Dear movement friends,
I’m Elçin. I founded the Atlas Movement Library community to bring together our movers, teachers, and their families and friends. It brings me great joy to have you here with us.
Moving together and building connections has always been deeply meaningful to me. What unites us in this community is our shared purpose: to move naturally and freely, to connect with our bodies and our surroundings, and to elevate our quality of life through healthy interactions, friendships, and routines. I truly believe that everyone here will enrich one another along this shared path.
Our community is currently active in Istanbul, Vienna, and Mersin. Trainings, retreats, and events taking place in these cities will be announced here. As the founding instructor of this community, I will keep you regularly and accurately informed.
I would be delighted to see you present and engaged in our community — a space where we can easily access Gyrotonic and Gyrokinesis movement sequences and reflect together on any questions that come to mind. 🤍
With love,
Elçin
Who is Elçin Arıkaner?
Elçin Arıkaner is a GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS® Pre-Trainer and movement educator with over 25 years of experience spanning professional sports, dance, and mind-body disciplines. A graduate of the Academy of Sports Sciences, she trains the next generation of teachers and teaches internationally, with communities in Istanbul, Vienna, and Mersin.
Her philosophy is simple: the human body is our atlas. Read carefully and understood deeply, it guides us toward natural, free movement — and toward ourselves. As a goalkeeper, she learned to protect the body. As a dancer, she discovered expression. And through GYROTONIC®, she found naturalness.
Her journey began on the football field. As a goalkeeper for Mersin Camspor — Mersin's oldest amateur football school, founded and coached by her father, Murat Arıkaner — she learned discipline, leadership, and trust in the body. In 1996, she was selected for Turkey's U18 Women's National Team and competed in the European Cup quarterfinals in Norway.
After years of growing up in a masculine world, she discovered that dance allowed her to express the feminine side within her. During her academy years, she won multiple national titles with her university dance team. Though it was a late age to begin a professional dance career, she had always dreamed of being on stage. She pursued that dream with determination. In 2004, she won her audition and earned a place in the world-famous dance company Sultans of the Dance.
It was there that she discovered Pilates. At first, it was a tool to refine her own posture. Then it became a calling. In 2006, she completed her comprehensive Pilates Teacher Certification with Judy Orlandella Ataman. After that to deepen her understanding of the body, she took a few more Anatomy classes from the master's program at a Faculty of Medicine.
In 2011, she moved to New York in search of a movement system that felt complete — and found it in GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS®, created by Juliu Horvath. Convinced that this system is the closest to human nature, she had the opportunity to work with highly esteemed teachers in New York and earned her Pre-Trainer qualification.
In 2013, she moved to Istanbul and founded her own studio. For a story that began in the goal and deepened all the way to the human spine, she knew there was only one true name: Atlas. For twelve years, Studio Atlas Istanbul was a home for lovers of GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS®. Today, Studio Atlas lives on as the Atlas Movement Library — a community founded by Elçin, where a growing archive continues to unfold for movement lovers and teachers.
Today, Elçin lives in Vienna, where she continues to teach and train the next generation of teachers — building a bridge of movement between Europe and Turkiye.