Our Mission: We Still Move, formerly Critical Mass Dance Company, cultivates Well-being, Resilience, and Joy through Movement and the Healing Arts.
Our Trauma-informed Work is by and for Women, Gender-expansive and 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals from Black, Indigenous and Communities of Color.
Our offerings celebrate both Ancestral Wisdom and emergent practices, creating embodied spaces to reconnect with ourselves and each other.
Our vision: A world where embodiment paves the way for community and possibility.
About We Still Move
We Still Move (formerly Critical Mass Dance Company) cultivates wellbeing, resilience, and joy through movement and the healing arts. Our trauma-informed work is by and for women, gender-expansive and 2SLGBTQIA+ individuals from Black, Indigenous and Communities of color. Our offerings celebrate both ancestral wisdom and emergent practices, creating embodied spaces to reconnect with ourselves and each other.
Founded as CMDC in 2010, Sophia Kozak (she/her/ella) and a dynamic group of activist women envisioned a space for self and collective care through dance. Their embodied movement emerged into Dance From The Heart (DFTH)--a moving meditation practice inspired by the elements for affirming individual and collective visions.
Since then, we've co-created dozens of free/low-cost DFTH programs designed to support the collective care of our communities. In 2024 we transitioned into our new name as a reflection of our founding and enduring commitments to collective dreaming and liberation.
Our Values
self - determination
We are an organization led by and for the BIPOC and LGBTQIA+ communities we serve. Most of WSM’s staff and board members are BIPOC women and gender expansive people who first worked with the organization as participants in its programs. We practice self-determination by supporting our autonomy and agency to choose what we want and need for ourselves, individually and collectively as a community.
by us. for us.
SELF - DETERMINATION
collaboration
No one person knows everything, but together our knowledge is vast. Creative partnership, mutual support, and interdependence are central to our shared vision and work together. Within our collaborative approach to leadership, each staff member is valued as contributing a vital part of the mission through our shared roles and responsibilities as part of the whole. This extends throughout our partnerships with over 50 healing arts practitioners and nonprofits across LA to share resources, support each other, and build our collective capacity to serve our communities in a sustainable way.
go far, go together
COLLABORATION
intersectionality
We have multiple, intersecting identities within ourselves, and we are interconnected to each other and all living things in our environment. Our well-being isn’t just the responsibility of the individual through self-care but held collectively by and with a whole, thriving community. Our commitment is to create systems and practices as an organization that support our collective care. “Nobody is free until everybody's free” - Fannie Lou Hamer
we are an ecosystem
INTERSECTIONALITY
intuition
Connecting within to listen to our own inner knowing is one of our organizations earliest roots. We aim to create systems that allow us the time and spaciousness to build trust with our body’s wisdom and to gather experience in acting on its guidance. In everything we do, we invite folks to bring their bodies along with them, resisting the ways in which oppressive systems try to separate us from our connections with ourselves, our ancestors, and our environment.
moving at the speed of trust
INTUITION
attunement
Connecting to each other to understand others’ perspectives and to show compassion and empathy. We offer flexibility to the reality that we are constantly interacting with the newest versions of each other within our own ebbs and flows. As we connect to ourselves, we are better able to honor each other as whole individuals with holistic wants and needs. We hold tenderly our own capacity to meet those needs for ourselves and with/for each other. We listen deeply and acknowledge each others' life roles, responsibilities and capacities. We respect each other's boundaries as well as our own. We meet people where they are at any given moment, honoring who they are and who they are becoming. We check our own assumptions and preconceived notions or ideas about people, allowing them to change and grow and us, with them.
meeting people where they're at
ATTUNEMENT
alchemy
We honor the experimental, co-creative, alive, and emergent aspects and realities of the creative process. Being in the flow and fully present in the moment, we exist in the unknown and live the questions–allowing the answers to unfold, become, and reveal themselves to us and through us. We honor the bravery it takes to step into the uncertainty of seeding a vision knowing it may not work, we honor the vulnerability it takes to ask for help anyway, and we honor all the drafts in between. We know and experience the magic that happens when a vision has the spaciousness to take on a life of its own and show us possibilities beyond our wildest imaginations.
process over perfection
ALCHEMY
