About this Event
These somatic workshops, designed as movement labs, offer an opportunity to engage with an evolving framework, a model for embodied, creative, and collaborative practice: the Collective Imagining Process. Drawing on Authentic Movement principles, reflective processes, and models for creative articulation, these sessions are an invitation to explore individual and collective experiences, approaching these as sources of creativity. The sessions aim to foster creativity and mindfulness by deepening awareness of both the individual body-mind process and the collective dynamic. By facilitating exploration and artistic expression through movement, these workshops are particularly relevant to practitioners in the fields of dance, choreography, physical theatre, and somatic movement practices.
- What to expect
This second session offers engagement with somatic exploration of personal responses to external stimuli (such as images, sounds, textures, and scents) related to water in its liquid form. Guided by written prompts, each participant will follow their personal journey, continuously oscillating between phases of focusing inwards, moving from within, engaging with imaginative activities, actively exploring movement through improvisation, reflecting, and artistically manifesting. The session will culminate in a collective devising endeavour: an invitation for everyone to offer, receive, witness, imagine, dream, and create with others.
The focus of the session is the processual work with attention through softening awareness.
Softening awareness, as an approach, is a way to blur the edges of the focal point of awareness and open towards its periphery, while initiating what feels like a slowing and a dissolving of time… to loosen the grip on that which is known and to nurture a gentle attention, opening new dimensions of the body-mind process and its creative potential… to embrace and follow what emerges with no judgement or identification with the unfolding process… to arrive in a state of openness towards the not-yet-sensed, the not-yet-recognised...
This practice values and encourages honesty, self-agency, idiosyncrasy, freedom, and playfulness. It further aligns with the principles of respectful and horizontal engagement.
- Who is this workshop for?
Grounded in embodiment and creativity, this workshop is particularly suitable for movement practitioners (both professionals and those in training) specialising in dance, choreography, physical theatre, and somatic movement practices. It is also suitable for anyone who is interested in somatic approaches and feels comfortable moving in the presence of others.
Please note that this session involves some reading and writing in English.
- Collective Imagining Process
This workshop is part of a workshop series devoted to the Collective Imagining Process.
As my ongoing exploratory project, the Collective Imagining Process stems from my doctoral research and constitutes an evolving model for collaborative, artistic creation through devising. Drawing on meditative, somatic, and reflective approaches, the model facilitates the investigation of personal and collective experiences as creative sources, suggesting both solo and collaborative movement explorations.
Comprising designated phases of activities, the model integrates meditative, explorative, and actively creative acts, while fostering recurring transitions between, as well as the co-occurrence of these acts. Essentially, the model offers space and time for one to first slow down and connect with their own personal experience, to look at it through a creative lens, and to then explore how to be amongst and create with others, without losing awareness of oneself.
- Approach
The Collective Imagining Process is founded on the synergies between Authentic Movement (as connected with Carl Gustav Jung’s method of Active Imagination) and aspects of Edmund Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological methodology. It is informed by the work of practitioners who develop Authentic Movement as a therapeutic and mystical practice (Janet Adler, Tina Stromsted, Paula Sager, and Linda Hartley, among others), as well as those who apply it in an artistic context (Andrea Olsen, Amy Voris, and Joan Davis, among others). By drawing on models for creative articulations (Creative Articulations Process (CAP) by Jane Bacon & Vida Midgelow, Josiah Hincks’s Five Facet Model of Creative Process, and Lawrence Halprin’s RSVP Cycles), the Collective Imagining Process explores a framework for both solo and collaborative artistic sublimation through somatic, movement-based approaches.
- Facilitator info
Hristo Ushev is a transdisciplinary artist and researcher from Bulgaria, currently based in London. He holds a BA degree in Acting for Drama Theatre from the National Academy for Theatre and Film Arts, Bulgaria. He graduated from the MFA and recently completed the PhD in Creative Practice Dance at Trinity Laban, London. With a background in theatre, Hristo is interested in the body-mind process, exploring the moving body as linked to, representing, and triggering psychological processes. As a mover, choreographer, and workshop facilitator, he explores movement through a somatic lens. His ongoing research looks at personal experiences as creative sources, while investigating personal and collective imagination drawing on Authentic Movement principles and phenomenological methodology.
Photo credit: Andras Viszmeg
Event venue & nearby stays
Chisenhale Dance Space, 64-84 Chisenhale Road, San Francisco, United States
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