook and audio.

It can be exhilerating, at times uncomfortable, but definitely powerful.

Love Java x