02/01/2026
🪨🌊Groundswells begins this week! Drop-ins are welcome. Sign up online for a single class or 4-classes to receive discount options. Bring a notebook and curiosity!
Groundswells - Rotating Topics for Emergent Dance
Tuesdays 7:00 - 8:30 PM
at the dojo
Starts February 3rd, ends TBD
💡🕯️Module 1 - Intelligence - that which cannot be artificial
🐚 Through dance improvisation, multi-media sensory experiments, and conversation, we’ll allow our minds to permeate our bodies and the space between us and all beings.
🕸️ Inspired by the more-than-human world—animals, plants, fungi &&—we’ll reclaim our ways of thinking from mechanical, industrial, and algorithmic structures. We’ll draw new lines for the boundaries of our minds and redefine intelligence.
Some experience in any type of dance improvisation is recommended.
Not a heady person? Looking for an outlet for existential concerns? Feel stuck in your head? Confused about what this is but want structures for movement improvisation?
This space welcomes you.
10/27/2025
Spontaneously decided to do something a little different this week.
I enjoy leading a good dance trance (guided, durational improvisation, sometimes with moments of choreography). Often they have intentions we’re holding, so this time they will be with the themes of the season—honoring ancestors and the thinning veil.
Come for an experimental, slightly woo, lil bit spooky good time!!
foundDANCE Beyond the Veil
Halloween/Samhain themed all-levels contemporary dance & improvisation trance
Wednesday, October 29th 6:30-8pm
At the Aikido Peace Education Center
$20 Drop-in Cash or Card
09/29/2025
UNTETHERED - Falling (up) with somatic awareness, technique, and improvisation.
With Carmen Serber and Soleil Chappelle
This coming Saturday, October 4th 1-5:30pm
At the Aikido Peace Education Center
🍂 Head, eyes, throat, heart, diaphragm, solar plexus, pelvis, limbs and feet. We dance the relationship to gravity, allowing all those parts of us to fall separately, together and sequentially. Nuanced organization of tone, incremental fall, gigantic fall. Falling in love. Falling as a continuous source of creating motion – a felt sense of body falling through space as dancing. Untethered. One fall becomes the seed of the next. Our senses turned inward and outward. We move at the speed of trust falling together as a community of dancers.
Sign up at bodyswells.com/classes
06/06/2025
The most special testimonial from . I love how they use their drawings to illustrate body experiences that exist beyond words. 🤍
You can find out more about craniosacral therapy and the bodywork I offer on my website.
And if you’re a client, I could use some Google reviews—if you feel inclined to give me all the stars 💫 More people have been finding me through internet searches lately, so I figure that would be a good thing to have! Search Body Swells Craniosacral & Massage on Google Maps and you should find me. 👐
🫧🫧🫧
05/09/2025
You are cordially invited to Bellingham’s most experimental, arty, cerebral, and somatic performance salon! A space for the individual and the collective. Sharing confidence and the vulnerable, being witnessed and cared for by the community.
🪟Dojo Salon No.2 🪟
Friday, May 23
7pm
Aikido Peace Education Center
1101 N State St (upstairs, ring bell)
Donation welcome at the door
Featuring cultivated and spontaneous performances 🔥
Tensile by Bonnie Smerdon + Collaborators
Kitty & the Public Toilet by Reve Shannon
We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik with Soleil Chappelle
Performances will be followed by community discussion and tea ☕️
Hosted and curated by Carmen Serber and Soleil Chappelle
In light of the massive blow dealt to arts communities across the country via the NEA rescinding promised funding, I invite you to show up for grassroots art makers.
Now is the time to come together to celebrate artists. To have a space to talk and process and roll around after watching raw performance. To be in community with artists, as artists, for artists.
Art is never apolitical. They will keep trying to control what we create—but we will rise up from below, composted and fertile. We need small art, big art, in-between interstitial web-maker art. Today and always.
03/11/2025
Bellingham has a brand new dance newsletter! Receive monthly updates on adult dance classes, performances, opportunities, and community highlights.
The dance web is woven by Soleil Chappelle with community-sourced information. Please share with your people, submit your events, and send out calls for connection!
🌐🤸🕸️
Submission deadline for the April edition is Tuesday, March 18. Email [email protected] to submit.
Go to BellinghamDanceWeb.Substack.com to subscribe!
Use to bring my (Soleil’s) attention to dance happenings in Bellingham!
02/20/2025
Can we let ourselves be organic material with simple needs?
New piece is live!
Exciting new things to share alongside a simple framework for checking in with yourself.
01/22/2025
🕯️🔥❄️🔥🕯️
If you’d like to stay in connection with me and my work, make sure you’re on my email list! Long form works best for my Gemini word rivers.
In this latest newsletter I share about:
🔥 Performance this Friday at Fire & Story
❄️ My ancestral journey to the Sami Winter Market in 2019
👐 New bodywork descriptions
🦭 foundDANCE in February
10/29/2024
Popping in for no other reason than to remind you that this cozy, heated, memory foam place exists for you to put everything down for a moment and unwind.
It’s a lot out there, folks. I’m here when you need. 👐
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10/29/2024
Movement for every moment.
The next foundDANCE series begins Wednesday, November 6.
4-Week Series on Foundations in Contemporary Dance. All levels welcome.
(No class Nov 27)
See you on the dance floor to be with our bodies and each other in this moment again and again and again. Moving with depth and levity.
Learn more and register on my website under “in person classes” and at bhamrep.org/classes.
Photo by Sarah Sakurazawa.
10/26/2024
“around”
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presented by
Nov 8-16
I am very excited to present my new dance work in collaboration with ’s incredible forms: Chromatic Gestures. Created with the dancers through deep play.
I will also be performing “breathing deep on a freezing beach” with my dear , choreographed by , inspired by sound and text by .
Come around!
10/01/2024
Finally made physical an idea I’ve had for awhile!
Did you know that craniosacral sessions ✨continue✨ for 24-48hrs after you get off the table? The session activates an internal and personal unwinding process that your body continues on its own! 🪼🪸
Like most people, as soon as my session is over, I’m right back in the hubbub of life and sometime forget that the care I give my body during this time matters.
So I made these little cards to remind my clients of the simple resources they have available to them during this time. They can put it on their desk or fridge and write reflections from the session on the back!
Truly anytime is a good time to remember to hydrate, float, ground, reflect, and connect!