A space for movement, and embodied inquiry evolving from Samba Dance Academy.
Source + Motion
The name holds two ideas.
Source is what we inherit, encounter, remember, study, and return to: culture, memory, rhythm, landscape, ancestry, and lived experience.
Motion is transformation: what happens when those sources move through a living body, encounter the present and envision the future. It's also dance and it's film.
Source and Motion lives between the two.
Rooted in experience.
Open to inquiry.
Photo By Valerie Villa
About Source and Motion
Source and Motion is an artist-led movement space created by interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, filmmaker, and educator Vanessa Agle Isaac.
Grounded in nearly three decades of artistic practice, Source and Motion brings together movement, choreography, embodied inquiry, cultural memory, and interdisciplinary exploration. Here, movement is approached not simply as something we learn or perform, but as a way of listening, perceiving, connecting, and discovering.
The Practice: Through classes, workshops, movement studies, and an evolving online archive, Source and Motion invites dancers and curious movers into practices that connect rhythm, musicality, culture, contemporary movement, and embodied exploration.
Come to learn. Come to move. Come to discover what movement can open.
The Practice and the Online Studio
Vanessa’s practice has been shaped by a lifelong dialogue between movement, culture, and artistic forms. Her Brazilian heritage, contemporary dance, Afro-Brazilian and other Brazilian traditions, music, film, visual art, landscape, and collaboration form a constellation of influences that continually meet, overlap, and transform within her work.
Samba, an Afro-Brazilian cultural tradition, is a living practice carried forward and continually renewed through the body.Afro-Brazilian and other Brazilian traditions are important sources within this practice, existing in conversation with Contemporary choreography, music, film, landscape, and embodied inquiry.
At the center of our practice there is curiosity:
What becomes possible when we pay attention to what the body already knows?
What does the body remember, imagine, and envision?
How does movement carry culture, memory, and lived experience?
How does place live within us, and how do we live within it?
What can we discover when we listen through the body?
How are we changed by the environments we move through?
What happens when movement becomes a way of understanding our relationship to one another and to the world?
You are invited to join the online studio, explore the practices within it, and become part of a community continually evolving through movement.
Vanessa Agle Isaac
Vanessa has spent nearly three decades creating work across choreography, performance, film, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
Her work has been presented in the United States and internationally. She has created commissioned work for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, collaborated with musicians of the Santa Barbara Symphony and two-time Grammy Award-winning composer Ted Nash, and created Passagens, commissioned by Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo for F(ê)aites de la Danse in Monaco.
Her cinematic movement studies Panducada and Alfazema, commissioned by composer Ami Molinelli with support from the San Francisco Arts Commission, extended this practice into film and landscape, exploring the relationship between movement, music, memory, and environment.
Teaching has never existed separately from Vanessa’s work as an artist. The studio is another place of exploration. Technique matters. Musicality matters. Cultural context matters. But so do curiosity, individuality, pleasure, imagination, and the intelligence each person brings into the room.
As an educator and guest artist, Vanessa has taught and shared her practice nationally and internationally through classes, workshops, lectures, and artist engagements. Selected engagements include UC Santa Barbara (UCSB), UCLA, Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo in Monaco, Centre Momboye in Paris, Gustfson (State Street) Ballet’s)school, the International Samba Congress in Los Angeles, and other cultural and educational organizations in the United States and abroad
Her artistic formation encompasses contemporary dance, theater, journalism, music, and years of movement and cultural research in Brazil. With maternal family roots in Bahia, Vanessa has returned to the region throughout her life and for periods of deeper study, including work with artists and cultural masters, expanding her engagement with Afro-Brazilian movement traditions and their cultural contexts.
More recently, her artistic research has extended to the Brazilian Amazon, where immersive field research has deepened her inquiry into the relationships between body, landscape, memory, and ecological knowledge. This research is informing an evolving body of interdisciplinary work across choreography, film, writing, and live performance.
From Hip Brazil to Source and Motion
Source and Motion carries a history that began long before its name. In 2000, Vanessa co-founded Hip Brazil, beginning a long-running artistic and community practice bringing together Brazilian movement, live music, performance, cultural exchange, and education.
For more than two decades, these projects brought together professional artists, students, children, musicians, and people who had never considered themselves dancers in shared creative experiences. Over the years, thousands of participants took part, with musicians, dancers, and artists joining from Brazil, across the United States, and many other parts of the world.
Source and Motion is here Now..
Not a departure from what came before, but a wider frame for what has always been there: movement as artistic practice, cultural exchange, inquiry, and connection..
Source and Motion invites you to become more attentive to how you move, how you listen, and what your body already knows.
Welcome. We are happy you are here.
Vanessa Agle Isaac
Founder & Artistic Director
