Department of Dance

Sondra Fraleigh

Professor Emeritus

Phone: (585) 395-2219

E-mail: eastwest@frontiernet.net

Sondra Fraleigh, professor emeritus of dance and somatic studies, is the author of Dancing Identity: Metaphysics in Motion (2004); Dancing into Darkness: Butoh, Zen, and Japan (1999); Researching Dance (1998); and Dance and the Lived Body (1987). She has been chair of dance at Brockport and a Faculty Exchange Scholar for the State University of New York.

Her innovative choreography has been seen in theaters in New York, Germany, and Japan, and she is often a guest lecturer in Europe, America, and Asia. Fraleigh is the founding director of Eastwest Somatics Institute for the study of movement therapy and dance where she brings her study of Western somatic practices (Feldenkrais, Alexander, Breathwork, and CranioSacral therapy) together with her use of gentle yoga and other Eastern modalities. She also uses Japanese Butoh techniques and Sun Ok Lee's movement meditation practice -- SonMuZen Dance that she has studied with Lee. Fraleigh evolves an approach to somatics that is informed by applied kinesiology, giving the student a map of the expressive and functional form of the human organism, and generating a basis for restorative movements.

She believes that healing our bodies and the body of the earth is the major work of the 21st century.

For more information on Eastwest Somatics visit Eastwest Institute of Somatic Movement Education and Therapy.

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