Healing Action
for self-care, bodywork, and wellness
10 AM – 6 PM
ALL WORKSHOPS $5 EACH OR 3 FOR $12 (except where noted)
REGISTER HERE →
A day of healing, wellness, and rest through hands-on bodywork, workshops, classes, and a communal/performance talk. We are inviting practitioners from somatic and healing modalities, and artists whose practices lend themselves to healing, to offer a taste of their work.
Healing Day Workshops
ALL WORKSHOPS $5 EACH OR 3 FOR $12 (except where noted)
Marissa Perel
Rename and Unbody: Somatic Awareness and Language for Who and What We Are
10 AM – 12 PM
La MaMa Great Jones Studio 6
This workshop is for those who seek to find a space and a language for a self that is not “fixed” – i.e. constrained to norms of identity such as gender or ability. How can we establish terms for our many selves that live more closely to our experience? We will queer such somatic practices as Skinner Releasing, Body-Mind Centering®, and Authentic Movement to come up with our own language for what our materiality means to us (as bodies, organs, substances, and/or everything in between).
Marissa Perel’s interdisciplinary work includes performance, installation, criticism and curatorial projects. She is interested in how identity serves to contextualize one’s artistic research and methods. Currently an Artist-In-Residence at Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Perel has presented her work at The Chocolate Factory Theater, Dixon Place, The Poetry Project, Danspace Project, DIVO Institute (Prague, CR), Medium Gallery (Bratislava, SK), and Konstfack (Stockholm, SE), where she was recently a visiting artist. She has taught workshops for Movement Research Spring Festival: Somewhere Out There (2008), CLASSCLASSCLASS (2009-2013), What Is Queer Performance? (2014), and Community of Practice (2015).
Regina aka Wolf Medicine
Healthy Skin from the Inside Out: An Ayurvedic Approach to Skincare
10–11:30 AM
IATI Studio
Whether you experience acne, eczema, psoriasis, dry skin or any number of common skin-related ailments, these all stem from various imbalances in the body. Ayurveda teaches us that healthy skin comes from the inside out and this workshop will offer the tools you need to correct the most common skin conditions. End your relationship to skin cleaners, lasers, and peels, and learn a variety of low-cost and easy to adapt Ayurvedic methods for clearer, glowing skin.
Regina AKA Wolf Medicine is a Brooklyn-based Ayurvedic Wellness Counselor and yoga instructor trained at the Kripalu School of Yoga and Ayurveda. In 2013 she took a pause from the dance world to pursue a certification in Ayurveda from Kripalu followed by receiving her 200-hour yoga teacher training in 2014. She believes her challenge in this lifetime is to live in the now and sharing Ayurveda and yoga are a constant reminder that the present is all there is. Her love of Ayurveda and yoga has lead her to study both in the US and India helping her to gain a wealth of knowledge and experience that she is enthusiastic about sharing with her clients. She is a member of the National Ayurvedic Medical Association (NAMA) and 200 hr RYT.
Weena Pauly
Reconnect Somatic Therapy
12–2 PM (choose one 30 minute session)
IATI Studio
Individual sessions, $15 each
This workshop uses meditation, movement, contact and dialogue in a one-on-one individual session. This work emphasizes the importance of bringing our attention to what’s happening now, specifically in our bodies. As a facilitator, I am there to shepherd your questions and curiosity back to your self, trusting the wisdom that surfaces as yours to hear. The lessons that are embedded in our tissue, muscles, bones and organs, breath and heartbeat can only be heard if we take time and make space to listen to them. Four 30-minute individual sessions will be offered.
Weena Pauly has lived as a dancer in NYC for the last 18 years. She has over 20 years of experience in movement based healing and transformation. Weena is a Registered Yoga Therapist (RYT-700) as well as an Experienced Registered Yoga Teacher (E-RYT-500) and has certifications through National Academy of Sports Medicine, Phoenix Rising Yoga Therapy, PhysicalMind Institute, Little Flower Yoga and Mindfulness for Children, ISHTA Yoga, and Reiki. Weena has been a company member of STREB, Brian Brooks Moving Company, David Neumann/Advanced Beginner Group, Young Jean Lee’s Theater Company and most recently with Katie Workum.
Ni’Ja Whitson
Being a Body Out Loud: Trans-Indigenous and Political Practices for Artists and Activists seeking radical moves in their work, art, lives
12:30-2:30 PM
La MaMa Great Jones Studio 6
This physical practice is grounded in indigenous healing intelligences and African Diasporic performance aesthetics, designed to catalyze your activist, performance, and creative practices through rigorous improvisational excavations. We will create space to reveal and dismantle, where necessary, the silences, memories, ancestral knowledges, tyrannies, that are held in the body and engage how the rigors of engaging politics, social justice, and freedom in our art/activist-making can be mirrored in a commitment to radical self-care. Open to all people and artists. Trans, Queer, and Gender Non-Conforming Artists of Color encouraged. Participants should bring a notebook. #bonespeak #staywoke
Ni’Ja Whitson is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and educator. Recent awards include an LMCC Process Space Residency, Bogliasco Fellowship, Brooklyn Arts Exchange Artist Residency, two-time Creative Capital “On Our Radar” award, and dozens of other residencies and awards across disciplines. They are a practitioner of indigenous and diasporic African ritual and resistance forms, creating work that reflects the sacred in street, conceptual, and indigenous performance. Proudly, they have worked with many notables in theatre, dance, visual art, and music including closely with Sharon Bridgforth and Douglas Ewart, and other leaders such as Dianne McIntyre, Oliver Lake, Edward Wilkerson Jr., Guillermo Gomez Peña / La Pocha Nostra, and Baba Israel.
iele paloumpis
Witchcraft: A Corporeal Practice
12:30-2:30 PM
La MaMa Great Jones Studio 4
Several years ago I began experiencing changes in my health and body that shifted the ways I approach dance and daily life. Without concrete answers from doctors or various bodyworkers, I began looking to witchcraft and earth-based rituals as somatic practices of integration, acceptance and healing. I’ve also been thinking a lot about how all bodies – whether elderly, disabled, or otherwise “different” – can enter into dance. For this workshop, we will look to astrology and the lunar calendar, as well as our own unique and defiant bodies, to generate restorative movement. Come with an awareness of something you might like to shed, heal and/or embrace.
This workshop is for anyone interested in connecting to their bodies. There will be time to improvise and make movement, but mostly I want to make sure folks get whatever they want out of this workshop. If dancing or improvising feels intimidating/not right in the moment, participants can engage in other equally valid ways (i.e.: through writing, drawing, observing etc). Generally, I will encourage everyone to take part in a group improvisation/movement practice (simply because I think feeling our bodies in motion is so important), but this can manifest in multiple ways and it’s totally at your discretion. Overall, the goal during this workshop is to tune into our bodies in whatever ways feel good to us as individuals.
On June 9th the Sun will be in Gemini and the Waxing Moon will be in Leo. We will explore themes that are in alignment with these transits such as communication, will, ego, being in relationship, and finding balance between the head and the heart. We’ll also focus our healing energy on Gemini and Leo ruled body parts such as the hands, lungs, and nervous system (Gemini), and the heart, thoracic spine, spleen and aorta (Leo).
iele paloumpis is a dance artist, educator, intuitive healer and death doula. Their works have been presented through Brooklyn Arts Exchange, New York Live Arts, Dixon Place, the Flea Theater, Movement Research, Painted Bride Art Center, Franklin Street Works, and Taubman Arts, among others. They’ve danced for artists including niv Acosta, devynn emory, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, Jen McGinn, Sebastienne Mundheim, Katy Pyle, Emily Wexler, and Nina Winthrop. iele has studied Tarot since 1996, most recently under Eva Yaa Asantewaa. In 2006, iele received a BA from Hollins University and in 2016 they earned a certificate from Deanna Cochran’s Accompanying the Dying program.
Melanie Maar
Healing an Icon? Performance/Talk/Open Dialogue
3:30–5:30 PM
IATI Studio
In this gathering, performance is placed within the context of the Festival’s Healing Day.
The event takes place in the intimacy of the dance studio in order to take a deeper
look at the public act of performing. There will be a performance, a talk and then an open dialogue with the participants. This time is not meant to be therapeutic nor healing, but rather an opportunity to engage with the possibility and failure of performance as an agent of relationship between our internal and external realms, of aesthetics as a means to dissolve the diagnosis, of communal sensation within personal projection. If every symptom of our body-mind is perceived as human phenomenon free from external value, what can Healing learn from performance practice?
Melanie Maar is a New York based dance artist and teacher. In her early works she processed her father’s movement disorder and questioned how the desire for wholesomeness exists within the need to also objectify struggle and discomfort in performance. Studies in neuroscience, psychology and somatic practices have furthered and contradicted her questions as an artist who teaches movement awareness and who works with touch. She has taught internationally, most recently in Mexico and was awarded the 2015 Grant to Artists from the New York Foundation for Contemporary Arts. She worked with choreographers luciana achugar, RoseAnne Spradlin and Daria Faïn.
mayfield brooks
Rupture: Improvising In the Break
3:45–5:45 PM
La MaMa Great Jones Studio 6
We practice performance training rooted in inquiry where we rigorously apply transgressive politics and physically embodied ruptures to sustain movement practice. We interrupt our own improvised dances. There is a rhythm that the dancer finds, creates and destroys. We improvise in a break or a stillness that carries rhythm. We touch space, time and each other. We ask questions: How does one negotiate rupture in a dance, song or story? How do we creatively intervene in what’s expected? Where does this intervention begin and end or does it have an ending?
mayfield brooks is a cultural worker, dancer, and performance artist currently pursuing a PhD in Performance Studies at Northwestern University in the Chicago area. Before landing at Northwestern, mayfield completed a MFA in Theater and Dance at UC Davis in California, danced with San Francisco aerial dance company Fly Away Productions, studied contemporary dance at the School for New Dance in Amsterdam (SNDO), and was a student of somatics and performance at Moving On Center in Oakland California.