FACILITATION TEAM
Wren LaFeet
Cocréa Founder and Retreat Lead Facilitator
Wren’s eclectic movement style has largely informed fusion as an emergent dance form free of any fixed aesthetic. Fueled by his curiosity in spirituality, the body, global community, the natural world and relationships, and guided by his devotion to love and the idea of the Beloved, partner dance has served as the vehicle for his inquiry and understanding. He has inspired the formation of multiple fusion dance communities on the west coast of North America, and teaches partner dance internationally as a practice for mindful, authentic living.
His facilitation encourages individuals to create themselves as safer spaces for the embodiment of the full range of human expression. Promoting dance as medicine, spirituality and salve for our modern ailments of disconnection and alienation, his practice insists we trust our bodies with the music and our partner to catalyze elevating our whole being into higher vibrational states.
Working with the holographic overview of humanity provided by the Gene Keys and combining its contemplative practice with his own somatic exploration and intuitive listening through the body, as well as his study of human conflict through theater, Wren empowers individuals and communities to dance with joy, helps free insights locked in the body, coaches people to more easily access their sensuality and even on privileged occasion supports the healing of chronic disease. Wren’s deepest desire is to guide people into right relationship with the moment; to listen and respond appropriately to what is being called for in service to the highest possible good.
Usha Rose
Guest Facilitator - Somatic Sex, Intimacy, and Relationship Coach
Usha Rose is a Somatic Sex, Intimacy, and Relationship Coach, Workshop Facilitator, Dance and Yoga Teacher, and Licensed Massage Therapist. She is trained in the Somatica™ Method of Sex and Relationship Coaching and is a graduate of the International School of Temple Arts Practitioner Training. She also spent three years studying closely with Sonika Tinker and Christian Pederson in the LoveWorks Relationship Training Mastery Program, including two years in the Assistant and Leadership Program.
She is the co-founder of Foothills Fusion Dance, a weekly, social dance in Grass Valley, CA and co-founder of Convergence, an annual Ecstatic and Fusion dance mini-festival in Northern California. She is also the Production Manager and Facilitator for Cocréa, a mindful partner dance company that produces transformational dance retreats and workshops around the globe.
Usha discovered the conscious dance community in 2010 when she started attending Ecstatic Dance Oakland. Since then she has studied SoulMotion™ with Vinn Marti and Zuza Engler, completed the JourneyDance™ Teacher Training with Toni Bergins and continues to be inspired by the many teachings of Contact Improv and 5Rhythms™.
She took her first partner dance class (Salsa) in 2005, although she was first introduced to partner dancing as a young child in her living room with her grandmother who was an avid Lindy Hop dancer. It was around 2010 when Usha discovered Blues dancing, and soon thereafter fell in love with Fusion dancing. She has studied several other partner dance forms including Salsa, Tango, Swing and Zouk, to name a few. In addition to teaching locally, she has taught dance at several events around the country including Enchanted Forest Gathering, Jumpsuit Family Gathering and Northern California Dance Camp.
Odessa Avianna Perez
Guest Facilitator and Trauma-Informed Somatic Educator
Odessa Avianna Perez is a trauma-informed somatic psychotherapist, embodiment and social justice educator who helps individuals and groups heal from fragmentation and remember agency, magic, and belonging.
Odessa is a cis gender, able-bodied, biracial white-presenting latina currently residing in Kumeyaay territory – what is now known as San Diego, CA. She holds an MA in Somatic Psychology from California Institute of Integral Studies and triple bachelor degrees in Dance, Theater Arts, and Sociology from Rutgers University. She is a ThetaHealing practitioner and instructor, and has a background in massage and bodywork. She has over 2 decades of movement and dance performance experience, and has been practicing and teaching Contact Improvisation as a form of self inquiry and relationship alchemy for over ten years.
Odessa is deeply curious about the intersection of personal and collective trauma, collective nervous system states and expression, and how we can use somatics to integrate our trauma for better relationship, community and planet. She has facilitated workshops at dozens of retreats and festivals up and down the west coast using somatics, movement, and contact improvisation as the platform through which to explore safety, relationship, building capacity for discomfort, interdependence and inclusion.
In her psychotherapeutic private practice, she weaves somatics, movement, interpersonal neurobiology, polyvagal theory, attachment work, and social and racial justice frameworks.
With spiritual lineage in western Sufism and a background in ThetaHealing, she invites the mystical and metaphysical perspective, while remaining grounded in the reality of this planet and the structures and power dynamics we find ourselves in.
Taj Richards
Yoga Teacher
FEATURED MUSIC ARTISTS
Scott Nice
In 2016 Jumpsuit Records released Scott’s freshman album ‘All the Wild Creatures’ and in 2017 the follow up EP ‘One Under the Sun’. In 2018 he released his sophomore LP ’A People Called Home’ and 2019 saw the release of Scott’s first remix album comprised of 11 producers including El Buho, Uji, Volo and more. Scott has been a featured producer and remixer on many releases including Ayla Nereo, Wildlight, Volo, Equanimous, DJ Taz Rashid and The Polish Ambassador albums.
Jonas Ketterle
Ora Cacao Founder
Jonas crafts unsweetened ceremonial grade cacao that is used in cacao ceremonies around the world. After first encountering sipping chocolate in Oaxaca Mexico in 2012, Jonas founded the bean to bar dark chocolate company, Firefly Chocolate, in 2014, with the mission of inspiring awe and wonder through cacao. Always with a focus on health, he initially launched 85% dark chocolate in a variety of flavors, sweetened with low glycemic coconut sugar. He also pioneered a bio-regional wild harvested chocolate bar, celebrating bay nuts, a food used by the native peoples of the SF Bay Area.
Sponsored by Ora Cacao
We are so thrilled to be joined by Ora Cacao on this exquisite journey.
Ora’s ethos and business model around cacao and its incredible properties are in perfect alignment with our own and we’re honored to get to journey through dance with this beautiful medicine.
“Cacao is not a commodity. It belongs not in the candy aisle, but in the holistic medicine aisle. It is time for a new way of producing chocolate that is a reflection of humanity’s highest potential of stewarding all life on Earth. This is why people choose cacao ceremony: they desire to know that the chocolate they so enjoy creates thriving for the ecosystems in which it grows, and for the people and communities who grow it. Our regenerative model is based on respect, true relationship and stewardship, for only with this as a foundation can cacao’s true medicine be realized.”