Fishbowl Conversations
Histories & Futures of CI in the Bay Area Community
with miniWCCI Teachers + Special Guests
Carol Swann, Byron Brown, Charles Campbell!
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Byron Brown has always loved dynamic, creative movement of the body, the mind, and the soul. He was a founding member of Mangrove, a men’s contact dance collective in the late 1970s. He toured, taught and performed in the US and Canada until the company broke up in 1980. He also enjoyed traveling, teaching and performing on his own while meeting other contact practitioners at jams and studios in the Bay Area and abroad. He was a member of the original Contraband with Sara Shelton Mann in the early 1980s before slowly shifting his focus to desktop publishing and later to spiritual work in the Diamond Approach. For the last 40 years he has been deeply committed to sharing the wisdom and liberation of the DA inner work as a Ridhwan teacher in the US and Europe. He wrote a book titled Soul without Shame in 1999 about working with the inner critic as a step toward inner freedom.

 
Carol Swann is a teacher, private practitioner, facilitator, co-director, performer and activist. Her work is focused on contributing to a more socially just and inter-connected world. She has been teaching voice, somatics (movement re-patterning & psychology), Alexander Technique, Authentic Movement, Contact Improvisation & Performance Improvisation for 45 years in the United States, Latin America, Europe, Israel and Russia. She is Co-Founder (with Martha Eddy) & Director of Moving On Center, School of Participatory Arts and Somatic Education  which links somatics and the performing arts for social change (1994-present). She is a registered movement therapist/educator (RSMT, RSME) with a private practice in Somatic Psychology (blending Hakomi, Somatic Experiencing & Process Work) and the Alexander Technique. She is a group process & conflict facilitator and weaves her extensive studies and practices in Social Somatics, Body-Mind Centering and Laban/Bartenieff into all of her work. Her work is influenced by her parents Bob and Marj Swann, Steve Paxton, Bonnie Cohen, Arnold Mindell, Ron Kurtz, Roy Hart Theatre, Meredith Monk, Balkan Singing, all her other teachers (including students & clients), nature, and the history and practice of liberatory politics. 
Carol is currently on a long term healing sabbatical from a very serious illness. 
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Charles Campbell
I took my first dance class, by accident, in high school. I got hooked. After dropping out of college and spending 6 months in NY, I moved to San Francisco in 1974. It was an incredibly fertile arts scene in the Bay Area in the 70s. I thrived. Contact Improv opened up whole new possibilities in dance. In 1977 I joined Mangrove, with wonderful opportunities to teach and perform in many places. Tai Chi with Peter Ralston, and Skinner Releasing Technique with Robert Davidson deeply informed my moving then, and still do. I often wonder: what would the world be like if politicians were required to do contact?