I am Rebecca R Burrill, Ed.D–dancer, artist, movement-based child developmentalist, and educator. I have a Doctorate in Education focusing on brain evolution, child development, movement, art-making, learning, and literacy. My Masters work focused on creative process and dance. I am Massachusetts Certified Elementary Educator (1987-2019) and Professional Development Provider. I am a trained Observer and Notator of movement-language in the Kestenberg Movement Dance Therapy System. I have trained in the mind-body integrative and repatterning systems of Educational Kinesiology and Rhythmic Movement Training.

My work is based on the experience that learning is fundamentally a creative process, and that aesthetic sense is primary in the
development of self, intelligence, and wellbeing.

I trace the evolution of human intelligence back to primal
people’s relationship with Nature, a relationship that was
instrumental in the development of language and art. With these understandings I seek to renew human engagement with the primary creative intelligences of movement, sound, feeling, imagination, and ecological conscious and their natural healing and developmental capacities.

Links to Selected Publications, Documentaries, Programs, Talks

2023
Eco-Art movement exploration at Findhorn Foundation, Scotland. June 10 -17 – 2023
The workshop— Languages of Nature Languages of Art® —is an evolutionary and developmental exploration of movement-sound as a primary language. We discover this primary language to be both aesthetically organized, and to be the primal kinship language that humans have in common with the natural world. The outcome of the workshop process is a participant-created, site-specific, ceremonial movement piece expressing gratitude for, and commitment to, our kinship relationship and with Nature. The workshop process is in-depth at the same time playful and informal. Workshop link: https://www.findhorn.org/workshop/languages-of-nature-languages-of-art/

Radio interview discussion of  Findhorn Workshop, 5/15/23
HEALING WISDOM: Primal Language and Scottish Retreat with Rebecca Burrill EdD

Virtual talk for the Scottish Center for Geopoetics by me and a colleague:
The Natural Aesthetics of Enchantment
We discuss the foundation of aesthetics in relation to enchantment, particularly the wonder that we as natural beings experience in and as nature. This aesthetic takes the form of a primary language patterned in the perception, both evolutionary and developmental, of movement-sound. The operation of this pattern is fundamentally lifelong perceptual metaphor, so we shall explore the essential dynamics of metaphor as a way not only of knowing but of being and living.

2022
The Ecological Citizen: “Art as Ecology: A mutual nod”. This essay explores, evolutionarily and developmentally, the deep kinship between humans and the natural world. We find that this kinship arises from an aesthetically organized, perceptual language – a primary language. This primary language is at the root of intrinsic, natural morality as well as artistic expression and meaning making. This aesthetic kinship language affords us a vision for a Nature centered — ecocentric — value system. And this to guide us in both ecological and social justice understandings and actions in the world.

2021
Honoring Nature: An Anthology of Authors and Artists Festival Writers: “The Ember”. This short narrative describes a dance/poetry artist residency experience (see Dancing the Dunes below) of intercommunication with Nature as a kinship consciousness that can be a renewing ember for the persuasive ecocide of our times.

Mother Pelican: A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability: “Ecocentric Languaging: Animism, persons, and the aesthetics of primary perception”. This essay looks at the primacy of aesthetic perception in human relationship with nature.

2020
The Ecological Citizen: “Ecocentric languaging: Persons, art and education”. This essay explores an understanding of an animate world view, based on a drawing by a six your old child, by looking at relationships between movement-based languaging both evolutionary and developmental, aesthetic perception, and approaches in ecocentric education.

Minding Nature/City Creatures’ Blog: Languages of Nature, Languages of Art^®. This essay describes Rebecca’s movement-based arts and kinship with Nature workshop, taking place over a two-week period at Frick Environmental Center, in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, where participants are lead to engage movement/dance to express interconnection—kinship—between the living world, in utero language beginnings, and movement as a language and art form.

2018
Minding Nature: “Moves Sound and Sounds Move: Introduction to the Re-enchantment of Learning”.  This essay explores, from beginning in utero, the psychobiological organizing principles of movement and sound underlying human perception, development, and intelligence. This pathway leads through the primacy of aesthetics in meaning making, languaging, and human relationship with Nature, to understanding the evolutionary context for the most humane child rearing and educational practices for developing compassionate, emotionally mature human relations, and ecological sensibility and responsibility.

2016
Minding Nature: “Dancing Our Kinship with Animate Earth”.  This essay gives an in-depth look at natural place and its inherent languaging through interweaving childhood Nature relationship with character and history of place, and a middle school movement-based arts and ecology project. The primacy of non-verbal languaging and its aesthetic and ecological quality, beginning in utero, is clarified as the essence of natural learning vs. skills based school learning.

All Your Making: Outer Cape choreographic artist, educator and scholar Rebecca R. Burrill has been writing poetry since 1969. Now, in 2016, YIP( Yonkers International Press) is thrilled to present All Your Making, the long overdue debut collection of Burrill’s poems. With gorgeous effort, and stunning natural intuition Burrill offers her reader a full-bodied immersion into both the natural environs of Cape Cod and the life she has lived there.
Excerpts of these poems, illustrated by the author, are published in The Ecological Citizen, Vol 2, No 2, 2019

IAE Newsletter: “Joy and Satisfaction in Natural Learning: Creative Improvisational
Explorations”.  This essay locates the joy of learning in its creative, improvisational aspect, explored through a dance-based arts and Nature project. Dancing place conjures the inherent aesthetics of non-verbal languaging, a quality of human intelligence that evolved in relationship with the natural world. These tenets are basis for arguing that the play of improvisational exploration is primary in supporting natural learning processes vs skilled based institutional learning.

2015
Wood and Arts Project: a video documentary concerning the honoring of cut trees at an historical landscape restoration. The intent, through art, is to express empathetic human relationship with Nature. The project was a collaboration with The Cape Cod National Seashore, The Cape Cod Light House Charter School, a local wood artist, and local dancer/educator–Rebecca R Burrill–videographer, producer, director and editor.

2012
Dancing the Dunes: a video documentary of a solo performance of story,  poetry and dance about a two week artist-in-residency in a rustic dune shack and immersion in the sensory communications of the natural surround. Author, dancer, producer, director and editor Rebecca R Burrill.

2011
The American Journal of Dance Therapy: “Movement, Art, and Child Development Through the Lens of an Innovative Use of The Kestenberg Movement Profile”.  This article is an introduction to a doctoral dissertation study, using a psychobiological movement assessment tool, to give insight into the effects of the parameters of classroom activities on the development of children in a public pre-school. Analysis of data sought to uncover significant patterns in regressive and defensive feelings, attitudes, and behaviors vs. creative learning of the children studied.

2010
Teaching Artist Journal: “The Primacy of Movement in Art-Making”.

2005
Teaching Artist Journal: “Natural Biology vs. Cultural Structures: Art and Child Development in Education”.

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Photo credits: Caroline Bartlett; Barbara Cole Kirk, Respectively