When Movement Becomes Medicine

An interview with Arianne MacBean on The Dancepreneuring Studio

Session Summary

In this session of The DancePreneuring Studio, we explore how movement, memory, and the wisdom of the body can become portals to authentic selfhood with dance artist, somatic psychotherapist, and author Arianne MacBean. Rooted in a rich background of community-based dance theater and deep clinical training, Arianne shares how she guides clients and communities to “swim through the muck” of grief, anger, and loss through the sensations of the body. She also talks about her upcoming somatic journal, Tough Shit: The Angry Woman’s Guide to Embodying Change, and why anger can be a powerful doorway to true self when met with compassion and curiosity.

A Few Key Takeaways

In this session, you’ll learn:

• How Arianne uses body sensations as an access point to get close to the psyche, helping clients move through grief, heartbreak, and shadow material toward true self.

• Why her work with The Big Show Co. and long-term projects with veterans and women in recovery revealed that community dance theater was doing real healing work long before she formally trained as a therapist.

• A fresh, somatic way to approach ballet and technique class—slowing down, closing the eyes, and letting the body lead plies, tendus, and relevés from lived sensation rather than only aesthetics.

• How ancestry, myth, archetype, and her namesake Ariadne inform her idea of “liminal imminence,” a moving, gender-fluid sense of the divine within the dancing body.

• What it means to be a “wounded healer” navigating her mother’s death, midlife grad school, and a lifelong devotion to excavating the feminine psyche.

• How women’s somatic circles, ritual, drawing, and movement can create multi-generational spaces where things “get real pretty quick” and deep resourcing in the body becomes possible.

• Simple somatic practices anyone can use—like noticing how you’re sitting, tracking a “rock in your shoe” concern into the body, or even clenching and releasing a fist—to honor emotions instead of bypassing them.

Featured Links and Credits

• Synergy Somatic Psychotherapy (Arianne’s practice)

• Journal – Tough Shit: The Angry Woman’s Guide to Embodying Change
  A self-reflection and somatic journal that uses anger as the starting point to trace “negative” emotions like fear, sadness, and hurt back to true self, with writing prompts paired with somatic exercises.

• Publisher – Tehom Center Publishing

• The Big Show Co. & The Collective Memory Project
  Community-based performance initiatives working with veterans through memory-writing and movement workshops, culminating in dance-theater performances that blend text, dance, and lived experience.

• Women’s Somatic Circles & Ritual Work
  Circles, retreats, and workshops where women co-create ritual, draw, move, and share in multi-generational spaces centered on the feminine, resourcing, and embodied myth.

• Forthcoming books mentioned

  • Back Pocket Therapy – “Gems from the therapy room” for humans on the go.

  • Somatics for Real Life – Accessible, subtle somatic frameworks for everyday living (no contortion or complex exercise required).