Join social artists and activists, Melissa Michaels and Ramon Parish, for a wake up dance.
This morning moving journey is a ceremony of remembrance and ignition … responding to life’s questions. Where do you come from? Where are you going? What is your soul calling you to do with this precious life? Come prepared to find your roots, come into rhythm, and RISE.
Melissa Michaels, Ed.D., is a dancer and writer who creates movement-based cross- cultural community rites of passage events focusing life’s major thresholds. Melissa developed the first contemporary international youth leadership program rooted in dance, which has empowered hundreds of embodied social entrepreneurs and peace builders around the world. From schools in our inner cities, to refugee settlements, to the United Nations, Melissa is a midwife of the soul who has dedicated herself to our collective renewal through the liberation of the creative Spirit. She shares the story of this work in her recently released book: Youth On Fire: Birthing A Generation of Embodied Global Leaders.
Ramon Parish is a adjunct instructor in Naropa University’s environmental studies department. At Prescott College he developed an interdisciplinary study utilizing ritual and ceremony as tools for community development, inter-cultural understanding, ecological awareness and personal transformation. For the last 7 years he practiced authentic movement, somatic based mindfulness, men’s work and contemporary rites of passage with Melissa Michaels, as a leader in Surfing the Creative International Rites of Passage Youth Campsand more recently with theMen’s Leadership Alliance. He has worked with youth of color to navigate the complexities of identity in institutions of privilege and currently hosts community classrooms and conversations in Denver and Boulder to bridge the cultures of healing, art, activism, ecology and the sacred.
