30+ Years Each of Embodied Wisdom
Over the last 30+ years of teaching embodiment, Constance Clare-Newman has developed a trauma-sensitive, neuroscience-informed approach to embodiment practices that focus on wholeness of being.
Grounded in her own deep study of embodiment practices, dance, improvisation, meditation, breathwork, trauma work, contemplative traditions, deep ecology, social justice work and addiction recovery, Constance facilitates a path to wholeness.
She has been studying and teaching movement practices her whole life, as a horse trainer and dressage trainer, as a modern dancer and as an Alexander Technique teacher since 2001. She is a co-founder of Desert Movement Arts, an intergenerational collective based in Coachella Valley, CA. Constance has taught in the performing arts departments of Academy of Art University, University of Redlands, and ACT in San Francisco.
Constance has explored many forms of dance, including serious study of Hawkins, Cunningham, Corvino techniques. She danced with Westwind, an international folk-dance ensemble, and spent time with Irish step and ceili dance. More recently improvisation has been a focus and co-creation with the movers, musicians and artists of Desert Movement Arts has brought performances to the desert for the last eight years.
Constance is especially interested in transcending familiar movement vocabularies and engaging in deeper presence and flow of somatic explorations. Atypical movement arising from imaginative and contemplative practices can access rich inner wisdom.
Embody Wholeness has several components. Foremost is a pedagogy of pleasure. The cultural norm of working hard at improvement is relinquished for a slow pace of enjoyment and feelings of pleasure that facilitate healing, creativity and unity of self. Nature-based play makes way for co-evolving with the natural world and deepening our relationship with self and environment. Breath awareness and exploration restores and rejuvenates. Sustainability for self, community and environment is prioritized for dynamic balance of human and non-human life.
Especially in this era of disconnection, and the fractured cultures we live in, connecting and learning from the desert, the dunes, the meadow, the mountain, and the water bring us closer to wholeness.
Bridging dance, mindful movement, functional anatomy, play, sensory awareness, spiritual practice and eco-connection, participants access ease internally and externally, engage creatively and come home to a sense of wholeness.
Jamie Grace Davis is a visual artist, movement researcher, and somatic practitioner whose work moves across four continents and twenty years of professional practice. Davis creates large-scale paintings, site-specific installations, and immersive retreats that map what she calls “choreo-geography” — the living intersections of cultural memory, geological time, and the body’s own knowing.
At the heart of her current practice is the integration of Molecular Movement and Systemic Constellations — a natural deepening of the somatic inquiry she has pursued through decades of movement research. Molecular Movement, a somatic practice attuned to the body’s subtlest intelligence, becomes in Davis’s hands both a preparatory field and a living companion to Constellation work, opening the nervous system to the relational patterns that Constellations bring into visibility. Together, they form the experiential architecture of her retreats: spaces where participants move between the cellular and the ancestral, the personal and the geological.
From 2015–2023, Davis developed Points of Connection, an internationally exhibited body of work examining how artistic practice creates meaningful dialogue across cultural boundaries. The series generated 13 exhibitions including “The Coming Waves” at Cité des Arts (Paris), “Seekers” in Cairo, Egypt, and ongoing collaborations with the Arte Expuesto private collection in Monterrey, Mexico.
Davis’s practice has always woven the visual, the textile, and the embodied into a single thread. For a decade while developing Points of Connection, she hand-crafted all dancer garments city-to-city, continuing a craft tradition of using collected materials to dye fabric — a practice that itself embodies the somatic attentiveness central to Molecular Movement.
Recent work includes leading a three-day somatic + systemic Constellation workshop in Thailand (June 2025) and the development of “Water Collection,” a body of textile work exploring geological waterways through traditional dyeing techniques.
In 2016, Davis lived on Oahu while collaborating with artist Masami Teraoka on his Pussy Riot theatre production for the Honolulu Biennial. During this period, travel to the Big Island gave rise to “Pierce the Veil,” a performance for blind and seeing audiences that investigates perception and presence in wild landscapes.
Davis studied at Otis College of Art + Design, where her 2014 thesis “Prescience and the Art of Knowing Before Knowing” explored artistic consciousness and emergent practice — an inquiry she continues to live and teach. She founded the Ex Nihilo collective and has exhibited across the United States, Mexico, France, and Egypt. Her work appears in private collections internationally and is documented in numerous publications addressing contemporary site-specific practice.