Name: DANCING OUR EDGES
Start: 2025-09-20T14:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-09-20T17:00:00-07:00
Location: FLOCK 2516 NW 29th Ave, Portland OR

*Participants must pre-register for this event (no tickets sold at the door)*
In this workshop we will attempt to dance those parts of ourselves (those facets of our lives and psyches) which are the hardest things to dance. We will attempt to hold two intentions and braid them together: the first is to emotionally and somatically access more challenging aspects of ourselves in order to accept them, love them, experience catharsis, and gain distance from them. One could name this intention: healing, transformation or integration. The second intention is to aesthetically represent these challenging aspects of ourselves through dance, movement, gesture and embodied expression in order for us to find our own unique artistic expressions of these parts of us such that we may beautify them. Together these braided intentions can be named: beautifying our psyche as a way of healing and integrating.
Some examples of challenging aspects of ourselves that we will work with may include: shameful parts, judgmental parts, fears of illness, disease or death, fears of ostracization, desires to hurt others or manipulate them or destroy them, etc. The exercises that we will use are inspired by: Butoh, Clowning, Process Oriented Psychology, and Psychodrama. Some of the activities at this workshop may include: a) warmups that involve exaggerated emotional gestures, laughing, crying and extreme gesticulations b) a here-and-now practice whereby a single participant stands up in front of the group, names emotions, and then is encouraged to express one of those emotions through a march or dance c) psychologically challenging scenes devised by the facilitator that present a singular image for participants to dance simultaneously in the room d) participants creating their own singular, clear image from some challenging content within their psyche to attempt to dance.
https://www.deepplayinstitute.com/edgedance.html
https://www.tickettailor.com/events/thedeepplayinstitute/1839255
A Note on Emotional Safety: The practices on offer are designed to cultivate vulnerability, with its pleasures and its hardships. The practices tend to surface conflict and hurt that might conventionally be quieted or minimized. It is common to experience triggers of past psychological wounds within this practice, and this should be accounted for as a possibility. The facilitator will use techniques to contain and care for what arises, but will not be able to provide ongoing care for emotional fallout. The invitation is to be watchful of one's own safety and opt out in little and big ways as needed, and to have emotional processing methods in place (such as therapy, meditation, journaling, processing with friends, etc) that can help you learn with and from what happens at the intensive. This workshop is not therapy, in spite of it being potentially therapeutic or possibly transformative.