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Tracy has since danced with thousands of people, in community workshops, school residencies, performances and celebrations. In 1989, she founded Pendium, a multi-disciplinary company featuring poetry, storytelling, movement and dance experienced through a variety of programs and videos. She has completed over 70 residencies in schools and colleges throughout New Hampshire, Vermont and Montana. Tracy is an instructor for Very Special Arts Vermont, and is on the Vermont Council on the Arts Touring register and the Arts in Education/Communities roster for Vermont and New Hampshire. She also works as a volunteer in domestic violence and sexual assault counseling. Working in schools has given Tracy ample opportunity to observe behavior among young people that sets up lifelong patterns. These include relationship issues, romantic or otherwise. Tracy has found pre-teens and teens to be hungering for expressive arts programming. Lecturing to them about teen dating and violence is less effective than dramatizing stories for them, and inviting them to explore their own responses within structured activities designed to enlighten as well as foster expression. To meet that need, Tracy developed SafeArt, a program designed to create confidence in relationship choices through understanding dating violence, domestic violence, and sexual assault via prevention, intervention and expressive arts programming, which she offers to middle and high schools, colleges, domestic violence networks and community organizations. In her private practice, she incorporates a method of mindful moving called Tracing that she developed during 25 years of practice, teaching and observation. Tracing is a creative process that engages the complete somatic instrument- body and voice - and may embrace other forms such as music, song, writing, poetry, stories, and drawing. Each session begins with a concept that directs and shapes the movement and is tailored to suit a particular group or individual. It is about moving, about flowing between the layers we trace, about discovery, and about a balanced and energized wellness. A longtime weaver and fiber artist, Tracy balances fiber work and dance by creating sets and costumes for her performances. Many sedentary hours at the loom led her to develop breathing, centering, stretching and strengthening methods to alleviate tension and produce her first video, Bodywork for Weavers & Fiber Artists. Feedback from computer-using weavers and subsequent research paved the way for her most recent video, geared toward computer-based professionals, Beyond Ergonomics: Solutions to CyberStress. In her solo work, Tracy partners the poet, dancer and musician within herself. Rather than working alone, she describes it as " playing with the world around me, with imagined people, with real landscape, with seasons. The earth and its environment are my closest collaborators." Her dances are personal mythologies, based upon the premise that we elevate our stories to personal myth via artforms. When shared, response is universal, as primal memory holds traces of the same stories. There are moments of mirth, of wild joy and sorrow, and through it all, of inevitable movement.
"The dancer is traditionally
silent. Tracy Penfield explodes that tradition with a
shocking and delightful repertoire of sung and spoken
words and non-words, grunts and groans, both improvised
and plotted, which become an integral part of her dance.
In an artform too often controlled by the past, Tracy
Penfield is doing something genuinely new."
"Tracy's work is special. She
creates dances that evoke our common genius as human
beings… creatures occasionally capable of
transformation."
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