about

Responsive Body is a social movement, body liberation practice, and body-based therapy founded and created by holly johnston. Responsive Body acts as a biodynamic ecology of support for body-based resiliency, social connection, personal, and professional development. The roots of Responsive Body are grounded in holly’s foundations as a creative, artist, choreographer, performer, educator, and body-based learner. These roots have grown into a vision that sees the potential and brilliance of incorporating body-based technologies for knowledge building, sharing, and communication to create human(e) systems for performance, production, and creativity.

As a social movement, Responsive Body holds an actively anti-racist, ecological, social justice and equity driven lens through which we believe in the resiliency, capacity, and wisdom of all bodies. Responsive Body recognizes legacies of oppression and trauma and seeks to honor the multitude of ways that bodies grow, adapt, and transform in order to not only survive, but to thrive. Responsive Body pedagogy encourages learning that is critical, body-based, and rooted in the power of lived experience. Teaching and learning through this framework offers that information emerging through and from the body is just as valuable as information emerging from the mind. This pedagogical approach places learning and knowledge in the hands of all.

As a body liberation practice, Responsive Body fully trusts the body’s intelligence, seeing the entirety of the person and their experience, and aims to be responsive to where the body is at the moment. While creating systems that strengthen one’s agency and bodily autonomy, Responsive Body helps participants to come into a sense of their intuitive understanding of their bodies, health, and wellness. Responsive Body practices highlight and negotiate systems of oppression that have tried to suppress continued ways of listening to, understanding, and fully expressing the body’s innate wisdom. Together, we get curious about what truly human(e) ways of being are; lives that offer time for creativity, pleasure, and rest without pressure - and create networks of mutual support to bring that reality to fruition.

As a body-based therapy, Responsive Body teaches people how to access the body’s capacity for healing physical and emotional trauma, and for transforming patterns of injury and stress into expressions of vibrancy and wellness. The work is simultaneously therapeutic and liberating, it is both passion/pleasure but also critical thinking, it is healing and asks for the rigor that transforms passion into social change. RB's approach deepens relationships to the body that enhance learning, autonomy, and creative action. Utilizing principles from Biodynamic Craniosacral Therapy, Polarity Therapy, and Dance as Embodiment, Responsive Body leads people through guided movement, dialogue, and body-to-body work. Responsive Body teaches new ways of listening to and understanding the body’s innate wisdom that white supremacy and capitalism have attempted to drown out.