colleague testimonials

Leeny Sack’s work as performance artist and somatic educator articulates itself at the delicate interface between self and world: the most everyday of the everyday, the most ordinary of the ordinary, but also the always potentially extraordinary, life-changing breath.

… The performativity of The Performative Self reveals the fragility of identity. It offers us an experience of self as a verb, as a creative process, one that requires ongoing practice of facing and incorporating otherness within and without.

… as personal as material might seem, when it comes to light in the studio with Sack as witness, it is being engaged in as part of an aesthetic activity that is also always an interrogation of reality, and potentially, a political intervention and a cultural critique. As such, The Performative Self is a unique approach to ongoing life/art practice, not only for the development of Sack’s performance works, but also for the training, education and mentoring of others via workshops, classes, and one-on-one client relationships

… Ultimately I see Sack’s work today as offering a kind of pedagogy of intimacy to a world in great need of it.

from Breathing Worlds: Somatic Practice, Performance and the Self in the Life/Art Work of Leeny Sack

by Michele Minnick, Ph.d, performer, director, teacher and writer

She has reinvented forms both as pedagogy and as part of her investigative nature as an artist. Her current interests represent an extraordinary synthesis of her experiences of 40 years as a creative artist who has associated with seminal figures in her generation, from Jerzy Grotowski, to Richard Schechner, to a generation of teaching artists at the Experimental Theater Wing who have in turn trained another generation of artists coming to maturity.

I find her current work operating at a breakthrough level because of her integration of a) physical theater technique which pulls on new technical work in somatics (mind-body training), b) a unique type of dramaturgy drawing on eastern nature of mind techniques related to meditation techniques, her personal experience of being a dharma practitioner, and the more radical traditions of western psychology, and c) a complete immersion in American theater experimental aesthetics and practices as a performer, creator, pedagogue and theorist over nearly the last ½ century.

— Wendell Beavers, dancer, educator, co-founder Movement Research, founder Naropa University's MFA Theatre: Contemporary Performance

-