ABOUT/BIO
Dody DiSanto is a teacher, performer, director, movement specialist, manual therapist and licensed acupuncturist. She has nurtured a healthy practice in bodywork since 1992, while maintaining a vital career teaching theatre. Dody was trained in Paris, holding an esteemed position as a teaching protégé of the late Jacques Lecoq whose teachings she carries on at the Center for Movement Theatre. She has been on the faculty of the Shakespeare Theatre Company Academy at the George Washington University teaching mask and clown for over 20 years, and has served as guest teacher for Cirque du Soleil and at the Yale School of Drama. Dody is the original creator of the world-renowned live music venue, the 9:30 Club, which she owned and managed from 1980-87.
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APPROACH
My training in the performing arts took place in Paris in the 70’s under Jacques Lecoq, who taught a physical approach to theater of creation. I also studied with Étienne Decroux and took classes at the École Nationale du Cirque under the direction of Annie Fratellini.
My pedagogy is not a technique, but rather an approach to mastery, training the actor’s body to be an open and resonant instrument available to reflect human behavior through the dynamics of space, force, and rhythm. My classroom opens a field of honesty, an entryway into a world of endless nourishment, knowledge, and reflection. A world where the known meets the unknown. A permeable membrane through which information breathes in both directions. Together, we will train your bodies to be instruments of poetry by supporting your physical aptitude, cellular wisdom, and muscular creativity.
We are vertical structures on a horizontal journey to find a state of equilibrium.
A lifelong project of both getting ourselves out of our own way, as well as finding the compass points of understanding that guide us to balance, awareness and ultimate health, both in life and our profession.
These beliefs bind the knowledge in our sinews with the urges in our hearts, manifesting traction through the age-old desire to play.