Kimerer LaMothe

[Note: This call blends both conversation and movement practice.] Many of us spend our days thinking, planning, willing our bodies to obey — as if life happens only from the neck up. For dancer-philosopher Kimerer LaMothe, that disconnection marks our deepest modern crisis.

Kimerer's intellectual journey began at Harvard University, where she earned a Ph.D. in the Study of Religion and taught as Lecturer in the Modern West. But insight arrived most powerfully through the body, not books. Performing her solo concert Genesis while six months pregnant, she discovered new intelligence in her hips, weight, and breath — an embodied awareness that couldn't be reduced to words. The body itself thinks. Movement is how it knows.

By 2005, Kimerer had teaching positions at Brown and Harvard, fellowships, published books, three children, a dance career. On paper, she had arrived. Inside, she was being torn apart. "The parts of my life were pitted against each other — work versus family, teaching versus scholarship, dancing versus writing." She wanted what she calls "a three-ply life" — writing, dancing, and loving her family woven together. "My creativity flows in all directions or none at all."

When the chance came to buy a broken-down dairy farm in upstate New York, she and partner Geoffrey Gee leapt. A month later, she gave birth at home to their fourth child. At Vital Arts Media — the farm where they would raise five children — philosophy became daily practice: milking cows, planting trees, hanging laundry. Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming (Columbia University Press, 2015) articulates what she learned there: we are not minds inhabiting bodies. We are "constellations of movement patterns suspended in the force field of gravity." "I am the movement that is making me," she writes. Health means cultivating what she calls "kinetic creativity"—the body's capacity to sense what movement serves its well-being and respond accordingly.

Her book Nietzsche's Dancers (2006) focuses on dancing imagery in the work of 19th-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, whose radical challenges to Western morality and religion still reverberate today. Kimerer explores how pioneering modern dancers grasped what scholars missed: that Nietzsche's philosophy includes instruction for how movement transforms consciousness. She spent decades researching this insight, which she and her partner Geoffrey Gee brought to theatrical life in Nietzsche: The Musical (Off-Broadway, October 2025). The play uses key relationships in Nietzsche's life to ask: What happens when you love people whose values you hate? Kimerer sees this as urgent now. "Nietzsche was fighting against many currents splitting our country apart — Christian nationalism, xenophobia, antisemitism. He felt that if people could find those places in themselves where they weren't loving themselves or loving life, they could start to overcome their tendency to blame and hate one another.”

Her philosophy gets tested in unexpected moments. One summer, corn she'd planted yellowed and lurched sideways in the heat. After watering them, she stood helpless. Then: "What about a corn dance?" She shuffled hesitantly around the patch. "I was suddenly swamped with love." Kimerer noticed individual details she'd missed—tiny twists at leaf ends, narrow cups still upright enough to catch rain. The next day, even as she moved from task to task, the corn accompanied her thoughts. By morning, "all but one of 100 plus plants, standing sentinel, straight and tall." Her dance changed her consciousness: “A few simple movements, and I was better able to conceive and affirm my own participation in forces of nature that otherwise appear to exist outside of me...  I am an active, essential part of the nature that lives in those plants. My movements matter. Dancing, I enable that corn to thrive, and that corn got me dancing. More became possible. In me. In nature itself. And there is more to be done."

For years she wrote for Psychology Today, channeling lived experience with breastfeeding, faith traditions, climate change, sexuality, aging, creative pursuits and more into accessible philosophy. She collaborates with Kun-Yang Lin/Dancers on CHI Awareness, linking breath, stillness, and flow. Her creative practice follows a principle: let the body be moved, then move with what moves you. In 2016, a shriveled rose caught her attention. "Obey the flower," she told herself. She started with small sketches, but the more she drew, the bigger the roses seemed. She taped four-by-six-foot sheets to her family room wall and drew in charcoal until the roses were the size she actually saw them — "expanding to infinity and retreating into invisibility, a sunburst, a mandala."

The quest at the core of all her endeavors: Does it dance? Does it catalyze a joyful affirmation of life? Are we awake to how our movements are making us, making the world, making what comes next?

Join Pavi Mehta and Cynthia Li for a part conversation, part workshop – with this philosopher-dancer who helps us rediscover what the body already knows.