About Us
Movement carries histories. It carries memory, culture, place, rhythm, and ways of knowing that often exist before language.
This online space is an artist-led movement space created by interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, filmmaker, and educator Vanessa Agle Isaac.
Source and Motion is becoming the new home within the Samba Dance Academy. Bringing 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.
Through classes, workshops, movement studies, and a growing online archive, Source and Motion invites dancers and curious movers into practices that connect rhythm, musicality, culture, contemporary movement, and embodied exploration.
Founder and Director Vanessa Agle Isaac
Vanessa’s practice has been shaped by a lifelong dialogue between movement, culture, and artistic forms. She has spent nearly three decades creating work across choreography, performance, film, education, and interdisciplinary collaboration.
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 University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA , University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo in Monaco, Centre Momboye in Paris, California Brazil Camp, Gustfson - State Street Ballet School, The International Samba Congress in Los Angeles, and other cultural and educational organizations in the United States and abroad.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.
Vanessa 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.