Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:02
Has A Single Story Changed Your Life? Kat Mills Martin, filmmaker, is joining in #AskSwell
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Kat is an extraordinarily prolific filmmaker, as well as somebody who just is committed to mentoring people in something she calls embodied storytelling, and she'll tell us more about that. But I wanted Kat to join us in this conversation about self expression, about sourcing your own shifts and changes by being in the story world and how you can get incredible pleasure from this
I grew up performing in the theater, and so I had a lot of confidence as an actor and as a dancer and a singer, but I didn't really have a lot of confidence as a filmmaker. And I took my first film class, actually, in high school. It was called Fiction and Film, and this was the first time I started to think about work as a director, to think about composition and tone and all of the aspects of filmmaking
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 2:03
And right now when you talk about this new way of of I forget what you called it, the storytelling, I'm not looking at your website, but when you teach storytelling, it seems like you are committed to making it as what's the word? Accessible as possible. So can you give us a little bit of a window into how you teach somatic storytelling, how you bring the body into the experience?
And so the more that we can get in touch with what is actually happening in our body and in our nervous system, moment to moment, the story that we're telling, we get to close that gap a little. We get to show up in a more authentic way. So this type of work is not only relevant to artists. I mean, I really think everyone is deeply, deeply creative and has that gem of wisdom, of artistic wisdom within them
Rocío (Ro) Christensen
@rocio · 2:59
Connecting with your body, connecting with your surroundings, connecting with others. I'm so excited. And it also reminds me a bit of a class that I took in college my last semester called Personal Documentary. And we were supposed to make these short documentary films about different topics about ourselves every week
Deborah Pardes
@DBPardes · 1:29
Hey, Ro, thank you for this reply and Kat for creating these spaces where we can explore what embodiment really means. And I know you're sort of inviting people to look at personal stories as a way to do it, personal inquiry, but to Rose point, there's that instinct. We have to project it out into the world because we're artists. So it's that timing
Rocío (Ro) Christensen
@rocio · 1:16
I would love to hear kat's response to this, but I can just quickly say I'm kind of going through that now. I've been performing this semi autobiographical monologue for the past two months and kind of working on it, and it had been something that a piece that I'd written throughout a year. Um, and then I found myself kind of editing it in a way that had turned into a conversation, kind of
Therapy Health
@Shmookie · 1:16
You. Wow, that was beautiful. I think what I really liked the most was realizing the synthesis of the art as a science and as the creative side of yourself. Also, in your prose, you hear how you see how life happens and how drama helped and how you discovered your body in drama, and you would never have known it had you not had those experiences. And I think that's really the beauty of it
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