Body Swells, Soleil Chappelle MA LMT

06/06/2025

The most special testimonial from . I love how they use their drawings to illustrate body experiences that exist beyond words. 🤍

You can find out more about craniosacral therapy and the bodywork I offer on my website.

And if you’re a client, I could use some Google reviews—if you feel inclined to give me all the stars 💫 More people have been finding me through internet searches lately, so I figure that would be a good thing to have! Search Body Swells Craniosacral & Massage on Google Maps and you should find me. 👐

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05/09/2025

You are cordially invited to Bellingham’s most experimental, arty, cerebral, and somatic performance salon! A space for the individual and the collective. Sharing confidence and the vulnerable, being witnessed and cared for by the community.

🪟Dojo Salon No.2 🪟
Friday, May 23
7pm
Aikido Peace Education Center
1101 N State St (upstairs, ring bell)
Donation welcome at the door

Featuring cultivated and spontaneous performances 🔥
Tensile by Bonnie Smerdon + Collaborators
Kitty & the Public Toilet by Reve Shannon
We Contain Landscapes by Patrycja Humienik with Soleil Chappelle

Performances will be followed by community discussion and tea ☕️

Hosted and curated by Carmen Serber and Soleil Chappelle

In light of the massive blow dealt to arts communities across the country via the NEA rescinding promised funding, I invite you to show up for grassroots art makers.

Now is the time to come together to celebrate artists. To have a space to talk and process and roll around after watching raw performance. To be in community with artists, as artists, for artists.

Art is never apolitical. They will keep trying to control what we create—but we will rise up from below, composted and fertile. We need small art, big art, in-between interstitial web-maker art. Today and always.

03/11/2025

Bellingham has a brand new dance newsletter! Receive monthly updates on adult dance classes, performances, opportunities, and community highlights.

The dance web is woven by Soleil Chappelle with community-sourced information. Please share with your people, submit your events, and send out calls for connection!

🌐🤸🕸️

Submission deadline for the April edition is Tuesday, March 18. Email bodyswells@gmail.com to submit.

Go to BellinghamDanceWeb.Substack.com to subscribe!

Use to bring my (Soleil’s) attention to dance happenings in Bellingham!

02/20/2025

Can we let ourselves be organic material with simple needs?

New piece is live!

Exciting new things to share alongside a simple framework for checking in with yourself.

01/22/2025

🕯️🔥❄️🔥🕯️

If you’d like to stay in connection with me and my work, make sure you’re on my email list! Long form works best for my Gemini word rivers.

In this latest newsletter I share about:
🔥 Performance this Friday at Fire & Story
❄️ My ancestral journey to the Sami Winter Market in 2019
👐 New bodywork descriptions
🦭 foundDANCE in February

10/29/2024

Popping in for no other reason than to remind you that this cozy, heated, memory foam place exists for you to put everything down for a moment and unwind.

It’s a lot out there, folks. I’m here when you need. 👐

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10/29/2024

Movement for every moment.

The next foundDANCE series begins Wednesday, November 6.

4-Week Series on Foundations in Contemporary Dance. All levels welcome.

(No class Nov 27)

See you on the dance floor to be with our bodies and each other in this moment again and again and again. Moving with depth and levity.

Learn more and register on my website under “in person classes” and at bhamrep.org/classes.

Photo by Sarah Sakurazawa.

10/26/2024

“around”
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presented by
Nov 8-16

I am very excited to present my new dance work in collaboration with ’s incredible forms: Chromatic Gestures. Created with the dancers through deep play.

I will also be performing “breathing deep on a freezing beach” with my dear , choreographed by , inspired by sound and text by .

Come around!

10/01/2024

Finally made physical an idea I’ve had for awhile!

Did you know that craniosacral sessions ✨continue✨ for 24-48hrs after you get off the table? The session activates an internal and personal unwinding process that your body continues on its own! 🪼🪸

Like most people, as soon as my session is over, I’m right back in the hubbub of life and sometime forget that the care I give my body during this time matters.

So I made these little cards to remind my clients of the simple resources they have available to them during this time. They can put it on their desk or fridge and write reflections from the session on the back!

Truly anytime is a good time to remember to hydrate, float, ground, reflect, and connect!

09/01/2024

07/24/2024

New piece is live! 🐋🌐🕸️🤲

Over the past seven months, I began five newsletters that I never published. In my latest newsletter, I share pieces of them in alphabetical order inspired by Sheila Heti’s Alphabetical Diaries.

Here is the letter B:

B
Barbara Dilley, one of my most influential teachers, the creator of Contemplative Dance Practice, and other improvisational forms, emphasizes the importance of allowing yourself to be seen. Belonging is a crucial aspect of being human, and so I understand why most people want to stay within the lines of widely accepted coherence.

Body intelligence is not knowledge of the body, but knowledge in the body. Buildings are also a feeling and impression as you walk into the space. Buildings are implicit, they are background, surroundings.

But here I’ll catch myself in the misconception that the seasons are happening somewhere “out there.” But I mean to express the simultaneity of experience. But once I sensed the psoas in the safe container with my bodyworker, I was suddenly aware of the ways I was already sensing it without the context of knowing what it was. But what if this stepping out is really a stepping in to a wider, more meaning-full sense of belonging?
🌐

Read the full piece for the rest of the alphabet and subscribe if you like body-based writing!

02/21/2024

The first time I felt another’s fascia unwind in my hands, I recognized this movement from my own experience dancing.

It’s the release of a spring, yet infinitely complex and multidirectional.

It’s the uncovering of a pathway under the surface, a party going on in interstitial space.

🔗in🌎 to read the full piece on substack and visit my website for bodywork appointments! 💆🏻

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