The Institute

The Spacial Dynamics Institute offers public workshops in Spacial Dynamics®, consultations, publications, and videos, as well as a five-year in-service training program (Foundation Year plus four-year training) held at various locations around the country.

Spacial Dynamics® is the study of the interplay between the human being and space. It is not only for movement professionals but also for anyone who chooses to enlarge and enliven their spheres of attentiveness, intention, and influence.

Space itself is normally a neglected component in the study of human movement, human development, and human health. When not overlooked altogether, it is most often regarded as something abstract, limited, or -- worse yet -- merely empty.

Students of Spacial Dynamics® learn to meet space as a vibrant, living medium, and movement as a dynamic force that can span distances at will. They are guided to understand the principles involved in interacting with space -- in movement activities, in learning, in social, pedagogical, and therapeutic situations, and in personal development.

Those who have been drawn to this discipline include classroom teachers, special education and remedial teachers, business and computer professionals, musicians, dancers, and actors, along with gym teachers, top-level athletes, coaches, participants in a variety of sports, acrobats, jugglers, clowns, mimes, outdoor educators and movers (rock climbers, skiers, mountain bikers, kayakers...), as well as doctors, midwives, hospice workers, physical therapists, movement therapists, personal trainers, and chiropractors.

The name Spacial Dynamics® was coined in 1984. It is now the servicemark name for a growing body of spatially oriented movement exercises, activities, and games, a unique spatial approach to posture, and a refined method of movement observation and analysis developed and worked out by Jaimen McMillan (SDI's Director) over nearly twenty years of intensive study, teaching, and therapeutic work with children and adults in the U.S. and Europe.

The need to increase awareness of spatial components in movement education and therapy led to the creation of training programs for any professional who wished to use movement and space more effectively.

Some 300 students are currently being trained in Spacial Dynamics® each year in Germany, the U.K., Hungary, and the U.S. Training in North America is offered via workshops and in-service programs that offer three intensive sessions a year over a five-year period.

Graduates are active professionally in a variety of ways: the principles of Spacial Dynamics® are being applied in education, special education, remedial work, physical medicine, chiropractic, movement therapy, sports, physiotherapy and massage, psychological counseling, birth preparation, work with the elderly and dying, and as a tool for self-development, as well as in music, dance, drama, mime, eurythmy, architecture, social work, computer applications, business consultation, and industrial safety.

Students of the Spacial Dynamics Institute have been recipients of Educational Incentive Program Grants from the Research Foundation of State University of New York.

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