Muffie Delgado Connelly

bio

Muffie Delgado Connelly (she/her) is a dance artist, movement researcher, teacher, and somatic practitioner in Portland, Oregon. Her work as a performer and choreographer has been presented across the United States at Links Hall (Chicago), Packer Schopf Gallery (Chicago), The Art Institute of Chicago, Movement Research Festival (New York), The Gibney Dance Center (New York), and in Portland at White Bird, Performance Works Northwest, and the Newmark Theater. She is the recipient of awards from the Ford Foundation (New York), Illinois Arts Council’s Community Arts Assistance Program, and the Regional Arts and Culture Council (Portland). Internationally, Delgado Connelly has performed in Tahni Holt’s Sensation/Disorientation in Plodiv, Bulgaria as part of Spotlight: USA; conducted movement research in Harare, Zimbabwe and in the Andes mountains of Chile; and presented her film Induction Ceremony at The Digital Institute for Early Parenthood in the United Kingdom.

She has won residencies at NEW Expressive works (Portland), Ponderosa (Germany), and Happy Dog Performance Gallery (Chicago). She has many longstanding artistic collaborations, including those with Tahni Holt, Annie Novotny, Leslie Cuyjet and Ruth Nelson. In her somatic practice, Delgado Connelly is a certified GYROTONIC® Trainer and movement researcher. Delgado Connelly’s movement work is part of her activist practice, and in both arenas she is informed by her identity as a Chicago-born xicana mother. She believes in dance and body work as strategies for fostering resilience and resistance, and seeks to make dance and engage in somatic practices that address personal and community needs. Delgado Connelly’s work holds space for the silenced and disappeared while demonstrating the infinite and expanding complexities of the biracial and the steadfast invincibility of the Indigenous Native American mother. Delgado Connelly is currently immersed in an extensive dance research process, Vuelve: en la choncha de tu madre, a project that explores relational lineages and survivor resilience of Indigenous peoples of Central Mexico. She is a yearly guest teacher at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Delgado Connelly is one of five artistic leaders of Portland, Oregon dance center FLOCK.

artist statement

I dance. I choreograph. I make movement with bodies in space. I make performances for audiences, I research movement through an anthropological lens, and I engage in longstanding rich collaborations with fellow artists. I am a dance artist and activist who believes with ferocity in the potential of the body to illuminate truths.

My work has always danced around a tree of health, spirituality and justice. As a fat, indigenous mother in a highly colonialized field, my work carves space for practices and people that challenge white supremacy and institutional traditions. Through dance research and practice, I use movement and collaboration to develop radical strategies for inclusion. I believe dance is connected directly to liberation and can be an antidote and source of hope and survival.

My work is a curative strategy for fostering resilience and infinite growth. I am particularly drawn to exuberance as a tactic for existence. My art grapples with the complexities of being born bi-racial, and also draws on this experience as a way to speak and work with both white and BIPOC artists and audiences in service of understanding and radical justice. My work demands acknowledgement of intersectional realities as a practice of amplifying the disqualified, erased, silenced, and disappeared; I believe that the body—from cells to mind to limbs—is the site of revolutionary possibility in terms of telling stories and re-envisioning what this world might be.

bodywork statement

I am a certified GYROTONIC® instructor and specialize in working with clients to find sweetness and strength in their bodies. I became a Certified GYROTONIC® Trainer in 2008, under the mentorship of Specialized Master Trainer Debra Rose. In 2013, I became a certified GYROKINESIS® trainer as well. Over the years I have achieved multiple GYROTONIC® specialized equipment certifications including The Archway, the Jump Stretch Board, and the Leg Extension Unit.  In 2017, I became a GYROTONIC® Pre Trainer and now lead teacher trainings in the GYROTONIC® Method. Get information on upcoming GYROTONIC® Pre-training courses here.

I bring over 30 years of experience as a choreographer, dancer, and educator to my practice. I have taught movement lessons in places such as the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, Alonzo Kings Lines Ballet Dance Center, The Chicago Academy for the Arts, The School at the Art Institute of Chicago and FLOCK Dance Center.  I have a private practice based out of Portland, Oregon.

I came to GYROTONIC® after an accumulation of injuries from 20 years of intensive dance training and performance including surgeries, therapies and study in other mind/body systems. All the while, I struggled with disassociation and an ability to find comfort and peace in my body. I found that the pleasure in the movement-based approach of the GYROTONIC EXPANSION SYSTEM® was unique in its ability to bring me out of pain and restore my sense of resilient vitality.

GYROTONIC restored my relationship with my most valuable natural resource, my body. I know first hand the devastating effect that injury, illness, and trauma can have in disconnecting our bodies from our greatest support systems, ourselves.  I want to help people feel again. I want to assist people in learning to trust their bodies and to know how to honor and care for them. The days of “no pain, no gain” are over. I invite EVERY BODY to join me in a crusade to feel the pleasure-filled wonder and gift that can be our bodies. To revel in the safe, pleasurable, and resilient experience that can be your forever home, you.