Dr Hannah McClure

Hannah works with Sufism, Healing, Dance and Performance.  Her medicine rests in a deep call toward peace processes at personal and collective levels.  Her own journey in finding peace began with Dance, where she learned to focus, trust her body, and expand her dreams. After many years working in contemporary dance choreography, professional performance, and somatics, Hannah became a licensed therapist and Healer.  Her practice in the U.S. focused particularly on women’s health and women’s issues, bereavement, and contacting the inner layers of the self through movement.  It was during her sessions with clients that her first shamanic journeys spontaneously began to happen.

Hannah holds a BFA in Dance from SUNY Brockport, an MA in Dance Anthropology from Roehampton University, and a PhD in Dance: Practice as Research from The University of East London.  She earned her Registered Polarity Practitioner status, a 700 hour graduate level training in anatomy, bodywork, counselling, yoga and nutrition, from Lotus Blossom Wellness and The Tree of Life Centre in North Carolina.  She is a certified Relaxation Practitioner and Reiki Healer.

She is a fellow the Higher Education Academy and is personally licensed and insured for healing, and the teaching and training of practitioners. She maintains professional membership in The UK Polarity Therapy Association, The International Federation of Theatre Researchers and the International Society of Religion, Literature, and Culture.   In Professional Performance Hannah worked first under Shen Wei Dance Arts and later with her own company, Open Air Dance.  Over 11 years Open Air Dance produced 7 seasons of work as well as one tour and many smaller pieces for shared performance.  Influences on her artistic work stem from a deep engagement with Limon and Release techniques, an ever evolving dialogue with Butoh, Sufism and especially whirling, trance and healing.   Hannah’s Research focuses on intersections of the heart, Sufism and arts practice. Her doctorate on the Mevlevi  was both ethnographic and practice based, working through arts practice to understand her own initiatory journey.  Considerations of time, place, politics and method open the discourse to a range of Sufi foci and notions of arts making as sacred and integral to spiritual development. Interests include somatic practice, methods of embodiment, ways of knowing, the feminine dimensions of religion, and continuums of peace and human sustainability.

Inspirations:

Hannah is inspired by the human condition, life, nature and her family.  For Hannah, there is no dance where there is not the yearning of the heart for home.  Everything is a dance.