MOVING FROM TOUCH – IN-DEPTH EMBODIED ANATOMY & SENSORY AWARENESS THROUGH GUIDED TOUCH & IMAGERY
Time: Sunday 10-13.00
Dates: May 24 & June 14th
Location: Alma Söderberg Studio, Bergsgatan 29, Malmö
Teacher: Tuva Hildebrand
How are you listening? Are you thinking or actually listening to what is there – allowing it to move you? What is knowledge? How do we learn about ourselves, each other and the world through our sensing body?
In this slower in-depth workshop we use guided touch through hands-on partnering to bring you into a meditative state of deep presence through movement and dance, relating to other humans and the more than human. We listen to and follow our breath, weight, cells, organs, skeletal landscape and senses. We listen to the materiality of our body and the environment it relates to on a micro and macro level.
Methods we use are embodied anatomy, visual imagery, poetic verbal guidance, hands-on (bodywork inspired) partnering, solo and group dance improvisation, reflecting and conversating – inspired by the work of somatic dance pioneer Eva Karczag, BodyMind Centering, Contact Improvisation and Alexander Technique, among other techniques.
Through touch and movement, we practice shifting our experience from analytical and word-based thought into an embodied perception of the materiality of yourself and your surrounding. We practice listening deeply to what is there and daring to be in a place of unknowing and unpredictability; of allowing more possibilities for learning, moving and choice-making – for dancing – to be available. We listen and trust the body’s intelligence, archive and process in intimate meeting with the world it is being formed by and forming all the time.
The exercises offer tools to release unnecessary tension, access strength and move effortlessly in a physically and psychologically sustainable way. You will notice how you use your attention and how it affects all of your cells in all of your body. Releasing tension and listening deeply to what is there can open up an unrestricted creativity, a playfulness, a language, ideas and images that are sitting deeply in your subconscious – as well as a more non-violent way of relating.
Please note:
Every other Sunday our exercises will lead into solo movement explorations and every other Sunday our explorations will be integrated with contact improvisation inspired forms of moving.
Solo/no contact improvisation: April 19 – May 10, 31
In touch/contact improvisation: May 3, 24 – June 14th
Somatic practice is an umbrella term mounted by Thomas Hanna in 1975 referring to alternative western bodymind practices such as Alexander technique, Feldenkrais, Ideokinesis, BodyMind Centering, and more, which are all influenced by eastern practices such as Yoga, Qi Gong, Tai Ji Chuan, Zen Buddhism, Tantra, Vedanta, eastern medicine and philosophy, western indigenous practices, and western modern medicine, physical education and philosophy such as phenomenology, pragmatism, post-structuralism, post-modernism and western psychology.
During the 1960s until today dancers in a wide range of communities, but especially in the New York Downtown dance scene have integrated these practices into their dance training and practice into what can be called Somatic Dance Improvisation.
This integration and genre of practice is mainly what this plattform and organization is supporting and offering, with a desire to share it with a social political and decolonial awareness, as well as an interest in collective care as a socially transformational act.