Beliz Demircioğlu İnanç

I was born in Istanbul, Türkiye. I started my ballet training at the age of 6. I had a very intense love for dance. When I started to live this love within the framework of ballet, I worked at an intense pace with great commitment and discipline for many years without getting tired. In addition to ballet, modern dance classes were part of the curriculum at Dans Akademik, which was founded by Emel Alper. I then went on to study classical ballet and modern dance at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. When moving within a certain vocabulary, I could no longer answer the question “Why do I move, what makes me move?”. I then realized that improvisation and production were areas that affected me in a deep way. Working across different media has always been an approach that came from within. After graduating from university, I was accepted with a scholarship to the Interactive Telecommunications Master’s program at the same faculty, where different courses such as coding and interactive design were taught. I had the opportunity to work with people from different parts of the world who are experts in their fields, think creatively, and who value collaborative production. The interactive installations I created here for my thesis, which aimed to raise awareness of the problems of finding clean water in Ghana, were displayed in an exhibition opened by Kofi Annan at the United Nations headquarters in New York. While working on this project, I realized how much the scale of supporting and accompanying others is distorted when one cannot feel and care for one’s own core. Again, a project I did in my master’s program attracted the attention of Mikhail Baryhsnikov. At the art center he was opening, I had the opportunity to work on and perform my project.

After a while, I decided to go back to Turkey. On the invitation of Aylin Kalem, I started teaching in the Performing Arts Faculty of Istanbul Bilgi University. At the same time, together with Aylin Kalem, we founded the Body Focused Expressions Initiative Association (boDig). Together we have organized artistic projects and established partnerships with the European Union. In addition to organizing projects abroad, we have hosted 51 different artists from 14 different countries in Turkey.

In order to better understand and research the therapeutic effects of art, I completed my Ph.D. in Expressive Art Therapy at the Faculty of Arts and Health of the European Graduate School in Switzerland. Expressive Arts is an approach that fosters deep personal development by combining visual arts, movement/dance, drama, music, creative writing and other creative processes. Using artistic processes and the flow from one form of these processes to another, it aims to enable us to access our own inner sources of healing, clarity, insight and creativity.

My doctoral dissertation on improvisation using arts-based research methods was awarded Summa Cum Laude and published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers as ‘Improvisation in the Expressive and Performing Arts: The Relationship of Shaping and Letting-go’. It was published in the UK and USA.

Through our ongoing work with Berrak Yedek in various ways since my childhood, I have had the opportunity to witness and accompany the formation of her Somatic Dialogue technique. Somatic Dialogue is a gentle and soft practice which enables better understanding of one’s own body and movement capacity.

I teach at the Istanbul Institute of Expressive Arts founded by Fulya Kurter Musnitsky, at the Somatic Dialogue Facilitation Training Program founded by Berrak Yedek in Prague and at the Istanbul Bilgi University Performing Arts Track. I am also a registered somatic movement therapist/educator with ISMETA (International Somatic Movement Therapy and Education Association) and I do individual sessions and group work.

I live in Moda – Istanbul with my 2 sons and my husband Emir. I feel that Sufism is the most important teaching that keeps me rooted in a flexible way.

My areas of contribution:

I can do group and individual classes in

• Somatic Dialogue
• Expressive Arts
• Movement Improvisation