I am a coach, performer, and teacher, as well as a certified Infant Developmental Movement Educator. I am currently based in the bay area of California where I offer in-person classes. I also offer virtual coaching to clients locally and internationally, and continue to perform in Europe.
1:1 coaching is currently available. For more information, please contact me.
Teaching, researching and performing corporeal mime during a seven-year apprenticeship with Tom Leabhart at Pomona College opened me to the power of decomposing movement into its constituent parts. The deconstruction in this theatrical method shows up everywhere in my coaching style.
Since first spending significant time in the Body-Mind Centering context in 2013, I've been fascinated by how the consciousness gets actualized in the tissues of the body. Learning and teaching Christine Cole's methods in Vermont and Moscow as a part of her Somatic Body training awakened me to the moving, living material of our anatomy, and was instrumental in informing the 'how' of my approach to working with clients as whole people.
I've had the pleasure of teaching Contact Improvisation and Contakids® in many international environments, including Russia, France, and California.Teaching Contakids® brought a much deeper perspective on relational attachment, and the dance of child-parent dynamics which condition the psyche and body. Teachers like Shira Yaziv, Matthieu Gaudeau, and Elsa Pernot significanty influenced my understanding of how to work with such powerful relational dynamics.
Similarly, learning meditation and mindfulness-based methods of investigating experience with Downtown Meditation immensely enriched my awareness of mind-body-heart dynamics. I've gained much deeper insight into the forces at play that can either inhibit or support the embodiment of a person's deepest and most sincere intentions. I am immensely grateful for the awakenings bestowed upon me by buddhist monks who I have worked with weekly since 2021.
Training with movers like Jonathan Schmid, Tom Weksler, and Rafe Kelley, as well as fighters like Master Cheetah, has taught me to move in more effective and transformative ways. The locomotive and martial aspects of movement allowed me to begin to translate, both for myself and others, aggressive impulses into caring actions.
Support and training from master coaches Paul Weinfield, Preston Smiles, Shaun Cooke, and Tyler Dudding, in both personal and group coaching contexts has profoundly influenced my sense of my work in achieving my own purposes as well as enabling others to do the same.
Andrew Davis Saul with Malen Iturri