Meet Sarah Sampson | Director of the Dallas Movement Collective, Embodiment Guide and Ritual Artist

We had the good fortune of connecting with Sarah Sampson and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Sarah, why did you decide to pursue a creative path?

There’s this quote by Gabrielle Roth, the creator of 5Rhythms dance practice that says,

“In many shamanic societies, if you came to a medicine person complaining of being disheartened, dispirited, or depressed, they would ask one of four questions:
When did you stop dancing?
When did you stop singing?
When did you stop being enchanted by stories?
When did you become terrified by the territory of silence?”

My fascination with these questions has been endless. They have inspired a life-long learning journey of exploring expressive arts and meditative practices as medicinal salves to our individual and collective suffering.

It’s interesting to me that dance was once woven into the sacred and mundane fabric of our shared humanity. The driving curiosity of my work as an artist and teacher has been to discover how we’ve collectively lost sight of our connection to movement as a community ritual and healing art. I believe practices that help us remember we are all artists and creators, as well as the spaces to come together to express ourselves in an honest way, hold a profound transformative potential for healing. I’m interested in accessing the arts as a way to remind us of our interconnectedness and deep belonging within ourselves, with each other, and to this planet. Coming home to our own bodies is brave and powerful work that may be vital to our capacity to connect with each other and care for our environment. On my creative path, I’ve found we’re all just dancing each other home.

Let’s talk shop? Tell us more about your career, what can you share with our community?

My professional background is in public education where I worked for many years as a theatre teacher and then later implementing Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) programs across organizations in the DFW area. It was in this landscape where I began to discover intersections between the arts and healing.

The Dallas Movement Collective was born from this intersection and from the belief that all humans are inherently artists and creators. Ancestrally, we all come from people who danced. The cultures that practiced intentional movement, song, storytelling, and many other modalities of expression are a part of our DNA and collective human blueprint. When we practice these creative forms with the intention to heal together, we open the possibility for a deeper artistry – one that articulates our truth.

To me, embodiment is all about finding the match between the experience of our inner world and our outer expression. Being embodied has not come easy for me. Theatre was the first art form that caught my heart. After years of studying and being in the world as a performance artist, I began to discover that I was living a performative life. Quite simply, I’d learned to fake it – on and off the stage. I’d become talented at playing characters, but at the heart of things, I didn’t know or feel connected to myself or others in a meaningful way. Realizing this was painful and disorienting. It opened a healing path of tending to my own wounding, particularly sexual trauma, that was leading to dissociation and feeling deeply uncomfortable in my body and voice. I began to desire for my art, and my life, to be a place for revealing and healing rather than hiding and pretending. I’ve found performative nature, and disconnection from our natural expression, is something all humans encounter to some degree, for different reasons and most related to individual and cultural trauma.

Discovering modalities such as ecstatic dance, ritual theatre, song and drum circles, and most recently, the work of The 360 Emergence, has illuminated a vast longing for artistic explorations that encourage the expression of our embodied, raw, vulnerable, brave, and brilliant humanness. The practices I’m committed to studying and sharing are in service of understanding and accepting ourselves more deeply, creating safety within the body and within connection to other bodies, finding our voice to express the often inexpressible language of the heart, and uncovering our true nature. This work will always be essential, but I feel we are in a particular moment in our global landscape where developing the skills to see and be seen, feel and be felt, hear and be heard, as well as how to hold others and how to be held, are needed more than ever.

In my early years of leadership, I tried, and failed, to do most things on my own. Over time, I’ve realized this more hierarchical and isolated form of leading was neither supportive of myself or the communities I serve. The Dallas Movement Collective emerged in a desire to be a part of an organization with concentric circles of leadership. Held by an advisory board, team of artists, and a community code of agreements has supported these brave spaces in a way that feels much lighter and stronger.

What I love about the spaces at the Dallas Movement Collective is that there are no ‘typical’ participants. As a multi-generational gathering place, the collective celebrates diversity, welcoming people from various cultural, gender, and socioeconomic backgrounds, recognizing that we are all connected through the ancestral legacy of dance and movement.

Participants are invited to try their first experience for free. This movement is truly for everyone. No experience is necessary. Being human and having a body is the only preparation.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
Dallas is like a treasure box that’s continually revealing itself – there are so many vibrant experiences to be had here! I’d invite them to join me for a class at The Dallas Yoga Center, a tour and bio-charge experience at Rain Fresh Water and Wellness, a breath work journey with Emily Ashley, a show at The Hip Pocket Theatre, a sunset at White Rock Lake, and a trip to Kalichandjis for dinner and kirtan.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
I believe that the choice to become a teacher is a forever commitment to being a student. I’ve been fortunate enough to have found teachers that guide me with a lot of care and tenderness on this path. I’d like to thank Amber Ryan and Kate Shela of The 360 Emergence for continual directing me towards more wholeness, Monica Blossom of Ecstatic Dance Dallas for her mentorship and invitation to carry on the care for Dallas dance community, David Sunshine of the Dallas Yoga Center for his continued devotion to sharing embodiment teachings, Blake Hestir for his many wisdoms on how this work must be in service of earth-care, and Lorca Simons of Live Wire and Hip Pocket Theatre for reconnecting me back to the roots and ritual of expression.

Website: www.dallasmovementcollective.com

Instagram: sarahsampson.life

Facebook: www.facebook.com/dallasmovementcollective

Other: www.sarahsampson.life

Image Credits
Photo Credit: Suellen Matteus and Peyton Quinn Baker