Camille Litalien MA, RSMT, RSME, E-RYT500, YACEP
Camille is a freelance Movement Artist and Somatic Movement Therapist and Educator. She has performed extensively as a dancer and as an actor throughout Europe and North America with companies such as the Royal Opera Ballet, Covent Garden, UK and The Young Vic Theatre. As a director, Camille won numerous awards, including the Discovery Prize at Mimos (France), Jerwood Circus Award, and has had works commissioned by Les Ballets de Lorraine in Nancy, France; the Art Academy of Culture in Riga, Latvia; ACT International Dance and Drama Festival in Bilbao, and Seville Dance Bienale, Spain.
While she really enjoyed the immersive creative process within professional companies, teaching grew more and more important within her own creative and experimental process. Through teaching, Camille found refreshing understandings and articulations that both inform and are informed by her creative work. In London, Camille served as Head of Movement in the BA Collaborative and Devised Theatre at the Central School of Speech and Drama -University of London, for six years. In 2015, she left a creative, challenging and inspiring faculty position at The Theatre School-DePaul University, Chicago, where she primarily taught practices of Embodiment for actors. After decades of city living and extensive touring, something had gone ‘’dry’’ inside and screamed for moisture. Drawn by the West, the lands of Open Spaces and Open skies, she felt propelled to protect the delicacy and fragility of her artistic practice and intentional life. Few months after this drastic lifestyle change, she started dancing compulsively, necessarily, just as she did when she was six years old and first discovered the magical lives that sprout when we dance; Her then buried practice slowly re-emerged from the depth of her physiological body; new creative spaces opened and EARTHBODYPLACE started its own unfolding process slowly after meeting Peter Francyk.
Since the beginning of her professional studies as a dancer in 1988, Camille has been deeply committed to her studies of Hatha Yoga and Somatic Practices. She created and directed the Yoga Studies Minor Program and Teacher Training Program at Utah State University, with the guidance and collaboration of Peter Francyk and continues to enjoy teaching dance, Michael Chekhov Technique and Hatha Yoga. She is faculty at the Michael Chekhov School, Hudson NY and with MICHA, as well as a guest dance teacher and choreographer at the United World College, NM, and a Yoga, Ayurveda and Somatic Movement Teacher at Sunrise Springs in Santa Fe, NM.
Camille was introduced to the practice of yoga as a child and pursued decade long studies within the Pashupati lineage, primarily under the guidance of Shandor Remete and Emma Balnaves. She was introduced to Tantric practices with Bairavan in the US and later on with brief immersions with Vikas Neelakandhan in Kerala. Most recently, she is enjoying an ongoing study and practice of Ayurveda and Patanjali Yoga with Peter Francyk, with whom she experienced several immersions at Aditya Ashram, under the watchful eyes of vaidyas (Ayurvedic doctors) Sathya and Suma Narayanan.
In her youth, searching tools to access refined states of consciousness, Camille participated in numerous teacher training programs and immersives with Shiva Rea, Jonathan Monks, Andrei Lappa, Elena Voyce, Annie Carpenter and later on with Rich Logan and Richard Freeman. Very influential were a couple of years’ study with Sensei John Evans in London, and his particular approach to Shadow Yoga. Yet, it is her current studies with Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen that most directly inform her approach to embodiment practices.