Please Wait a Moment
X
Events Love Your Body Week Discussion Prompts/Movement Activities Movement Activities

Movement Activities

Movement Activity Option 1: Sonya Renee Taylor - New 2026

Materials: quotes, paper, markers, tape

We will begin our LYBW activity today with some quotes by Sonya Renee Taylor. Sonya is an activist and the author of the book The Body Is Not an Apology. She is an advocate for radical self-love and spends her time educating and inspiring others to love their body.

Quotes:

“How we value and honor our own bodies impacts how we value and honor the bodies of others.”

“It is through our own transformed relationship with our bodies that we become champions for other bodies on the planet”

-Sonya Renee Taylor

It may be helpful to write these quotes on the white board, or large on paper with marker so that dancers can read them more easily. Have dancers put themselves into groups based on which quote they connect to more. There can be more than one group per quote. Ask groups to create short pieces of choreography inspired by the quotes and share them with/perform them for the rest of the class. The teacher can provide music, or allow dancers to choose their own.

After watching each other's work, break dancers into smaller groups or partners to discuss the following questions:

  1. How can you “value and honor” your body?
  2. One way to love our bodies is by practicing self-care. What does the term self-care mean to you? How does it relate to building a body-positive community?
  3. How can we use self-care to improve our relationship with our body? What gets in the way of practicing self-care?
  4. How can we become “champions” for other bodies?
  5. What from these themes and ideas did you see reflected in the choreography projects you watched?

Have dancers come back together as a group and share if they feel comfortable.

To post on the mirror, please write a goal about how you will care for your own body, or about how you will honor and respect the bodies of others. This statement could start with “I will take care of myself by...”, or however you would like to frame it.

Begin by having dancers choose one word that describes their body (e.g. strong, powerful, changing, mine),   and post their “my body is...” statement on the mirror. 
 
Next, ask dancers to craft a phrase inspired by that word and by their body.
 
Options for complexity vary based on age/level (share phrase work with class as it is, or could continue to develop with choreographic tools, put in combination with classmates’ work, etc.). 

 

This exercise asks for a great deal of vulnerability, and best serves advanced students that are comfortable with improvisation.  Mary has used this exercise yearly for nearly a decade, and has consistently seen it to be one of the most impactful LYBW experiences for many teens. 

Start with some reflective journaling - ask dancers to write about a favorite body part, as well as a least favorite. Two groups take turns improvising for one another.  For the first round, dancers initiate movement  from their favorite body part.  For the second, they initiate movement from their least favorite.  Finally, dancers initiate movement from both.

Allow time for reflection and conversation, facilitating support and community. Dancers are invited to share about their own experience, and/or about the experience of watching their classmates move through this exercise.  In the past, we have not included any mirror posting as a part of this activity.  We often use it at the end of the week when the mirrors are already very full of positive statements, so rather we use this experience to reflect on what it is like to dance without the mirror. During this discussion time, often what comes up is how much beauty dancers see in one another, even when watching their peers move from their least favorite body part. 

 

This activity can be equally interesting and powerful with dancers that know each other well, or those that don’t. 

Have dancers partner up. One dancer improvises while the other observes. Then, the watching partner “reflects” back the beauty that they saw in their partner through movement. This may look like repeating specific steps or actions they saw, or may just embody tone or quality. Switch roles and repeat. This exercise could also be used to generate choreography.