THE TEAM
Slow, Soft and Spacious
21-26 JULY 2023
Earthdance, Massachusetts
TEAM
We – the organizers and teachers – are coming together to expand and collaborate.
And we – the participants – are a group of dancers, movers, somatic learners, spiritual magic makers, embodied humans, vulnerable deep-divers, and relational explorers. With curiosity, care, and perhaps a bit of mischief, we call in this community, expanding within and expanding throughout, to gather in a new creation.
All are warmly welcome, to come as your full, unfiltered, beautiful self.
Hazel Turrone
Core Team. Liaision to T&P Global Team. Participant Team Lead. Liaison to Soothe&Care and Peace Council. Finance Lead. Site Lead. Grief Ritualist
Hazel (she/they/it) is a trauma-informed intuitive bodyworker, geomancer, ritualist, parent, animist, homesteader, herbalist, artist, dreamer, woods whisperer, gardener and guide living on the unceded land of the Abenaki in Northern Vermont. Curiosity is her magic and medicine. They are touched by the tender complicatedness of our humanity and in awe of the exquisite beauty in all life. At the core of their own personal life journey and the work offered to their clients is a dedication to embodied liberation -dismantling the entangled layers of generational trauma and systemic oppression and thus reconnecting to the deep wisdom of our bodies in relationship with the earth that we are. She believes that like the mycelial web that is at the root of a healthy forest ecosystem, cultivating healthy resilient community connections is essential in moving through these turbulent times.
Parneet Chohan
Core Team. Teacher Liaison. Inclusivity Team Lead, Liquid Love facilitator.
Parneet Chohan (he/she/they) is a human becoming whole; a time traveler who ventures into the past and future to reclaim her life force and reach her highest potential. Parneet works as a counselor, somatic experiencing® practitioner and naturotherapist in her home city Montreal. They are inspired by the resilience and healing abilities of the human heart, brain and body. Their work is focused on the liberation of all beings including themself. Parneet works as a mindfulness and meditation coach as well as an authentic relating facilitator with a direct love and comradeship for queer, trans and non-binary racialized folx.
Kelindah Bee Schuster
Core Team. Teacher Liaison. Performance Night Producer.
Kelindah Bee is a draglesque artist known as Theydy Bedbug, and a queer trans educator. In performance, they use lip sync, embodied movement, poetry, and striptease to reclaim their body, reckon with belonging, subvert art forms and dissolve gender norms. In Lenapehoking aka Brooklyn, NY, they facilitate a “Drag Performance: Between and Beyond Gender” program at BAX, produce queer community events, and freelance as a Trans Inclusion consultant. They value spaces that welcome our whole selves to be present, especially the messy, grotesque, hairy, queer, kinky, vulnerable sides we’ve been conditioned to shrink. They believe that when we connect, collaborate, and create art and community spaces that channel our authentic sexual expression liberated from gender norms, we make space for more ways of being: a pathway to new-world building. kelindahbee.art | @theydy.bedbug
Leela Kelley. Registrar, Astrological Advisor, Ritual Support
Leela (she/they/fae) has participated in four Touch&Play festivals, and has been coming to Earthdance since 2014.
Leela is grateful for the deep healing, feral wisdom, creative magic, and authentic expression she’s experienced with this community, and is happy to be of support to this important and powerful container.
Leela is a somatic therapist, bodyworker, astrologer, and social media witch for earthdance. Also a clown, a kitty, a tree-whisperer, a weed-witch, a friend, a song catcher, a devotee of Venus, a phone call away from the Magician; a Cancer moon, she likes soft things.
Skins. Work Exchange Lead
Skins (they/he) is in constant wonder of bodies’ vast potentials to experience sensations, emotions, and integrate experiences. They believe people can access pleasure in respectful ways for ourselves, and with each other. Exploration and trust must go hand in hand. He feels when spaces are intentionally co-created {centering each person as important, valued, and celebrated} meaningful connections of intimacy can happen. With ~*~trust and play~*~ healing and integration of our physical~emotional~erotic~kinky selves is possible (and has happened in their experience)! Acts of care and pleasure are vital pathways to mutual liberation: where we build skills, resources, and support to be our truest most loving selves. Skins is a bodyworker, burlesque drag ritual performer, pleasure activist, joyful tender rascal who just wants to play and enjoy in the sweetness of life with people (and wishes the same for you) <3
Photo by Drum Fernandez // Instagram: @fernandezdrumphotography
Princess Michael - On-Site Lead
Wanderer, art appreciator, community lover, mischievous instigator, connection seeker. Honored to be part of the Touch&Play team co-creating containers for playful, kinky, vulnerable exploration in community
Rob Schicker. Soothe&Care Team Lead
Rob (He/They) has been engaged in Touch&Play since 2017 and co-founded the Soothe & Care team. Rob moonlights as a homesteader and therapist when they are not shadow walking as Master of Death. Rob also supports male bodied folks deconstructing patriarchal patterning and others to create healthy boundaries. Rob is switchy, likes to curate spaces, tends to the flock, may present as aloof, playful, naughty, and has been known to flog a person or two during the festival. Keep an eye out for cameos of…Calvin, Nikki, MOD, Stunt Double Rob
Leslie Heydon - Peace Council Lead
Leslie Heydon grew up with highly dedicated amateur dancers and remembers her grandmother dancing every Saturday night in gold sparkled shoes. As an Expressive Arts Therapist, she worked in specialized Addictions programs for women and black youth, providing individual therapy and facilitating groups. She also completed a wilderness Leadership program at Outward Bound. Over twenty years ago, Leslie started dancing 5 Rhythms, and In 2016, began the practice of Contact Improvisational Dance. For several years, she facilitated a monthly BIPOC Jam and is on the Toronto Sunday Contact Jam Safety Committee. Leslie completed levels 1 and 2 of The Human Awareness Institute’s (HAI) workshops, attended Touch&Play 5 times and has experienced deep healing with Ayahuasca plant medicine in Peru. These experiences, along with a Betty Martin Wheel of Consent workshop, sparked her to delve further, into sensuality, sexuality, gender, race and other dimensions of identity, power and consent in conjunction with CI. Leslie is a trained Relationship coach and her passion is to explore, in the outdoor wilderness, on the dance floor and in the internal wilderness of the soul.
Daniel J. Hayes - Founder of T&P
Medical Doctor, public health scientist and practical idealist.
He’s been playing, dancing, meditating and conversing CI for over 20 years.
He is the founder of the Touch&Play Movement and the Vidàlia eco-village outside Barcelona. He is the current Executive Director of the Earthdance Creative Living Project, an arts & cultural community and institute in Western Massachusetts. He’s been exploring the intricacies of the Relational Body for over 10 yers and is committed to building a more equitive and authentic culture through his social entrepreneurial and creative endeavours.
Caelum (aka Captain Kale) - Lead Chef
Caelum loves to nourish people! He applies his background in cooking from his family, in restaurants, hotels, co-op’s, and his Masters in Human Nutrition to empower guests to deepen their connection with healthy and sustainable food.
Kale is passionate about meeting everyone’s needs with organic, traditional and seasonal foods. He loves your special diet and wants to know every detail! He cooks at many intentional community gatherings in the area and has formerly been the kitchen manager at Earthdance.
“Food is love! How we source and prepare our food can help nourish our connection to the Earth, each other and our selves. I’m really looking forward to being back with our touch and play family!”
Caelum uses him/they/captain pronouns.
Chef Falcon - Sous Chef
Touring the land collecting recipes and spices form local farms and farmers, co-ops, music festivals, camping events, Falcon has been workingn with chefs for nearly two decades. Professional training through immersive cooking practice under pressure in fast paced kitchens with tall standards, Falcon has a natrual passion for food and sharing love through cooking for others.
You can find Falcon cooking at Camps, Festivals, Restaurants, and dance events. He has also a perosnal catering company with meals delivered to home.
Can we collectively create a space that encourages us to simultaneously mobilize while being still?
Akil Apollo Davis
Sacred Mask Work: 2nd Chakra, Angels & Pleasure
Akil Apollo Davis is a full-time Performing Artist & Theatre Professor of Mask and Art Aesthetic.
He has been a unique and influential presence in New York City’s performance, educational and cultural avant-garde for 18 years.
Akil’s performance disciples and works are:
Theatre, Dance, Spoken Word, Freestyle Poetry, Music production, Performance Art, MC’ing, Directing and Sacred Ceremony
As a seasoned Theatre Professor and educator, Akil is a master teacher of an extremely unique form of Mask (SUNY Purchase, NYU, William Esper, Bali Indonesia, Bangkok Thailand), and is one of only 3 humans in the world that teach it.
This form of Mask work plants it’s roots in the power of image and transformation. The practice alchemizes traditional theatre, practical esoteric philosophies, original meditations, and Balinese disciplines.
Akil has designed and owns over 200 Masks, almost all of which are hand-carved by a Brahman (Priest) in Bali, Indonesia.
He has trained with Monks in Thailand, Brahmans in Bali, Witches in New York, and has worked with Psychologists to bridge the gaps between esoteric knowledge and classical paradigms.
Akil’s Karmic mantra: there must be more light.
Helen Tocci & Jaycelle Pequet
Offering: The Dance of Becoming
Helen Styring Tocci (she/her) creates space for people of all ages to explore their unique creativity and discover the innate strength and wisdom that lives in every body. With 25 years of experience as a professional dancer, vocalist and movement teacher in NYC, her work has been presented throughout the city and beyond. She is a longtime teaching artist and currently a dance curriculum specialist for Juilliard. A passionate improviser, Helen travels internationally teaching connection, awareness and musicality through CircusYoga, Contact Improvisation, and Fusion Partner Dance.
Jaycelle Pequet (they/them) loves to explore embodied questions like…where in your body does that sense of spaciousness live…that fear, is there a micro-movement that feels resourcing…if that voice inside you were embodied how would they move…what color is your hair when you find that it. Jaycelle builds connection within self and others in their work with queer, trans, and bipoc individuals as a sensorimotor psychotherapist and founder of The Institute for Emerging Adulthood. They have produced movement and arts events in service of social justice for bipoc communities on the West and East Coast. As a movement artist in continual learning they have trained Capoeira Angola, modern bachata and Brazilian Zouk.
Murry Eyeball
Offering: LAB and Exploratorium
Marie/Murry (fae/they/she/eyeball) is a song weaver, dream druid, death doula, & cosmic clown creature of the northeastern forest. Fae paint space with ruminative, playful and etheric strokes. After facilitating an intensive called “Mythic Mirror” at Touch & Play Mexico, they are excited to explore the uncharted seas of hosting the Lab Intensive & Exploratorium this year at Earthdance. Both a contact dancer & vocal improvisor, the union of movement and sound is at the core of her practice of somatic instrumentation. Marie/Murry are so delighted to play and pray with you all!
Chaya Leia Aronson
Offering: Shadow and Light – An Alchemical Fire Ritual
Chaya Leia Aronson, RN BSN is a mother, partner, lover and ecosensensual earth worshipping clown goddess. Chaya maintains a private practice offering Maya Abdominal Massage, Holistic Pelvic Care and Health, Movement and Sexuality coaching for over a decade. Chaya has also facilitated a number of transformational and alchemical rituals related to grief, wombs and eros. She has great passion and skill in supporting people and relationships to have clear conversations about desires and boundaries and to unpack our wounds and traumas gently to find more capacity for love and pleasure. She has a private practice, Your Sacred Pelvis, where she sees clients in person and virtually based in the Northampton, MA area.
Clove Silk
Offering: Intro to Kink & Pleasure Palace Play Party
Clove (he/him) seeks to explore emphatic “yes” as a gateway to rewiring mental obstacles. As an in-person sex worker of 13 years, his life has been oscillating between confines and containers. Moving through this, Clove has procured focus away from liminality and towards experiential internal guides. He asks: how does “work” and/or expectations of our sexual selves limit us? Pushing further, how do we break down barriers without denying the structures once deemed necessary to self protect?
Living in NYC for 11 years, Clove has delved into many different kink and sexual spaces. Whether it’s been setting up a booth of consent talks at kink events, facilitating private play parties, or even just participating in raucous yesses personally, his work has flourished beyond confines and limitations. Clove’s life experience as a sex worker and an agender trans person lends a familiarity to limitations, and his personal teachings make fluid currents towards self definition, interdependence and new pathways of pleasure dedication.
Aeric Meredith-Goujon
Offering: Photography
Visual Omnivore
Maybel Ovalles
Offering: Sensuous in Sobriety
I’m a transdisciplinary artist—performer, poet, facilitator, writer, producer, visual and audiovisual crafter. Through community gatherings and embodiment practices I investigate pathos, mythos and the organization of archetypal fields to gestate experiences that offer us to become aware of our bodymind content, the unknown, and the threads that bind us together.
I’m the co-founder and co-director of Matrifestival—a gathering that provides sustenance and inspiration to people with wombs—and CAMP, a participatory art center located in Zipolite, Mexico.
I studied Indigenous Spiritual African Technologies with Malidoma Patrice Somé, to learn about holding rituals and incorporating visible and invisible realities. In this line of work I’m also learning Process Work.
In my apartment in Brooklyn, I founded and co-directed Residencia (2017-2021), an underground germinator of experiences where visionaries can practice their discoveries. I taught classes there, and in festivals, including Touch&Play, Dark Odyssey, Burning Man, Connection Camp, etc.