Valerie Green/Dance Entropy kicked off 2023 with a 6-part podcast series hosted by Podcast Business Networks’ Steve Harper. The series took listeners through the entire history of Dance Entropy and described the plethora of programming Dance Entropy offers the Queens and greater New York communities.
The first episode gave listeners a general outline of the wide-ranging programming VG/DE offers. Steve began by asking Valerie about her favorite works, her technique class “Dance Your Frame,” and movement healing. Valerie discussed her upbringing and relationship to dance, how she found dance in college at University of Wisconsin Madison, and her journey moving to New York. When discussing her studies with Erik Hawkins, she noted how she always had the urge to create her own work. After 28 years in the field, Green’s advice to young dancers is to “just keep at it and not care what anybody else says.”
The following episodes through the next two months included discussions about Green’s journey of creating Skimming the Surface and Adult Support Group, including her four-year training in Core Energetics, and how both have helped hundreds of people from all backgrounds. The point that kept resonating between Steve and Valerie was that movement heals, and that anyone can learn from being present in their body. The fourth episode spoke about home and identity, and how those definitions informed her newest full length work, HOME, in collaboration with Maria Naidu (Sweden), Ashley Lobo (India), Souleymane Badolo (Burkina Faso), Sandra Paola López Ramírez (Colombia), and Bassam Abou Diab (Lebanon).
The final episode took Steve through a small experiential, led by Valerie, in order to illustrate how grounding and choice can inform a person, and to share more about how her embodied movement programming, which include Skimming the Surface, Adult Support Group, and 1 on 1 sessions, use the body, mind, and spirit to unlock trapped emotions.
The series was a great way to reflect on the expansive history of Valerie Green’s work over the last 25 years, and how courageous it is to lead a company through thick and thin for two and a half decades. In reflecting on the experience, Green remarked “I enjoyed the opportunity to reflect on Dance Entropy’s history and how the organization and my work keep expanding and evolving in new directions organically through the years.”
The podcasts are available to listen to until January of 2024, and offer deep insight into the inner workings of Dance Entropy.