ABOUT
DUNAMI
DUNAMI - MOVEMENT ARTS WELLBEING CIC
is an umbrella Community Interest Company combining the fields of movement and eco-somatic arts, therapeutic counselling, experiential education, intercultural dialogue through arts projects, as well as environmental awareness research.
Meet the Board
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Dr Anna Dako
Dr Anna Dako, AHPP, RSME/T, UKSMDT is the founder of DUNAMI - Movement Arts Wellbeing CIC, a platform for ecologically mindful growth, creative development, psycho-somatic health and intercultural dialogue projects. DUNAMI’s offer includes regular practice-based workshops: The Seedling and Soma Scapes, as well as self-therapy resources. She specialises in supporting and working through versatile psycho-somatic imbalances, and loves guiding experiential walks outdoors, especially throughout Aberdeenshire. Her practice focuses on practice-based research in creative arts and environmental psychology perspectives on mental health and wellbeing. She has developed a movement-based approach towards more embodied ways for ‘being well’ with the natural environment guided by processes of Somatic Felt Thinking. The methodology is now offered as an online course in Eco-Somatic Movement Education and further described in her recent books ‘Dances With Sheep - On RePairing the Human-Nature Condition in Felt Thinking and Moving Towards Wellbeing’ and Walking to Wellbeing - A Guide to Practising Self-Care in Somatic Felt Thinking.
Dr Sarah Luczaj
Sarah Luczaj PhD, MBACP, DipCouns is a writer, artist, person centred therapist in private practice, inventor of the Creative Regeneration method, Reiki master, translator and co-founder of the terrealuma healing refuge in south east Poland, as well as enthusiastic cello learner and spontaneous mover! Her poetry and literary translations have been widely published, and she is the author of Creative Regeneration (Wayward Publications, 2019) and The Chi Book: Reiki from the Roots (Wayward Publications, 2021). Currently based in Glasgow, she is the mother of two grown daughters. Sarah's connection with Anna Dako and her work goes back two decades, and she is honoured to be a Director of Dunami, whose active exploration of the life force in thoughts, feelings, bodies, and nature is very close to both her mind and her heart.
Shayne Lilith-Moon
Shayne Lilith-Moon is a classroom assistant in special needs school. Her primary job is working with neurodiverse children, and young adults, using a curative approach based upon Rudolf Steiner's and Camphill's pedagogy. Her BA is in Steiner Education. In her free time, Shayne likes to spend time outdoors, running, cycling, walking, and indoors at the gym. She has always liked to move and enjoys movement per se. She also completed the MA in Somatics and Wellbeing in 2017 and has been accompanying Anna on many of her wellbeing walks since. Shayne enjoys the change she is currently experiencing from seeing herself as very progress-orientated to becoming more process-orientated and noticing the shift in her nervous system taking place during the walks. ...
At Dunami, we regularly dive into eco-somatic movement practices as a starting point for movement-based research and performative explorations, as well as an every-day wellbeing support. Highly rooted in the natural landscape, we seek to use the experiential methodology Felt Thinking to provide participants with new tools with which to meaningfully engage with Nature, reconnect with the breath and awaken creativity and imagination through movement with and in response to the natural environment.
We are dedicated to promoting experiential and Somatic Movement Education (SME) practices which are ecologically inclusive and which seek to expand on our comprehension of the relationship between the natural world and movement per se, both functional and creative. Through the Felt Thinking approach, we also hope to encourage other practitioners and artists to engage with Nature in practice-based self-enquiry. At the same time, we also aim to support individuals to develop more intuitive, ecologically-mindful ways to respond to outdoors contexts when creating work.
As well as applying the methodology of Somatic Felt Thinking to performance practices, at Dunami we are also committed to offering a range of educational and wellbeing opportunities for creative practitioners, as well as members of the public. We are currently working on extending our reach further and are hoping to be able to offer greater support to companies and organisations, as well as individuals in the near future. In the coming months, we will be making arts and somatic practice more widely available to a greater range of corporations through somatic mindfulness training for staff and employees.
We are proud to be able to offer interested individuals from all walks of life and backgrounds the possibility to access guided practices, led by Anna Dako. Individuals are warmly invited to begin their journeys by exploring the available audio guides, to reflect on mindful living practices via our Mindful Living blog, or to join us and participate in one of our organised events. These have included creative contemplations and individual happenings online, as well as workshops and outdoor encounters with the natural landscape, such as our workshopping events of The Seedling, and Walks To Wellbeing seasons.
Our ongoing activity: In The Open aims to merge choreographic practices with somatic approaches, whilst exploring movement in outdoors settings. We seek to create and share choreographic work which is produced in dialogue with and response to the natural environment. Through this outdoor arts work, we aim to produce a range of site-specific outdoor happenings/choreographic performances and short films. Recently, we have been sharing about the work on ‘Forest Within’, which took place at Countesswells Forest in Aberdeen in 2021.
At the heart of our work is a desire to not only connect with Nature, but also with each other. Through our work, we hope to inspire and support people from all backgrounds, ages and abilities. We enjoy engaging with our audiences and hearing about your experiences. Above all, we welcome your feedback and interactions, whether you choose to leave a comment, upload a creative reflection or join us for one of our events.
We warmly invite you to join our community and share in our work.
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DUNAMI's regular collaborators include also other
wonderful teachers, practitioners, and artists whose work inspires and nourishes many, every single day!
both UK and internationally based:
MARTINA POLLEROS, RSME/T, MA Dance and Somatic Wellbeing Martina trained in Dance between Art and Therapy, at the Bewegungsinstitut Essen and continued her education with Bodybliss – Continuum Movement at the Somatic Academy in Munich. She also studied the Life Art Process of Anna Halprin with Ulla Schorn and completed her MA in Dance and Somatic Wellbeing at UCLAN University U.K. with distinction in 2014. She is currently teaching somatic movement classes, working as a somatic coach for a health prevention program in a large insurance company and working as an ISMETA certified somatic movement therapist in Vienna. She teaches sensory integration for pedagogues and is also the founder of a one year “heart-listening circle”, an exploratory research circle to cultivate heart-listening. Martina is a part of a German NGO called Emergency Pedagogy, that works mainly with children of all ages in areas of huge crisis around the world. Her last operation was in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon in 2019. Besides her practice as a movement educator, she also value her further development and seeks out regular research opportunities. She has worked with Susan Harper, Miranda Tufnell, Andrea Olsen and Caryn McHose, to name a few of wonderful teachers who have formed, inspired and supported her work throughout the years.
Dr MARTA BURY, Artistic Director at O.de.la Marta is the founder of O.de.la Dance Theatre and a director of Nowe Strategie Choreograficzne (Cotemporary Dance Festival) in Rzeszow, Poland. Marta Bury – PhD in dance pedagogy, sociologist, choreographer and instructor of contemporary dance II degree (diploma issued by the Ministry of Culture and Art in 1998), actress (in the years 2001-2016 actress of the Maska Theater in Rzeszów), originator and co-founder of creative associations (Rzeszów Association of Artistic Initiatives "Pełna Kultura" and the O.de.la Theater Foundation), producer of theater and dance performances, founder of the Gestu Theater (1998-2009) and the o.de.la Theater (2014-). Member of the Polish Choreological Forum Association since 2024. Freelancer since 2016. Teacher of the method of work on deepening body awareness, "Becoming Space", and author of a doctoral thesis in the field of dance pedagogy on the influence of colorful psychokinetic visualizations on the body, defended in 2022 at the University of Silesia. Marta has received numerous awards for her acting and choreographic work. https://www.facebook.com/odelateatr
FRANCIS ANGOL, RSME/T, MA Dance and Somatic Wellbeing Francis is the founder and Artistic Director of Movement Angol dance, a UK based Dance Company which produces work that draws from the teachings and practices of dance from the African Diaspora, synthesised with Western Contemporary dance and underpinned by Somatic practice. Francis’ other roles are that of Somatic Movement Educator / therapist, performing artist, choreographer, Creative Educator and Lecturer in dance at the University of Surrey. He works extensively in professional, HE and FE education as well as community practice. Over the course of his career, Francis has produced works that have contributed to the enrichment of British dance culture through the production of a range of training programmes, classes, courses, and performance works, most notably he produced and curated the Flat Feet Dance Festival with the support of the South Bank Centre. Over the years, Francis has worked to develop a distinctive movement modality, an individual approach to dance art. Through his work, Francis enables people by creating opportunities for intercultural exchange and dialogue. He synthesises cultural traditions with contemporary norms to offer individuals a space for self-actualisation, through exploration and expression. Francis strives to encourage change by influencing the future, through impacting the present with work that is accessible, inclusive and is physical and mentally empowering. His work is deeply rooted in the spirituality of the self, a way of life that taps into the unspoken rhythmic dialogue of mind and body, to form a unique cultural synthesis in movement form. The practice is a way of allowing the individual to journey through a widening "field of possibilities, folding presence with existence, to allow self-expression to organically unfold. In his work he offers individuals a fresh and creative approach to engage with their body, to awaken the inner self through a dialogue of movement, rhythm, dance, imagery, and the imagination. This forms the basis of his mode of expression referred to as ‘Embodied Flow’. As a performer / choreographer and creative educator, Francis works to synthesise his accumulated knowledge of dance and the arts, with that of his lived experience, to help individuals bring about clarity, meaning and understanding to their mental and physical flow, through movement and dance.
KOROLEKO MOUSSA DEMBELE, West-African Griot, Master Instrumentalist Moussa Dembele comes from a traditional Bwa Bwa Griot storytellers’ family of musicians and craftsmen from Burkina Faso and Mali who have been making and playing musical instruments for generations. His father and various family members trained him from a young age. He has gone on to become a professional musician and teacher as well as a master craftsman of West African instruments all of which he has done for the last 25 years. Dembele has toured extensively throughout Africa, Europe and Israel as a freelance multi-instrumentalist and bandleader. He spent many years based in Ghana where he played balafon for the renowned Pan-African Orchestra. In addition to the balafon, he plays the kora, ngoni, and percussion, including djembe, doum doum, and talking drum.