Friday November 9th Festival Schedule of Workshops

Photo credit: Blake Horn

Learn About Somatic Movement Education

Friday, Nov 9—Community, Healing, Creativity-Play, Simplicity & Self-discovery

9 – 9:30 AM:  Arrive, settle


Friday, Nov 9 9:30-10:30 am
Opening Ceremony

Monday, Nov 12 12:00-2:00 pm
Group Dialogue-Reflection & Closing Ceremony
Led by Mary Abrams
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To open our Moving Body Festival we invite all participants and presenters, whether coming to one workshop or the entire festival, to come together, body to body: to inquire, journey, express, create, and celebrate the miracle of being alive now. Please join us first thing on Friday, November 9th to invoke a safe space for exploring, learning, healing, discovering, dreaming, manifesting, transforming, and the emerging unexpected.

The opening and closing ceremonies will include breath/sound, moving, deep inner awakening and supportive interaction to facilitate us in forming, un-forming, and transforming ourselves over the weekend. The opening ceremony will focus on clarifying and seeding intentions for the weekend. On Monday, November 12th our group dialogue-reflection and closing ceremony will support us to reflect upon the gifts we have offered and received during the festival and feel for what supports and sustains our webs of connection as we move onward, manifesting new dreams within our families, communities, and world.

 


10:45 am-12:45 pm
Engaging the Web of Life
Taught by Stuart Garber
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Human beings are relational creatures. Our hearts thrive on connection: with our own unique gifts, with beloved others, with the miracle of life within and around us. When we touch into these layers together, a kind of synergy occurs.
Pioneers at the interface of the healing arts, consciousness studies and social transformation movements are applying these principles to develop practices for sensing and drawing support from the enhanced energy fields – the collective “we-spaces” – that develop when group gather with shared intentions for healing. These practices are deeply enhanced when combined with practices of embodied presence.
This workshop will explore this work of “mutual awakening,” weaving between:
• Continuum-inspired breath, movement and awareness practices to “light up” our inner (myofascial) webs;
• Imagery/invocation practices to enhance our experience of support from the earth, sky, and space around us; and
• Experiments in feeling and drawing support from the shared “we-space” we’ll create as a group.

 


10:45 am-12:45 pm
The Shape of Attention
Taught by Melissa Neidich
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In a world of constant stimulation filtering information is essential. However the ways we narrow our attention often keep us from seeing, sensing and engaging in the world as fully and richly as we can. A narrowly focused mode of paying attention can be useful for certain tasks but constantly maintaining this kind of focus requires a great deal of energy and increases stress. This workshop inquires: How can we be receptive to the newness of the moment? How can we shift our field of attention and move out of our usual ways of being in the world of our daily routines? Becoming more conscious of our habits of attention can take us past our preconceived ways that limit our pleasure, allowing us to experience the fullness of our senses and reconnect with forgotten parts of ourselves. Using breath, sound, improvisational movement explorations both solo and with a partner, we will explore ways we can become more conscious of our habits of attention and enliven new possibilities for attentional support.

 


1:45-3:45 pm
Resetting the Central Nervous System for New Experience
Taught by Clare Maxwell
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Clare will guide participants through a practice mapping our head-to-tail segmental design, experiencing one at a time all cranial nerves and 31 pairs of spinal nerves via their dermatomes. The process of traveling through the whole system recalibrates and re-orients the participants for allowing new, surprisingly easy movement to occur. Using the skin itself and the layer of tissue underneath the skin as a springboard for contact with the floor and generating movement, we will rock our way gently from supine to upright movement focusing on unified organization of the whole body and ease from head to toe
Clare designed this practice to learn and memorize the architecture and functioning of her own nervous system, and to deepen connections between that architecture and developmental movement patterns. She rigorously applied the principles of the Alexander Technique (awareness, inhibition, and “direction”) to her process, discovering that this process helps her students easily bypass unproductive movement patterns, access a more expansive, moveable state, and empowers them to make more constructive, life affirming choices in how they embody their own thoughts, wishes, and desires.
Clare Maxwell is a movement educator and Alexander Technique teacher based in NYC. She worked with two Bessie award winning choreographers during her 30 year career in experimental dance, toured her own work in the US and in Europe, and certified as a teacher of the Alexander Technique at ACAT/NYC and The Art of Breathing with Jessica Wolf. Clare created a full curriculum for actors during her five years on the faculty of the William Esper Acting Studio, and is currently developing a body mapping practice that follows the evolution and structure of our central nervous system.

 


4:00-6:00 pm
The Feel of It!
Taught by Susan Sinclair
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Dress is an intimate bodily act. One must choose what to wear everyday, creating a ‘second skin’. This act engages the body/mind in many ways. The texture, weight, design, color and specific materials used to fashion a fabric structure that one then extends their body into, informs the way one moves and how one feels. In this experiential workshop one will begin to explore this intimate relationship between the ‘two skins we are in’ and develop more awareness of how body movement/expression is affected by clothing. These explorations might even inspire one’s thoughts and ideas on personal expression, artistic vision (ie: costume), connections to culture and activism concerning textile production and consumption.
Please bring one article of clothing that you love to wear.

 


4:00-6:00 pm
Of the Embodied Heart 
Taught by Hanson Tse
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Discover a new and expanded expression of being by utilizing original and groundbreaking discoveries in consciousness, awareness, mind-body, spirit, Divine energy and more. Visionary master healer, Hanson Tse, works with the comprehensive complex of the human being in all expressions and combinations relevant to maximum change, well-being, and spiritual advancement.
In this special workshop we will examine the human heart as the center of intelligence of mindbodyspirit; activate its wisdom, integrate its intelligent function with the brain and incorporate heart brain coherence into the entire body-being. From here we will explore what it is like to live in this expression of self and as this expression of self, while moving and relating to the environment.
Participants may leave with a new sense of flow in their lives, emotional connectedness, and enhanced relationship to both self and world.

 


6:00-6:30 pm End of Day Gathering, Sharing, Dreaming

 


7:30-9:30 pm
Playbody—an oofa playlab
Taught by Sarah French
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Play is dynamic energy that brightens our awareness, feeds our souls, and nurtures our relationships and communities. Bodies in play feel alive, awake, and aware. In this session, we’ll leave “skills” at the door and open to the joys and delights of our bodies moved by play. Prompts inspired by Clown, dance, dreamwork, animal studies, and nature will shape a spontaneous journey into new inner and outer spaces. Our playful body is also our listening, receptive body. With playfulness as our guide, we’ll enjoy the chance to bump into ourselves and each other in unexpected ways that broaden our horizons, while bringing us home. Note: this playlab will be the unique creation of those who attend.

 


7:30-9:30 pm
The Wabi Sabi of Somatic Movement:
Refreshing the Simplicity and Nuance of our Embodiment Practices
Taught by Ayako Sho & Kima Kraimer
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The co-presenters invite participants into an exploration of the nature of the aesthetic Wabi Sabi, as it relates to foundational SME principals. The heart of Wabi Sabi offers the gentle reminder of the beauty of things imperfect, impermanent and incomplete. Considering this in our approach to self-care, metaphor and images provides a space for us to refresh our experience of wellness, as an intimate and immediate resource in our personal and professional practices. Our clients and communities can benefit from our embodied presence as we relate from an organic process of body wholeness within more complex environments.
Embracing simplicity, modesty and unconventional life elements, we redefine our personal meanings of taking care. We ask, how do I listen and respond to my rhythm while relating to others or incoming information? Attuning dynamically is a growing edge, a transient process, like a leaf cascading from its branch, drifting towards another manifestation.