about

I am a movement, visual, and performance artist, a teacher of movement and relational somatics, a writer, and an event organizer.

My love of movement began as a child playing sports. I enjoyed informal, peer-coordinated play far more than the structured competitions organized by (and seemingly for) adults. In college, I engaged in a highly competitive team sport that emphasized the mind-body connection, which also taught me a lot of valuable lessons about training and discipline.

Around the same time, I learned how to dance to house music at underground raves. Prior to this, dance had never been an option for me. The only ways to express myself through movement growing up as a boy were sports and fighting. I still occasionally enjoy dancing to this kind of music.

As I started exploring Eastern spirituality in religion classes and my studies, I found the Japanese martial art of aikido, which became my primary practice for the next decade. My aikido teachers supported me through some powerful transformational work, but eventually the structure of art proved to be too dogmatic and inflexible, and my own research about how to most effectively use the body led me in other directions.

On a personal recommendation, I met a Chinese teacher of taijiquan who turned out to be already doing much of what I was trying to do with aikido but at a far higher level than I had imagined possible. I trained with him for many years when he was in the US. I also discovered a small group practicing an authentic, traditional style of Brazilian capoeira.

Capoeira blurs the line between dance and martial art. Several aspects of the art, including playing musical instruments and leading songs in a language I didn’t even speak, pushed me outside of my comfort zone. It opened me up to the possibility of a more artistically expressive way of moving together with another person.

While I was exploring stretching techniques to open the physical and energetic channels in the body, I encountered a very power system of yogic asana, which eventually became a daily practice for nearly ten years. During this time, I went to India four times, spending a total of one year studying with my teachers there. But eventually I once again found myself constrained by the limitations of a rigidly structured system.

I sought out entirely new avenues of movement, taking classes in multiple forms of social dance, going deeper into acroyoga, and learning how to climb. I also began exploring a cluster of loosely connected communities that embrace and honor the erotic energies typically excluded from traditional movement practices. There I met people practicing the Japanese art of tying people with rope, often called shibari (“tying” in Japanese).

Although I had been exploring playing with restraint and other forms of power dynamics for several years in my private intimate relationships, doing so in groups and semi-public spaces was new to me. I had many concerns about the social dynamics of these groups, but I wanted to learn what these people knew, so I chose to dive into this world.

This led to several significant developments. One was rekindling my interest in photography, especially erotic photography, which I had began experimenting with nearly a decade earlier when the first digital cameras were coming on the market. In these communities, I found both an audience for my photos with and a group of people willing to model for photos I could share online. As I improved my technical and artistic skills, photography eventually became a primary hobby and means of creative self-expression.

Another significant development was launching the first group in Chicago offering ongoing, structured education in tying. This group pioneered several concepts almost unheard of in that community at the time but now widely copied in rope education and elsewhere, including establishing standards of professional conduct for instructors and event organizers and creating policies and procedures for receiving reports of and responding to incidents within the community. We also were one of the only groups in North America teaching a style of tying emphasizing interpersonal connection and communication through rope. This group collectively chose to disband during the pandemic.

The pandemic was my first significant break from teaching and leading groups since the mid-2000s. I used this as an opportunity to focus on internal work and the cultivation of new somatic practices, including contact improv, which is now my primary movement art. While movement offers amazing potential for healing, I believe the wounds resulting from the legacies of societal and generational trauma we all share are too deep to be held by any single movement practice. My current approach to practicing and teaching movement and somatics acknowledges this and foregrounds healing at the both the individual and community levels.

For more information on my teaching, performing, or photography, visit the respective pages on this website. To connect directly, contact me via email at jon @ kediart.com or on Instagram @jonkediart.