Glenna on the Road in Ireland and London – October 2022
October is my birth month: an emblem of 74 years of life experience. I will spend this past month in Ireland, dancing while aging, falling and rising, and falling again – letting go of the leaves in an elaborate psychophysical folio of movement, thoughts, emotions and dreams.
Do BOOK to join my colleague, Susan Sentler and I, in a new workshop on the f/ol\d, Saturday/Sunday 15th and 16th of October – on site and online! The theme – DRIFT – is a rich plot for art making, a deep investigation into embodied improvisational practice – movement and materials. See below for more about the f/ol/d – what it is, what it offers for artists and aficionados of all trades. Click on BOOK for details and registration.
The Fold as Somatic/Artistic Practice
image Susan Sentler & Jamie Forth, dancer Valerie Lim
My colleague, dancer and multimedia artist Susan Sentler and I are going on our 8th year of collaboration on folding as somatic movement, art making and curation. Formerly called Human Origami (http://humanorigami.com), we now are calling our process THE FOLD as Somatic/Artistic Practice. We offer periodic workshops and are open to tailoring workshops for online residencies. Our courses are geared to persons who share a kinship, correspondence with, or connectivity to, embodiment, including, (but not limited to) dance artists/educators, somatic movement arts teachers, visual- and multi-media artists, architects, teachers in the humanities or science and medicine, essentially those with an aesthetic willing to explore the unknown. We welcome persons interested in, or intersecting with, the arts to join us in exploring this living continuum of dimension and depth. Designed as a generative platform for sourcing creativity, our courses offer a space to transform playful exploration into deeply honed intimacy within art making. The starting point is the body – the somatic body in movement and stillness. We create an environment that is a sensory rich landscape — an improvisational playing field of inner-to-outer body relationships. Exploration of macro- and micro-folding dynamics will uncover liminal thresholds of becoming – a portal for engaging with the unknown. Enfolding and unfolding patterns will give rise to a tactile imprint – a palimpsest for the emergence of new material. Other stimuli will be layered into the practice: visual images, paper/fabric play, video recording, photography, drawing, automatic writing, and journaling. Exploring this multi-layered confluence of somatic materials will support the building of meta-skills for making your art of choice.
NOTE: Our work is not product driven. You may choose simply to explore the experiential themes in each class, or to bring a more focused intention to a new discovery or a theme/piece already in progress. The utility in morphing artistic praxis is to evolve new personal methodologies for art research and to hone ways of archive/anarchiving of current and future work. Further, no movement training is necessary to participate. You need only to bring a level of mature engagement with an aesthetic within your practice, regardless of discipline.
Learnings
- Work with experienced curators to hone critical elements in your art of choice
- Engage with a collective while receiving supportive and focused mentoring
- Enrich your experience within a collective that translates across the screen
- Progress your own somatically rich language to better articulate your process
- Ignite your imagination through working with tangible and intangible technologies
- Identify and transform default habits that block creative process
- Deepen the threads of your own research practice of archive/anarchiving
Welcome professionals of all trades and aficionados of the arts.
For more information, book a workshop for yourself, or interest your institution in our work, contact Glenna…
glenna@glennabatson.net
Testimonials
“The class leads from interior folds of the body along lines extending outwards into our immediate surroundings and offers a new way of tracing their trajectories and relations.
Susan and Glenna open a space for thinking and being together that is outside of any discipline or practice, while engaging precisely and gently on immediate concerns.”
Sony Devabhaktuni, professor of architecture
“Exploring folding…with you has only made me want to go deeper with this practice. Folding feels like accessing those subtle layers of self that we wish to explore as movement researchers and your way of teaching helped remind me that intuition is really at the heart of creative practice.”
Jacquelyn Elder, dancer
“Through and with such a rich guidance from periphery to the nature of presence, I find the fold and the folding practice moving me towards a new conceptual understanding of body and self, as the fold focuses towards an indefinite spatial awareness…a renewed anatomy without bounds and movement…a generative opening into the experience of being with.”
Peter Mills, independent artist/educator
Biosketches
Susan Sentler and Glenna Batson first met in 2013 in London at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. Since then, they have collaborated on artistic dance and movement research around folding phenomena. Originally entitled Human Origami (www.humanorigami.com), the work has been presented at various conferences, showcased in artistic installations, and taught in educational courses worldwide, including England, Ireland, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and East Coast USA. As well, the work continues to be disseminated in scholarly journals.
Susan Sentler, BA, MACP is an independent dance artist, multi-media maker/choreographer, teacher, researcher, director and performer. She has taught and practiced globally in and around the field of dance for over 30 years. Susan’s creative, pedagogic and research practice is inter/trans-disciplinary, anchored by a honed somatic relationship to image. She focuses on gallery/museum contexts creating/collaborating on ‘responses’ or ‘activations’ within exhibitions as well as durational installations orchestrating moving/still image, objects, sound and absence/presence of the performing body. Her work has been exhibited and performed in the UK, USA, Europe, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore. Currently she is Head of Learning and Teaching for the Faculty of Education at RAD.
Glenna Batson, ScD, PT, MA is an independent lecturer, researcher, mentor and performer. For five decades, she has honed a trans-disciplinary approach to the study of embodiment, bridging between dance, science, phenomenology, and somatic studies. Professor emeritus of physical therapy (Winston-Salem State University), internationally recognised teacher of the Alexander Technique, Fulbright Senior Specialist, Glenna currently teaches Somatics at Peabody Institute for The Johns Hopkins University (Baltimore, MD).