Human Origami
an embryological journey into the Somatics of folding
BODY IQ Festival 2019
On being human in a world begging for our passion, compassion and action.
Somatische Akademie Berlin 15.-17. 11. 2019
Each of us bears the imprint of the other and an-other – something yet unknown and located deeply in our embodiment. In this workshop, participants will sample one theme from Human Origami, a somatic, improvisational movement practice in bodily folding. Co-created by two dancer/somatic educators, Human Origami explores the Möbius strip of movement that never arrives, nor finishes. The practice takes its point of departure from phenomenologist Gilles Deleuze. Here, corporeality, society and soul are enfolded in an infinite continuum of relational depth. The workshop will draw from the first two weeks of life – that phase when the embryo creates an entire body without a brain. Exploring the cleft of any fold offers a pathway to the somatic self, its historicity, and into transcendental consciousness. Here lies the imprint of otherness in this fractal multiplicity of folds – transparent in its porousness and its resistances. By enfolding and unfolding across iterative scales, we will come to meet the self and the other at the junction of entanglement and negotiation. Here lies a somatic option for moving away from default responses, traversing cultures and obliterating boundaries.
Susan Sentler is a dance artist working as choreographer, teacher, researcher, director, dramaturge and performer. She served as senior lecturer with Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance for 18 years and has taught globally in the field of dance for over 30 years. As performer she danced with the Martha Graham Ensemble, and in recent years has returned to performing in works of artists such as Tino Sehgal, Xavier le Roy and Jerome Bel. Susan’s creative practice is multidisciplinary, anchored by a honed somatic relationship to image. She works in gallery/museum contexts creating ‘responses’ or ‘activations’ for visual art works and exhibitions as well as durational installations orchestrating objects, sound, moving/still image and absence/presence of the performing body. Her work has been exhibited and performed in the UK, USA, Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Ireland and Singapore. She is a lecturer in the School of Dance & Theatre at LASALLE College of the Arts, Singapore.
For four decades, Glenna Batson has advanced multi-disciplinary approaches to embodiment studies as catalysts for artistic growth, teaching, performance and wellness. She has honed a trans-disciplinary approach to the study of embodiment, bridging between multiple disciplines. Her scholarly writings and research are synergistic, articulating points of correspondence between dance, somatic movement arts, embodied cognitive science, and phenomenology. Professor emeritus of physical therapy at Winston-Salem State University (USA) and a Fulbright Senior Specialist. Glenna currently is an independent educator in dance and Somatics in the USA and Europe. She co-created Human Origami with Susan Sentler, as practice research supporting the broad, sociocultural range of the performative (www.humanorigami.com). She is author of Body and Mind in Motion, Dance and Neuroscience in Conversation, and editor/contributor to Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives.