Authentic Movement: The Structure and Practice

May 19, 2025

BY LAUREN TIETZ

Stills by Michel Orion Scott

Note: This article was first published in Stance on Dance’s spring/summer 2025 print issue. To learn more, visit stanceondance.com/print-publication.

The basic human desire to be seen and accepted is one of the driving forces of life. We long to be seen and loved and equally so to be understood.

Authentic Movement is simple in structure though profound in experience. It occurs within a relational space. Movers listen with the whole body for impulses to move, be moved, or be still with eyes closed in the presence of one or more compassionate witnesses, who are in turn tracking their own internal responses to seeing those emergent expressions of movement and stillness. These two roles form the basis of the practice: One or more movers and one or more witnesses work within the structure and safety of agreements for practice.

This practice of deep listening and discovery can feel like: a poem, a dream, a pleasure, a space for exiled parts to return, aspects of one’s psyche coming home, a replay of an old habit, a grief, a joy, a new dance, a humor, a death/rebirth, a rinsing of the body’s tension, a memory, a profound stillness, an artistic flash, and so much more.

Over the many years of practicing and facilitating this form, I have felt and witnessed how liberative it can be. At times a needed antidote to the more poisonous and cruel aspects of surviving the dominant culture, it invites what is real without censoring what is present in our bodies. Sometimes deep, sometimes lighthearted and pleasurable, many shades of human experience arise and express from each practitioner, working with embodied presence.

Authentic Movement is relatively nonhierarchical. It can hold space for very diverse experiences occurring simultaneously in one studio (or forest, or Zoom room). Participants simultaneously explore their own movement impulses individually, yet simultaneously together. I find this to be a rare occurrence in modern spaces, the invitation for both a (somewhat) private intimacy with self, in the presence of another/or the collective.

The form investigates two fundamental and interconnected human needs: the need to be seen (vulnerably and honestly) in the presence of another, and the need to see, to be witness to another’s authentic (vulnerable and honest) expression. This brings us into meaningful and tender connection within a creative space.

I have found this practice space can potentially facilitate the rewilding of movement patterns. As movers observe and sense what wants to move, or be felt, we welcome new pathways and fresh awareness. A deconditioning process can emerge, releasing some of the binds of inherited intergenerational material and cultural layers living in our bodies.

The Origin

Authentic Movement was instigated and developed by pioneering practitioners and dance and movement therapists Mary Starks Whitehouse, Janet Adler, Joan Chodorow and in another iteration known as Contemplative Dance developed by Barbara Dilley at Naropa University in Boulder, CO. Other practitioners no doubt intersected with and influenced the form’s development. Marian Chace, for example, is considered to be the grandmother of the Dance and Movement Therapy lineage in the West. Other fields and perspectives that have influenced its development include Carl Jung’s work on active imagination, Buddhist philosophy, and meditative and mystical traditions. The form lives on and continues to evolve in subtle ways.

Mary Starks Whitehouse was a dancer, teacher, and performer who worked with modern dancers Mary Wigman and Martha Graham. She went on to become a Jungian analyst. Whitehouse’s trajectory of study and practice, her interest in genuine movement, and authentic expression, had profound influences within these different fields of dance and psychology.

In her dance classes, she found herself longing for some missing layer or ingredient with the dancers. She wanted to invite another way of sensing and expressing deeper layers of movement discovery that might emerge unbidden and unpremeditated. The idea of an approach to movement with more organic emergence began to take root in her teaching. Inviting movers to source impulses from within, she began to invite the unconscious to move and express through the body, becoming conscious in these dance classes. This work she called movement in depth – inviting gestures and shapes to emerge from deeper or less conditioned places, perhaps more raw, innocent, or mysterious. For an art form like dance, that in the West has been dominated by narrow ideas of the body and beauty, her approach invited a welcome and radical shift in perspective.

Whitehouse went on to study Jungian psychology and after working with patients for some time she found she wanted to support patients therapeutically to sense and feel not simply through the mind or images in a static posture, but from the intelligence of the body itself with its many layers of evolution, survival, and poetics. She began to invite patients to shift from the more static posture of lying or sitting to exploring other positions their bodies might want to sense and explore, as well as impulses to move, thus making a radical shift in this analytical space.

Janet Adler (dance movement therapist and PhD in Mystical Studies) influenced by Marian Chace among others, went on to develop this work in great depth. Influenced by Buddhist psychology, mindfulness, and mysticism, she developed many aspects of the work, but one particular focus was the development of understanding the distinct roles of the mover and the witness, and the importance of the relationship, using the terms mover consciousness and witness consciousness, to help practitioners understand the differences and nuances of these distinct roles. Her work was also greatly influenced by her studies in mysticism and her own personal experiences of mystical realms of energetic or spiritual dimensions in creative practice. She went on to codify and trademark her particular approach and created a private training program where students could learn what she named The Discipline of Authentic Movement.

Joan Chodorow’s work was based in Jungian analysis, working with active imagination in movement, developmental psychology, archetypes, dreams, and play. Both Adler and Chodorow were on faculty at the Authentic Movement Institute, co-founded by Neala Haze and Tina Stromsted in Berkeley, CA.

Barbara Dilley (Naropa University) developed a very specific and equally beautiful structure for the work she called Contemplative Dance. Sometimes the name Contemplative Dance is used to refer to any of the iterations of Authentic Movement, but Dilley’s particular structure is a distinct and related practice from Adler and Chodorow. Her structure involves three unique phases each timed by the facilitator: Sitting meditation (being here, now), followed by a timed period of personal awareness practice (also called personal warm-up, or time attending to self), followed by open space (time to sense ourselves in relation to others, sometimes moving and sometimes witnessing the movers). Being inspired and influenced by Buddhist practice, the quiet meditative aspect of this work comes to life in this form.

The Relational Aspect: Seeing and Being Seen

What is the importance of the witness in this work?

Relationship is potent. We are mammals and our brains and nervous systems (and entire bodies) have evolved, survived, and continue to change and grow in and because of relationship. We as humans literally do not survive alone. We are bonded and bonding animals, born into the world via relationship, much like other earthly beings, though unique in our particular kinds of interdependency. The quality of bonding and of relationship matters. The quality of attention and care matters a great deal in relating to oneself or another, given just how much we shape each other and ourselves with our thoughts and emotions. We influence each other in endless myriad ways we are only just beginning to understand in the research realms of neuroscience, trauma recovery and healing, and interpersonal neurobiology.

We carry through life and into adulthood a profound need to be seen and understood and loved as we are. And many of us also carry some cautiousness, fear, or trepidation around this longing or potential intimacy, influenced as we are by the hurt or harm, or lack of safety we have experienced, be it through our family, friends, communities, or larger influencing cultures.

How do we reconcile these sometimes conflicting longings?

We can learn to develop our awareness of this inheritance, this (conscious or unconscious) nervous system patterning from life’s experiences. We cultivate somatic attunement in Authentic Movement, and in the process find the space to uncover some of these layers needing care from/for ourselves, noticing how they feel in our body. Much like other therapeutic, embodied, or creative exploratory spaces, this practice can open space, with each person following their own timing and respecting their own needs and boundaries. We develop a capacity to slowly explore the range of sensations and feelings we encounter.

As our capacity increases, we learn to sense the potential need to be seen and loved, and to sense a simultaneous (or alternating) urge to hide or protect from this kind of vulnerability. Through mindfulness and embodied presence, we can notice the fear of potential exposure or criticism coming from the witness, or simply the fear of the potential intensity of the experience of being seen, not as a performer, but as me, and get curious about it.

There is an intimacy that is possible when we are seen and seeing. When we practice in a safely held space, other pathways begin to appear and glimpses of other possibilities become apparent. As we co-cultivate safety together, we practice compassion and kindness. In so doing, we find possibility for new options that are liberating, pleasurable, joyful, surprising, or empowering pathways. Ultimately, we are relearning belonging to self, with another, and within community.

As dancers and dance makers, we might find that we are able to shed some of the conditioning around performance, suspending the tendency to evaluate and judge movement, but instead to invite and allow instinct and impulse. Technical training can be incredible and freeing, and it can also be limiting creatively. I have found that Authentic Movement practice opens new dimensions in my research of movement.

As we shed aspects of cultural conditioning and uncover other layers of presence, we cultivate openness to what might feel more authentic, real, or vital in some way, in the studio and beyond. It is a form of sensitive listening, a training that in many ways is antithetical to the dominant culture. It is the unconscious becoming conscious.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love–whether we call it friendship or family or romance–is the work of mirroring each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when shame and sorrow occlude our own light from view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. 

–James Baldwin, Nothing Personal

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Lauren Tietz is a dance-based interdisciplinary artist and teacher working with the body through the mediums of film, performance, and somatic writing. She has been facilitating Authentic Movement practice (along with other dance forms) for many years and delights in supporting participants in orienting to the unknown, discovering new agency. Lauren has a private practice in Santa Fe, NM, offering sessions in somatic movement and biodynamic craniosacral therapy. She offers Authentic Movement workshops in New Mexico and Austin, TX, and happily welcomes opportunities to facilitate the work in other communities. To learn more, visit laurentietz.com and www.earthskybodyworks.net.