Body as Place Workshop

This workshop is offered as part of the Civic Lab Symposium,. Responding to the theme of Civic Placemaking, it places empahsis upon the role of the body in placemaking.

Extending from the question: how can we establish a sense of belonging when modern relationships with our bodies are so fragile? This workshop will provide a space to explore the body as place. Specifically, how an embodied arts approach can create an effective sense of 'home' through [re]connecting with our bodies.

Climate crisis, Covid-19, global diaspora and an irrepressible techno-industrial society are teaching us about the human need for connection. Our experience of withdrawal from the rest of nature, from other humans, from home, brings with it another acute realisation - the troubling notion that humans are experiencing disconnection from their own bodies (Walla 2009). The daily practices of our western lives have evolved to favour the mind over the body. Consequently, we lose our ability to listening to and believe in the wisdom of our bodies (LaMothe 2012). Yet, our bodies have so much to teach us about: inter-relation, aliveness, belonging and our sense of home. To secure respectful relationship to place, we need only to consider what we know about infant development. As babies our first human experience of place is through our sense of gravity and the felt sense of our physicality through touch - our flesh and the Earth in union. This primary relationship with Earth forms the basis for all other developmental progressions (Hartley 1995, 2004), and will be the starting point for this workshop.

You will be introduced to strategies towards reshaping the relationship we have with our bodies. We will begin by acknowledging our body as our primary ‘home’, developing awareness of our felt sense as the basis for our [re]connection. From here we will explore how reinhabiting our bodies is crucial for ecological reconciliation that enables us to honour ‘home’. By shifting and moving our bodies in response to the felt sense we can sustain and build upon our kinaesthetic understanding of self, other and environment towards “emersion of new sensible data” (Andrieu et al. 2018). Together we will use different approaches to develop, perform and hone our physical explorations.