Open Floor International – The Story (2012–2019
This is the story of our movement practice — the story of Open Floor: a story born from grief, carried by resilience, and shaped by immense courage and generosity.
1. An Ending That Became a Beginning
In 2012, after the passing of Gabrielle Roth, Five Rhythms continued under new leadership.
For many senior teachers, this moment marked the beginning of deep questions about integrity, ethics, and belonging.
Remaining within the existing structure no longer felt possible. Yet leaving meant letting go of what had shaped their professional and personal lives for decades — their work, their community, and their shared language. For many, it felt like a terrible divorce.
And still, within that grief, something new slowly began to move.
2. Seeds of Renewal
It was only in mid-2013, after months of uncertainty, that a new impulse began to take form. Throughout that summer, several teachers — among them Kathy Altman, Lori Saltzman, Andrea Juhan, and Vic Cooper (KLAV), together with close colleagues — found themselves gathering, talking, and slowly acknowledging a difficult truth: Something new would need to be created. There was no longer a viable way forward within the old structure.
By late 2013, these conversations expanded into a wider email circle of teachers.This early constellation was broad and fluid — a larger group exploring what might emerge next, even though not all of them would ultimately continue into the new work.
From within this wider circle, eleven people gradually stepped forward with a clear commitment to continue the process alongside KLAV: Cathy Ryan, Cynthia Kennedy, Deborah Lewin, Geordie Jahner, Lucie Nérot, Irit Ziv-Ron, Nele Vandezande, Rivi Diamond, Sarah Davies, Sue Rickards and Tim Stevenson. These eleven became the founding members — the core group who would help carry the earliest phase of creation.
During this time, KLAV also met regularly in California, where they lived close to each other. These smaller working sessions allowed them to prepare and refine ideas before bringing them back to the whole group. They referred to this focused circle as the Brain Trust — a space for clarifying vision and direction.
These early explorations — from the wide email circle, to the committed founding members, to KLAV’s focused working sessions — did not yet define a school. But together they opened a door toward a new vision grounded in body, heart, mind, and a diversity of voices.
3. The First Foundation: The ICMTA
In parallel with these early explorations, a significant development had already begun.
Early in 2013, several of these same teachers — together with close colleagues — co-founded a new professional association: The ITA (initially called) — later renamed
ICMTA — the International Conscious Movement Teachers Association, registered in Belgium.
Created by teachers for teachers, the association offered professional support and an ethical framework for the wider conscious movement community.
From the very beginning, this association adopted Dynamic Governance (DG), also called sociocracy. DG was introduced to this community by Deborah Lewin, who first brought it into ITA/ICMTA and later into the emerging structures of Open Floor International.
This governance model replaced hierarchy with shared intelligence and responsibility, ensuring that every voice could be heard, decisions were made by consent, and differences became sources of creativity.
These early experiments in collective leadership laid essential groundwork for what would soon become Open Floor.
By the end of 2013, this growing momentum led naturally to the first step toward structuring the emerging project.
On October 30th, 2013, KLAV invited colleagues to join what became the Open Floor Advisory Board, and on November 6th, 2013, the group held its first meeting.
This was the first formal gathering dedicated to imagining a new school — a moment when the early vision began to take organizational form.
4. Building Through Movement – First Steps (2014)
After this first Advisory Board meeting in November 2013, the work quickly moved from discussion into embodied exploration. Founders and founding members — a core group of fifteen people — began meeting across continents, sharing ideas, dancing together, and testing material in real time. The early energy was collective, courageous, and often overwhelming. Everyone contributed: research, writing, movement experiments, ethical inquiry, and countless hours of organizational groundwork.
During this period, Andrea Juhan offered the name Open Floor, drawn from her longtime body of work rooted in Gestalt Awareness Practice and her previous project, Open Floor Encounter. Her tremendous generosity provided not only a name but a philosophical lineage and integrity that helped anchor the emerging school.
At the same time, KLAV also took a significant financial risk. They personally advanced the initial funds required to build the early structure — from website development to organizational setup — at a time when nothing was guaranteed. Their willingness to shoulder that uncertainty made the first steps of the project possible.
In January 2014, the group held its first formal structural meeting. This became the earliest version of what would later be called the General Circle: a collaborative framework where decisions were made by consent, not hierarchy — a foundational shift that shaped both the culture and the ethics of the new organisation.
Just a few weeks later, the first public signs of the new work appeared: The Open Floor website went live in March 2014, making the name visible to the world and offering a first glimpse of the practice that was still being shaped behind the scenes.
That same year, the first Common Ground Labs took place:
August 2014 — California (KLAV)
September 2014 — Moorsele, Belgium (KLAV, with founding members present)
These Labs became crucibles of experimentation. Material was written late at night, revised at dawn, and tested on the dance floor hours later. Founders and founding members were questioning, refining, and offering perspectives drawn from psychotherapy, somatics, expressive arts, meditation traditions, and decades of movement experience.
By the end of 2014, a shared language and the beginnings of a coherent body of work had emerged — not from theory, but from embodied practice, collective intelligence, and extraordinary dedication.
5. A Collective Act of Creation (2014–2015)
As 2014 turned into 2015, the creative momentum intensified. Founders and founding members were equally immersed in shaping the practice — writing, refining, teaching, organizing, and carrying an enormous amount of work.
The first Labs taught entirely by founding members marked a significant turning point:
January 2015 — Ground Floor Lab in Munich
March 2015 — Ground Floor Lab in London
These Labs allowed the emerging curriculum to be held, tested, questioned, and strengthened by multiple voices. They also responded to a growing need: many experienced teachers — especially those who had lost their professional home after the rupture in 2012 — were waiting, hoping, and asking when a new training would begin.
By early 2015, nearly two years of intense collaborative experimentation had created the foundation needed to launch the first Teacher Trainings.
6. The First Teacher Trainings (2015–2017)
And so, in May 2015, the first Open Floor Teacher Training – Europe began, with its first module held in the Netherlands.
A few months later, in August 2015, the first Open Floor Teacher Training – USA opened in Upper Lake, California.
From the very first generation of trainees, participants could complete modules in different regions — Europe, the United States, and Oceania — reflecting the international reach and adaptive spirit of the work. This mobility allowed teachers to weave together multiple influences and communities as they trained.
Meanwhile, the curriculum continued to evolve. An updated manual — refined through the cumulative learnings of the early Labs — was completed before the 2017 trainings began, offering a clearer and more structured articulation of the practice.
A second Teacher Training opened in 2017, again offered across continents. Teachers from this cycle graduated in 2019, joining an expanding global community and carrying forward a practice that had grown from collective courage, commitment, and embodied intelligence.
7. Deepening the Practice – The Continuing Ground Floor Labs (2015–2019)
As the Teacher Trainings unfolded across continents, the work continued to evolve through another essential stream: the Ground Floor Labs.
From 2015 to 2019, Labs were offered regularly in Europe, the United States, and Oceania — each one an opportunity to refine, deepen, and clarify the growing body of work. They were living laboratories where founders, founding members, and new teachers met the curriculum on the dance floor, bringing insight, critique, curiosity, and lived experience.
With every Lab, the material matured, pedagogy became more precise. language became more coherent, principles and practices became increasingly grounded, consistent, and teachable.
Experiences from the earliest experiments, learning from the first Teacher Trainings, and feedback from emerging teachers, all flowed back into the Labs. Nothing was static — everything was in motion, shaped by collective intelligence and the resilience of a community committed to integrity and embodied education.
These years were marked by extraordinary, often invisible labor: hours of testing, rewriting, meeting, discussing, and dancing, co-teaching across countries and time zones, and a willingness — from so many — to keep building, step by step, something that had never existed before.
This deepening phase carried Open Floor toward its next major transformation:
the creation of a nonprofit organization in 2019, an act that would anchor the practice structurally in service of the wider community.
8. Becoming a Nonprofit – Anchoring the Vision
By 2019, Open Floor had grown far beyond its beginnings.
The curriculum was alive, the Teacher Trainings were established across continents, and a vibrant international teaching community had taken root. What had started as an act of courage and necessity had become a mature, embodied practice shared around the world.
At this stage of growth, the founders and the wider leadership recognized a new need:
to anchor the work in a structure that would serve the public good, protect the integrity of the practice, and ensure transparency as the community continued to grow.
And so, in 2019, Open Floor International (OFI) was formally registered as a nonprofit organization in Oregon, USA. This step was much more than administrative. It expressed a core intention that had been present since the beginning: that this practice did not belong to individuals, but to the community it serves. Becoming a nonprofit required courage, clarity, and dialogue.
To meet legal requirements — and uphold the ethical standards the founders envisioned — OFI restructured its online presence, removing promotional material for individual for-profit events. It was a difficult choice, but a necessary act of integrity, aligning the organization’s structure with its values.
A little later, OFI’s commitment to shared stewardship took another step when the organization adopted a Creative Commons framework for its core materials. This move ensured that the practice remained accessible, protected, and rooted in collective ownership — reflecting the values of transparency, generosity, and collaboration that shaped Open Floor from the very beginning.
The transition into nonprofit life was navigated collectively, using Dynamic Governance — the same shared-leadership approach that had shaped the early years. Through open discussion, careful listening, and a willingness to change, the community embodied the very principles at the heart of Open Floor: Move and Include.
This shift laid the foundation for the next chapter — a growing, adaptive, collaborative ecosystem guided by community and purpose.
9. Looking Ahead
By 2019, with the transition to nonprofit status complete, Open Floor International had reached the end of its first great chapter — the chapter shaped by the extraordinary dedication of the founders and founding members.
In the years that followed, many of those who had worked so intensely in the early days gradually stepped back from formal roles. Not because they were gone, but because they had given so much, often for years on end, and it was time to make space for others. Their presence remains — woven into the culture, the structures, the pedagogy, and the heart of the organization.
Open Floor continued to evolve. New generations of teachers were trained — including those who completed their programs in the unusual circumstances of the COVID years. The organization adapted, restructured, and kept learning how to live its values in a changing world.
What began as grief, courage, improvisation, and devotion became a living practice — carried by hundreds of teachers, thousands of dancers, and a global community that continues to grow.
Open Floor exists because people gave so much— time, creativity, resources, courage, and resilience. And if we want this practice to continue, to evolve, and to reach more lives, we must ensure together that this legacy has the support it needs to thrive.
Open Floor only exists because people gave everything – and its future grows from what we give today.
Catherine Elvinger
Mission Circle member
November 2025
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