Name: Physical Listening for Changemakers
Start: 2025-09-14T10:00:00-07:00
End: 2025-09-14T17:00:00-07:00
Location: 2525 8th St, Berkeley, CA 94710-2541, United States

📅 Sunday, September 14th | 🕙 10:00am–5:00pm
📍 Wildcat Studio (2525 Eighth St, Berkeley, CA 94710)
🎟 Sliding scale tickets via Humanitix: https://events.humanitix.com/physical-listening-for-changemakers
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What becomes possible when we lead and collaborate with our full bodies?
Physical Listening for Changemakers is an improvisational movement workshop that invites us to listen beyond our ears and communicate beyond words, based on cues like body language, spatial relationships, and shifts of energy. In a world longing for justice, care, and connection, this kind of full-body awareness opens possibilities for how we create together.
Through solo, paired, and group movement explorations — alongside moments of reflection and dialogue — we’ll explore leadership and collaboration as embodied, relational acts, grounded in shared power and emergent process.
Open to changemakers of all kinds: educators, organizers, makers, dancers, healers, and anyone facilitating change in your family, workplace, or community,
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🐴 WHAT IS PHYSICAL LISTENING?
Physical Listening was developed by JoAnna Mendl Shaw and her dance company, The Equus Projects, through 25+ years of dance research—much of it in collaboration with horses. Horses are highly sensitive, non-verbal communicators who respond instantly to shifts in movement and energetic intent. Working with them has taught JoAnna and her collaborators how to cultivate a precision of full-body awareness. They have taught this practice to everyone from corporate leaders to Stanford Medical School students to elementary schoolers to professional dancers.
In this daylong workshop, you’ll be invited to sense more fully (through your body) what’s happening within and around you, especially in moments of tension, decision-making, or creative possibility. A glance, a shift in weight, crossed arms: what happens when we listen to these signals more consciously, and respond to them more skillfully?
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🔍 TOGETHER, WE'LL EXPLORE:
• Non-verbal communication & multi-sensory awareness
Gaining insight and direction from often-overlooked dimensions of connection, like body language, breath, spatial orientation, and energetic intent.
• Relational dynamics
Holding power with care and adaptability (collaborative leadership) and responding with agency (active followership).
• Co-creative emergence
Sensing what’s arising in a group and supporting its unfolding through how we move.
• Strategic creative process
Translating embodied insights into meaningful action and clear direction.
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🌀 WHAT DO YOU MEAN BY MOVEMENT-BASED?
This workshop playfully steers away from verbal problem-solving, and instead invites us to relate through guided improvisational movement and somatic awareness. We'll practice sensing and responding through our bodies—on our own and with others.
Most of the workshop will involve moving without physical contact, with optional opportunities to engage in touch-based exercises. We'll approach touch gradually—starting with spatial sensing, exploring phases of proximity and depth, and, for those who choose, tactile contact with another person.
During movement breaks, there will be ample opportunity to reflect and discuss how these practices apply to our work and daily lives.
The workshop is accessible to all curious movers—no dance experience required. (If you are a dancer, this work deepens listening and expands creative and relational capacity well beyond the studio. Join us!)
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👥 FACILITATORS
* Together, JoAnna and Rebecca bridge the worlds of movement and social transformation. They bring over four decades of embodied teaching and facilitation for healthcare professionals, nonprofit leaders, educators, grassroots organizers, naval strategists, dancers, parents, corporate teams, and more. *

JOANNA MENDL SHAW is an interdisciplinary choreographer and the Artistic Director of The Equus Projects, a company known for creating site-specific performances with dancers and horses. Since 1998, she has pioneered Physical Listening, a somatic approach to attending to other moving bodies through tactile, visual, auditory, and proprioceptive awareness.
JoAnna’s choreographic work has been presented across the U.S. and Europe and is recognized for its deep collaborative process and responsive engagement with diverse participants—human and equine alike. She has taught at institutions including Stanford, Juilliard and NYU, and brought the tools of Physical Listening to artists, educators, medical professionals, and the Naval War College. She is a certified Laban Movement Analyst and the author of Physical Listening: A Dancer’s Interspecies Journey.
https://www.equus-onsite.org/

REBECCA STRULL is a consultant, designer, and improvisational dancer who guides change grounded in relational intelligence and collective imagination. She has spent nearly a decade partnering with public agencies and mission-driven organizations to transform systems—including healthcare, education, childcare, agriculture, and immigration—so they work better for everyone, especially those historically excluded. Her consulting draws from Emergent Strategy, Integrative Design, and Biomimicry, and she's certified in Permaculture Design.
Rebecca also teaches Contact Improvisation across the Bay Area and and co-organizes the Thursday Jam at Berkeley's Finnish Hall. Her teaching draws on decades of dance experience and study with respected CI teachers such as Nita Little, Jo Kreiter, and Scott Wells. Whether in dance spaces or community planning sessions, she invites groups to playfully and authentically move together.
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rebeccastrull/

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📧 Questions? Email: [email protected]

REGISTER HERE: https://events.humanitix.com/physical-listening-for-changemakers