This is a transcript of the conversation between myself, Brandi Fleck, Host of the Human Amplified podcast and Nashville, Tenn. teaching artist, Amanda Cantrell-Roche explains how embodied storytelling heals personal trauma, fuels social-justice campaigns, and even reshapes the immigration debate.

What if your body could tell a story—and in doing so, help heal both personal and collective trauma?

I sat down with Amanda Cantrell Roche, a choreographer, writer, and somatic practitioner whose life’s work is rooted in embodied activism. Through the transformative power of dance, storytelling, and intuitive movement, Amanda helps individuals and communities reconnect with their bodies, process emotional pain, and ignite social change.

From healing stuck energy with somatic practices to using art as a tool for social justice and rewilding, Amanda reveals how movement becomes more than just physical—it becomes a force for transformation. Whether she’s guiding court-involved youth, collaborating with refugee storytellers, or creating performances that invite the audience to join in the healing, Amanda brings empathy, authenticity, and purpose to every step.

If you’ve ever felt disconnected from your body, overwhelmed by the state of the world, or unsure how creativity fits into activism, this conversation will inspire you to reclaim your inner spark—and use it to ripple healing outward into your community.

Keep scrolling to read the entire conversation. If you’d rather listen than read, you can do that here , on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or anywhere else you get your podcasts. Or, watch the YouTube video below.

Defining Humanness Through Community

Brandi Fleck:

What does being human mean to you?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

You know, I love that to you part, because human being human, that's such a vast array of people and ideas and beliefs. To me, it means not being perfect. It means to be able to access play. And it also, because I'm so community-rooted, I think of humanity. And I think of being human as being connected and empathetic and caring about people outside your immediate circle. You know, like animals kind of protect their immediate circle. They have this very small community that they live in.

[2:59] Humanity, for me, is having that heart connection to people across the world that you've never met.

Brandi Fleck:

[3:08] That's beautiful. Thank you.

Everyone, today we're welcoming Amanda Cantrell-Roche to the show.

We're going to be talking about the importance of connecting to your body and all the ways that helps, not only on an individual level, but a community and societal level. Everything from the importance of storytelling to how to minimize trauma during our current political climate.

And we're able to have this conversation because Amanda is a multimedia teaching artist, choreographer, and writer who is as enthused in guiding participants through the creative process as she is about being a maker of art. She thrives working simultaneously in multiple fields, as an arts integration teaching artist in schools and community groups, in restorative art settings with court-involved youth, as an intuitive movement writing and visual art facilitator at Art and Soul Studio, as a lead trainer for Narrative 4, and in a therapeutic setting as a somatic practitioner and adjunct faculty at on-site workshops.

[4:12] She's a narrative artist, former journalist and editor, and lifelong choreographer and writer who is recently expanding into creating short films. Amanda is the recipient of the 2022 Hermitage Artist Retreat Fellowship for Arts Education, and her choreography, Yearning to Breathe Free, was presented at the Americans for the Arts National Convention. Her ongoing creative focus is on the climate, and her upcoming project focuses on rewilding both nature as well as our relationship to the earth.

And so Amanda, welcome to the show.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Thank you, Brandi. I'm so happy to be here and be part of your beautiful, engaging podcast.

Brandi Fleck:

Oh, thank you. I'm really excited to have you here. And I can't wait to talk about what we're going to talk about. I feel like you and I have a lot in common in terms of all the different things we like to have our hands in. And so before we dive in, though, what else do you want listeners to know about who you are?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

[5:18] I think a core of who I am, even though my kids are now 25 and 23, is a mother. That was such a big part of my life for so many years, and it still is. It's just a different type of thing now.

[5:37] They're past the teenage years. It's a beautiful time to be in relationship with my kids who live near and far, my daughter Ella and my son John. And I think the other thing about me is I am just very deeply rooted in community and creating communities and connecting in different communities.

Brandi Fleck:

Yeah. Oh my gosh. I remember Ella from when she was 10 and she did an improv dance with us. It was so cool. I can't believe that she's already in her 20s.

Art as Activism

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

25. Yeah.

Brandi Fleck:

Oh my gosh.

Okay. Well, so as I just alluded to, so I've known you not only as you led an improv group that I got to be a part of in 2009, raising awareness for AIDS in Uganda, but you were also the co-founder of the Blue Moves Dance Company, which started in 1989. And I used to love watching you guys. And I became aware of that while I was at MTSU. So one of the things that has always struck me about your work is your creating awareness around social justice and even issues like rewilding nature, those things are just so important.

[6:59] Creating awareness around social justice has always been a part of your work that I've admired. And so can you tell us a little bit more about how art can be activism, or at least advocacy?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Yeah there's so many different ways to do it and for me being a journalist first before I became a teaching artist had a big impact on the way I bring words and narrative into my choreography.

[7:29] I do love art for art's sake and I think the art where we're telling personal stories is beautiful and profound, and I do that sometimes. But for me, if I'm going to live in a project and invest maybe a year thinking, reading, creating around it, I usually want it to have an activism focus. I want people to experience it and be moved, perhaps learn something, and then walk away with an action focus, because the arts are among the most powerful communicators we have. And they can touch us in ways that reading a news story or seeing a documentary can't.

[8:15] And so when you blend that power of narrative art with a specific cause, and then you have some follow-up actions or ways that you are encouraging people to maybe shift their behaviors or rethink some beliefs, perhaps, I think that is such an incredible combination.

The way I do it is having that specific narrative where there are often recorded words because you know dance can be very abstract, especially contemporary dance, and so if you want to communicate an extremely clear message, for me that needs to be with recorded or spoken words, maybe with written words if it's a film, and then pairing that with a different kind of more interpretive language of movement is a really good combination.

I feel if I'm going to invest so much time in something, to me it needs to be encouraging ways to make this world a better place, even if it's just a tiny movement in my own local community.

Brandi Fleck:

Okay, so I'm hearing you say pairing words, storytelling through words with body movement, interpretive movement that then creates action out into the community.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Yeah, yeah. A lot of times I'll do like a follow-up action step or I'll have a call to action with the piece of choreography.

[9:52] One of my favorite pieces was a little less issue-specific, but it spoke to the divine spark in every human being. And I interviewed four local activists:

One was Lindsay Krinks from Open Table Nashville. She does work with people experiencing homelessness.
Another was Sarah Sharp, who founded Artemis, a group I was in for art, women, and change-making. She did a lot of stuff with women's rights, women's issues.
Another one was Tamara Embar. And she has done all kinds of things in conflict resolution, but she specifically spoke about when she lived in Jerusalem. She's Jewish. She worked in Israeli prisons advocating for the rights of Palestinian prisoners who had their human rights violated.
And then Noong Losel is another friend who is a Tibetan refugee, and he spoke about the oppression of the Chinese government and just crushing oppression on the Tibetan people.

So what I did was I kind of interwove all of these different things, but really also they talked about their passion. What is that divine spark in you that keeps your fire burning to keep you active in this?

And then I worked with a local writer, Jen Mapes-Couture, who wrote this incredibly beautiful narrative to set up the piece that talked about the divine spark in everyone. And so at the end of the piece, we had people giving—well, they were LED lights—but candles out to the audience. And we invited them, when the dancers on stage lit their own candle, to light their own candles.

[11:50] I get emotional about this, in recognition of the divine spark inside them, that spark to, you know, live in beauty, to live in connection with other people, that spark of the divinity, and how are you going to use this to make the world a better place?

And then we ask people to actually follow up with, you know, what did you do? You know, we want to hear. What is something that you've done?

So I remember one of the people emailed and said, “I've never been personally impacted by this, but I decided to volunteer for a suicide hotline because, you know, I think I just can't imagine that loss.” And his son was in the dance, and two years ago his son passed at a very young age. And I like to think that that experience in helping others helped this man and his loss.

So you never know where the ripples are going to go.

Brandi Fleck:

Yeah, the ripples.

What I'm seeing is that you're not just inspiring the audience or the people by…they're not just spectating. They're actually involved in the project in some way. You guys pull them in so that then it then ripples out into their life. So I think that's really important. And that's a great takeaway for anyone who's trying to do something similar with art.

Now, you mentioned that dance can get kind of abstract, but I think people understand oral storytelling a little more than movement. How do you tell a story with your body? How is that even part of it?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

[13:45] You know, it's so intuitive for me because I've done it all my life. I'm trying to think how I structure it for other people that might be like a way that's clearer. For instance, there's this new project that I'm going to be doing—it's a structured improv with a cast of eight dancers. I've asked them to go do some research in a rewilded area and ask themselves some questions. And then we'll come into the studio. And, you know, one thing we might do is just talk about the topic, the story we want to tell. And sometimes it's, you know, you can just say walk and get this in your body.

[14:29] And now let's see, you know, when I say this phrase, “the lusciousness of the yard when it has been rewilded, the diversity of the levels.” And just see what that kind of inspires in your body.

And then going back and, okay, what's clear? What's dynamic? What's interesting? And then kind of piecing it together.

Another way is to make snapshots. You know, I'm trying to tell this story about, say, my experience of walking the Camino when I turned 50. Well it actually was when I was 51 because of COVID. But, you know, I might break it up to five things that I want to express about that and then create some kind of static pose for each one and then transitional movements. There's all kinds of different ways to do that. And sometimes, you know, it's just beauty and just what looks vulnerable, like an open chest, what that's protected, something contracted. So you might be just communicating a feeling or a state of being rather than a really specific narrative.

Embodiment and Trauma Healing

Brandi Fleck:

Okay. Why is it important to tell stories in this way?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

[15:51] Well, I think there's all kinds of ways to tell stories, and they are important.

For me, I am an embodied human, and I think many of us are, and I hope many of us will find our way back to being more embodied, because I think it's something that we are losing culturally as we sit in front of screens and do things that are all kind of in our head sometimes. But pairing the two is just to me the the most precise and poignant way to to make that work, you know, the specific words narrative and the body.

Brandi Fleck:

You mentioned so many people are becoming disconnected from their bodies. What impact do you feel like that has on just the larger community as well as the individual?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

[16:53] Yeah, so individually, I see a lot of people who have stuck energy in their body. I work as an adjunct at on-site workshops, and I've trained in things like somatic experiencing in a variety of different healing techniques and therapies, but I'm not a licensed therapist. I just want to say that. But I do work with clients in tandem with their guide being in the room one-on-one. The sessions are two and a half hours, so we can get pretty deep.

[17:26] Obviously, you can't talk about any individual clients, but you do see a lot of people who have the just stuck energy, because they've been feeling these things, and it gets like stuck in their bodies and they don't know how to transmute it because we're not like living as physically as we did once.

I think that finding ways to like move the energy, to like not ignore it, don't—like we're not always needing to be calming ourselves. I mean, it's great to have these techniques of tapping and breath work and stuff where we calm ourselves.

But I think we also need some tools to transmute stuck energy like grief. Grief sometimes lives in our lungs. A lot of people hold anxiety and tension in their chest area and anger and rage. People often have sexual trauma that feels stored in like the belly and the pelvis.

[18:25] So I feel like in cultures where, you know, like you're dancing, you're moving more just as part of everyday life—that's opportunities to move that stuck energy. But we don't live that way, unfortunately. So I hope that we will move towards a culture of just kind of more authentic movement.

The dance isn't something that you go to a studio and take a class. And it's not something that you can only do if you're, you know, a certain level and you can perform on a stage. No, it should be part of our daily life. You know, like Tai Chi type movements, yoga, all of these things that are rooted in just natural patterns, I think, that people did. If we can bring that back into our life more and then supplement that with some knowledge of how do we move this energy through our bodies so it's not stuck, so I'm not holding on to it, I think that would help.

Now, you can move like anxiety, rage—there's something called sacred rage I've done some work with. There's certain things that I encourage people can do on their own, but like if you're working with trauma, really deep stuck grief, it's really good to do that with someone who has trauma-informed experience because it can really dysregulate people when you start, you know, breaking this up and transmuting it.

Brandi Fleck:

[20:03] What are some ways to transmute that stuck energy that you've found?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Yeah. Well, for grief...

[20:13] I won't go really too deep in this because it's something that is therapeutic.

I start with a lot of clients with a bounce, full body. You'd be standing up and you'd just kind of be bouncing for a while. This is after we've done some pretty significant grounding and resourcing and kind of actual visual mapping and recording of what we're feeling and sensing inside.

But starting with a bounce and then kind of letting that go to like more of a shake, like a more of a kind of aggressive shake. And I might have the person sort of just visualizing what feels stuck.

Learn more about somatic healing session with Amanda Cantrell-Roche and book a free consultation to get started.

It might feel like for me—I hold grief on the right side of my body sometimes. And it feels like a just like a a block of dark matter almost and visualizing why you're shaking and bouncing that it is possible—just like breaking off a little bit and it breaking off into little bits and then kind of once you feel like you've loosened things up, slinging—and I won't do it here because this is pretty intense practice—but like slinging it out through your arms and your fingertips. And I sound as well. Not everybody is comfortable with sounding, but like [primal moan].

Just physically exhausting yourself.

Sounding is a great way to get the internal externalized because you're literally pushing the breath and the sound out of your body and then returning to a calmness and a resourcing that's one of the ways that I would work with someone.

Brandi Fleck:

Gotcha. Do you ever run into people who are so or who are embarrassed to do things like that and they just have such a hard time to like get it moving. How do you deal with that?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

[22:22] In incremental steps.

I've worked as a teaching artist for years and years and years. And so we do something called scaffolding when we're guiding, say, the creative process.

You don't just go and have, say, to a group of fifth graders, create a dance about evolution. No, you explore what does evolution mean to you? What are some steps of it? Let's get that in our bodies. What are, you know, let's explore being primates for a while. Let's explore level changes, so you scaffold it.

I do it with clients even though that's pretty intense for me so they're not the only one, they're not just being watched doing it, starting with breath work and then it's just using a sigh. Most people can do that for sounding—that's what we do at art and soul our sounding circles—they take three deep breaths as a group, we do (and that's not therapy it's a different type of thing) and you just start with an audible sigh.

[23:26] Most people will do that and then some people don't get to the point where they can really sound and shake. I will say the clients at on-site—they're there for an intensive for four days, one-on-one usually or if it's a couple it's two. So they've invested a lot of time and energy and money in doing this work. So they're usually willing to do it.

Brandi Fleck:

Gotcha.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

And sounding's not for everybody, you know, when you just go out into the public and be like, hey, let's sound together. You have to have a level of trust.

[24:04] Because you're usually doing it with your eyes closed, too.

Brandi Fleck:

Yeah. Well, I think all of these are really helpful takeaways because without movement, at least in my own personal life and with clients I've worked with, trauma stays stuck. Like that movement is so important, whether you're moving the breath and what you're saying, it almost—like I know you don't bill it as energy work, but I do some Reiki with clients and it really reminds me of some of that energy work where you're like just shaking off or like pulling off some of those dark matter things.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Yeah, I'm actually trained in Reiki. I'm level one and two attuned. And by the time this broadcasts, if all goes well, I'll be a Reiki master because I'm doing training. But yeah, it all starts with a core channel.

You know, my grounding almost always starts with—some people think of it as the chakras—I call it core channel because I like for people to envision a cylinder that goes from their crown chakra down through the middle of their body to the tailbone. And I invite them to think of that being filled with a liquid or gas that has color or colors and to notice where they have places that feel stuck. And then we use the breath. And a really deep, like, rooted down into their soul space kind of breath work to bring that breath back up from a grounded place and to move the energy. Yeah, so it's all connected. I love that you do Reiki, too.

Brandi Fleck:

[25:45] Yeah, I love it. Really helpful. Yeah, okay. And it is all connected. So I'm glad you brought that up. I do want to pivot now. Well, let me ask you before we pivot, is there anything else that you think is important to say about movement or telling stories through all of it, words, movement, sound?

Improvisation and the Creation Process

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

[26:09] Well, just that as an artist, I am really kind of find myself not interested in doing a traditional performance anymore that I am really moving towards combining some of this…

Don't worry if you're listening to this and you want to come to the show we're not going to be doing therapeutic work, but combining some of these ideas of moving together, of collectively grounding together our energies and almost co-regulating our nervous systems as part of actually being a community that experiences a performance and then becomes part of the performance.

I'm just super excited about this rewilding project because I'm living it right now and it's really combining a lot of my passions, which is dance improv, which has some play in it, to audience engagement and full participation because one of my very favorite things to teach at Art and Soul is the Friday Night Frolic, which is an improvisational movement class for adults designed for people with no dance training.

*A recent Friday Night Frolic led by Amanda Cantrell-Roche at Art and Soul in Nashville, Tenn.*

And it is such a joy and I'm super excited to bring a little bit of that to my rewilding happening—I'll call it “happening” because I don't like to call it a performance.

Also, I do individual somatic work. I've just started doing that at The Healing Society.

I got kind of sidetracked by some really beautiful um but intensive residencies and schools this spring right after I joined the Healing Society. And so this summer, I hope to get back to offering individual sessions with people independently, which is a new thing to me.

Brandi Fleck:

[28:03] Gotcha. Okay. You brought up improv. So I have to bring up improv now because when I did improv work with you in 2009, which feels like so long ago now, that was the first exposure I had had to that type of dance. And it really challenged me.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

You did an amazing job.

Brandi Fleck:

Thanks. Thanks. Can you tell me a little bit about the importance of improv and being able to embrace it? Because I feel like there are other people who might want structure and who are used to rules who would be challenged by it.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Yeah, yeah. And, you know, just like wild open improv—I mean, that might be great for seasoned jazz musicians, but it's usually not something that works for absolutely everybody.

I love improv personally right now in my life because I've never been one that is really great at or really cared to spend a lot of time learning choreography. I don't feel as alive in the dance when I've either one, not learned it well enough to feel confident in it or two, learned it and rehearsed it so many times that it just feels stale.

Improv does need a structure.

And one of the basic structures that is used in the class is—and it came to me from Aaron Law, I'm going to speak their name into the room because I learned so much from Aaron, who is now in the Northeast, but comes back some. But Aaron studied under Susan Scorbati, and Susan Scarpati talked about the idea of a self-organizing system and emergent choreography.

So if you set a container, and I learned this from Aaron, but it comes from other people. Say you have a space, a rug or space in the studio, and you say these are your choices in the space: walking, running, pausing, forming a line. You could do any of those anytime you want, and you put on music and you do that for one song.

[30:25] And it's magic.

It's like you're making your own choice whenever you want to.

Maybe forming a line ends up being with other people some of the time. Maybe you are initiating a pause and sometimes a pause actually when you start out, it's just standing. It's standing with presence. And maybe sometimes you're following. And There's this magic that happens when people just go into it. It's an experience of learning to lead and learning to follow and learning to trust the process and hopefully the people that are in the space with you let it self-organize.

[31:10] It's amazing how in the course of one song, people can just like create something that—I've had people say like, I can't believe that wasn't choreographed. And especially if you do a pause where, you know, like maybe you can pause in a shape and then maybe somebody comes and pauses in that shape next to you. I think it teaches a lot about, where am I enjoying being a leader? Where am I enjoying being a follower? Or where am I enjoying being in the space with other people? And, how much am I wanting to just pull back and have my own experience?

They're all fine choices.

[31:50] If you have a big enough group, there's something called witnessing. So people come in and out of the space, but they hold the space for other people.

You know, how much am I feeling today that I want to be in it, moving? And how much am I feeling I want to stand back and just kind of take it in?

There's a lot we can learn about ourselves—not like a blanket thing—but like where am I today? What am I feeling today? And then create something just so intuitive with other human beings in the space—it's a beautiful feeling.

Brandi Fleck:

I'm having so many thoughts as you're talking—like as you're describing what's happening—while you're creating this dance it's literally also a representation of the creative process. In life that's how it works. I think there's a container and you have certain things you can choose from to get going and then you sort of intuitively make another choice and another choice and then there's this thing that emerges and whether or not it looks like what you thought it would look like in the beginning doesn't really matter because you've got this amazing thing.

[33:10] And I love how you said improv makes you feel alive in the dance, because I also think that's representative of how we interact in life. And when we're connected to life, we can feel that dance and make decisions based on how we feel, to just being so disconnected.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Absolutely. Yeah, you can be responsive to your environment and to the people around you.

And that container of dance, you know, that you set, and it can be, you have other things. You can have something called flocking, which is where you—I think we did flocking in the Uganda piece where you have someone in the front and they're moving very slowly. It's almost like Tai Chi type stuff. And there's people behind them that are following them. And it's all in unison if you get people that are, you know, moving slowly and trust each other. And then when you turn, someone else that everybody can see becomes a leader. So there's that shared leadership, that moment of just like beautiful community moving in unison.

And then like what you said about the container and allowing things to happen, that's about having enough trust to let go of control.

You're never going to control the whole group.

You can only control your own contributions.

Rewilding: Nature and Self

[34:30] And that to me was such a beautiful metaphor for rewilding.

I let my yard grow like the whole month of April. My husband and I didn't know our yard, and it got really—I mean I'm talking the grass was up to my hips almost—but there were wildflowers everywhere. My neighbor plants her whole front yard in, butterweed which is a big really tall yellow flower for bees and we have fleabang too which is that like white flower and what I realized is that the yard began to self-organize itself. It sounds crazy, but like the really tall big flowers got a lot bigger and then there were some things that were staying lower and it was this magical space and it was rough around the edges and I had to let control of that go, but it was so beautiful what emerged when we let the container do what it wanted to do instead of just mowing it off.

[35:34] So I just like living that whole rewilding and improv concept right now that it's coming out everywhere.

Brandi Fleck:

Yeah. Well, and it's interesting. I'm curious now how we can apply this concept of just having a container and trusting those around us, how we can apply that to what's happening in society now, especially in the United States where things are tense. Things are happening that are scary and traumatic.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Yeah there's sometimes when the container's not safe and it doesn't feel safe right now for a lot of people and I think there are times when you do have to be like I have got to try—you know I'm not going to sit back and be like let's see how this works out—we can't in my opinion… we cannot do that right now in our community of Nashville, with the ICE raids, or in our country. I think these containers have to be set with people that you can trust.

[36:42] And it doesn't really work on a huge societal scale, because there's too many different opinions, and there's people that are harming other people. And when you have the possibility of harm and violence, the system doesn't work.

[37:04] Because you can't be free to create. So I don't know that that concept works on a huge scale, but I do think that if everyone kind of tried to let go a little bit of control that we have over nature and other human beings, that we would have a better society.

So one of the things we're looking at in this rewilding project is not only what does it mean to rewild nature, but…

What does it mean to rewild ourselves?

[37:39] And part of that is, who am I? What are my behaviors if I have a deeper relationship with nature? And that informs my decisions in what I consume, what I do.

*Get* *your tickets* *to Amanda Cantrell-Roche’s Rewilding project. Performances are on Sat. July 26 at 2 pm and Sun. July 27 at 5 pm at the* *Kindling Arts Festival* *in Nashville.*

But another part of it, and I'll speak Brandon Johnson's name into the room—he's a teaching artist friend and artist and a body worker too. He brought up the idea of what if we say “yes and” to each other when we're rewilding. What if we say, yes, you can be who you are and I'm going to be who I am and we're going to find a way to live in community.

I think we need more of that because why do we need to know, for instance, what sexual organs someone has in order to have relationship, you know, business-wise or other, why is it so important that we laser focus on how someone identifies with gender? And whether or not people have legal immigration status has nothing to do with a character or who they are. It just really, really gets to me. And the narrative that we have that's false, that, well, people are criminals because they don't have the right paperwork.

[39:00] I'll bet you everyone listening to this podcast has speeded in a car or, you know, done something that is against the law. And what if that act defines your whole existence? What if you are a criminal because of that? Because you don't have the right paperwork. Because we do have a broken immigration system. And it takes years to go through it legally. And even if you are going through it legally, you don't know now if you're going to show up for your court date and be detained and freaking disappeared possibly.

I don't think there's an immediate step with, you know, improvisation or rewilding that's going to fix this. I think we have to be active and take active steps. But I do think there are communities like Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition that are creating as safe a container as they can for people without papers to be able to stay in our community.

Immigration Social Justice and Allyship

Brandi Fleck:

Gotcha. Well, and I know that you did some work with RISE, which stands for Refugee and Immigrant Students Empowered. Based on that work, or how has that work really, I don't know, impacted your opinion of what's happening right now?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

[40:24] Yeah that was a long time ago.

This organization had a classroom in different apartment complexes where several immigrant and refugee families were relocated, so there was one that was all kids from Miramar and there was another one where there were a lot of kids from the Middle East and Nepal and that gave me—working with those kids in the places where they live gave me a window into what an amazing and vibrant refugee resettlement community we have.

*Amanda Cantrell-Roche works with refugee and immigrant children in residencies and in the classroom.*

I mean, I've always kind of known that, but to spend time in the community with these kids was beautiful, and it gave me a chance to see just how incredibly creative and kind of innocent, even though they lived through some very difficult things, innocent and joyful, these kids were.

I mean, they're in my classrooms too, but that particular residency was a concentrated one in which I could just work with only the kids that were refugees and immigrants in their home.

[41:41] And I've continued to do that. Social justice choreography around that. I did Yearning to Breathe Free, where Kassar Abdullah was one of the people that I interviewed for that, and also something called Braid, the Global Nashville Project, where I collected stories from immigrants and refugees and recorded them, and then did my best to hire dancers who had similar lived experience, I couldn't always, that were either immigrants or refugees or had lived something a little bit similar, like moving from Puerto Rico. You know, you're an American citizen, but the culture is very different. The language is different. Yeah, so I think that fed into some of that work. Now I just feel like I want to support it, but I need to be an ally. I just have kind of gone past this idea that I should be telling those stories. You know, like, I want to amplify the stories in the community of being told by those people.

[42:48] And they're not telling those stories right now much because they're in survival mode.

How to Possibly Minimize Trauma with Impending Immigration Threats

Brandi Fleck:

That brings me to with your somatic experience. If someone's listening who is experiencing the threat of being disappeared or body snatched or what I feel like is being sent to concentration camps, even though people aren't calling them that, is there anything that they can do to minimize the trauma or to deal with this impending threat?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

[43:24] That is so hard because I have the privilege of not living in that, although I do have loved ones that are on the kind of cusp.

I do think that paying attention to grounding and breath work, and if this anxiety is building up, like doing some practices, shaking, screaming, letting it out slinging practices you know because it is gonna—you know it can get stuck in your body.

But also to know that there are thousands of people in this community that are seeing people and they value them and they want you here in this community and there are groups like Turk that are fighting tirelessly.

I was on a call for educators to help protect their undocumented students way before the raid. There were 500 people on that Zoom call, educators in Tennessee, wanting to know how can I protect my students. So I hope that that is a sense of heart connection, knowing that there are people that don't know you, that will stand in front of ICE to protect you.

And I would probably be one of those.

And there's a whole lot more, you know, there's people doing incredibly, way, way more work. And, you know, and then there's a lot of people that maybe they're not actively engaged in it, but they're pushing back by calling their legislators.

There's a sign across the street from the school on my street in someone's yard that says “immigrants belong,” so I hope that our numbers are growing, we can continue to support our neighbors.

Brandi Fleck:

And as an ally is it different? Are there different ways to avoid traumatization as you're standing up for other people or to even bolster your courage to go stand in the face of someone who could do something to you—I don't even know what they could do, but yeah.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

I think so much about history—kind of what this time will be looked back upon as and you know maybe it's just having the courage to think did I sit in my comfortable home and do absolutely nothing while people in my community were being traumatized in this way?

[46:14] Because a large portion of these folks didn't even have a criminal record.

And I would hope that that alone would give people some courage and strength to think, I can't just scroll past this on social media. I can't just not elect to call Governor Lee, which will take one minute to say I oppose this and it's got to stop, you know, or support an organization like Turk and NICE, National International Center for Empowerment, Global Education Center.

There's so many places that do work to support these folks in the community, you know, so we can be supporting the people that really know how to do the work, who are trained and who are on the front line all the time.

The Power of Community

Brandi Fleck:

[47:04] I keep coming back to this idea of container for some reason. And as we're talking about community, that almost is, it feels like it's a container. What is the importance of community? Let's just go there.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

I mean, that's everything to me. And like the community, it's your family, it's your friends, it's your professional, you know, hopefully you have community in your professional work.

I just, I don't think that humans are wired to live in isolation.

And while, you know, it can be nice to have time on your own sometimes—I mean, I walked 200 miles of the Camino in Spain by myself, and I really loved that. But I also had so much joy in, you know, at the end, having met some folks and being together. And this world is tough. these are hard times that we are living in and we have to lean into each other and we have to find people we can trust and and not only for support but for play and for joy and connection and I you know community is just—I feel like it should be my middle name.

[48:30] I'm forever trying to connect the different circles I'm in too.

Brandi Fleck:

I know we're not going to solve all the world's problems here in this podcast episode now, even though that would be nice. But it almost feels like that that connection that you're doing and the ripple effect from the impact of the art—all of that serves to eventually get us to a place of harmony where there isn't violence because we are embodied. We are, and maybe this is too big of a picture, but I'm just thinking that one day it is possible for that model to scale.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Yeah, maybe so. I think empathy has to scale. Empathy has to scale massively right now because we have a very desperate lack of it, in my opinion, in our country, different parts of the world.

Building Empathy with Narrative 4 Story Exchange

[49:42] And that is one space where I do love the story exchange work that I do in Narrative 4 because it is all about empathy.

It's about connecting to other human beings.

And you can form a community of people from all around the world. I mean, I did one with young people in Joslovo Township in South Africa paired with high school students in Palo Alto, California the other day.

When you put two people together, they've had a prompt. They tell each other a true personal story, and they listen to their partner's story deeply, without interrupting, without the idea of I'm going to put my own spin on this, or I'm going to react to it, or even respond.

And then they come back and do a small circle with a facilitator, and they retell their partner's story in first person, as best as they can recall. And this is where you have to remember, we're not perfect. We're human.

So, like, if you and I were partnering, you'd be told, we'd exchange stories, and we came back, I would say, “My name is Brandi. And this is the story about how I became a healer and a podcaster and found my passion.” And I would tell your story. You would get to receive it.

[51:00] I would live in your story for a moment knowing I could never be your lived experience. But the empathy that that grows in that short workshop is profound.

So I hope that things like that, we can touch each other in so many different ways beyond the arts and somatic healing work. And yeah, I think the healing empathy community has to continue to be nurtured and valued and grow.

Brandi Fleck:

Agreed. And on that note, Amanda, is there anything that I haven't asked you that you think is important to share today?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Gosh, you know, I feel like I juggle so many different things.

Brandi Fleck:

[51:51] Yeah, we covered a whole lot.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

I'm very much reliving the rewilding experience right now. And I'm excited to share that with people in late July.

Brandi Fleck:

Yeah, I think that's great.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

I would love to hear more about your work, honestly. But maybe that's a different podcast.

Brandi Fleck:

Well, I would love to tell you about my work. But for now, how can people find your work?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

I have a website that has a smattering of my work. Like I said, I do a lot of different projects with different organizations. But amandacroche.com is my personal website, my business website.

The Rewilding Project is part of the Kindling Arts Festival. And I highly encourage local folks in Nashville to do the Wildfire Pass and go to a bunch of great shows. But that's KindlingArts.com.

I have several films for my residency work, art films, and dance films on Vimeo.

And then yeah Art & Soul—all my work there is at artandsoulnashville.com. There's a whole bunch of classes, but if you go to teacher view you can see the upcoming classes I teach like some frolics and there's a class called move to create sanctuary where we paint and visualize in the air our own personal refuge and then we could create it with fabric and stones and stuff in the studio, so fun stuff like that.

Brandi Fleck:

Yeah, awesome. Everyone you know the drill all of those links will be in the show notes so be sure to go check those out and if you're watching this episode when it comes out, I believe you'll have about a month before the Rewilding project comes out.

Do they get tickets or you mentioned they get a pass?

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Yes, they can get tickets. They will be available at Kindling by then. And I encourage people to get a pass because there's so much great theater and dance. It's mostly theater, dance, and cirque.

Brandi Fleck:

[54:00] Okay. Well, Amanda, thank you so much for coming on the show today. And thank you for the work you're doing in the world.

Amanda Cantrell-Roche:

Thank you, Brandi. It's been a pleasure.