In this workshop, improvisation and somatic expressive group-therapy will be used as a strategy to search body memories and bodymind possibilities of kinesthetic empathy with all its physical and emotional states. Groups are offered the opportunity to explore alone and together diverse improvisation scores of breath rhythms, muscles tension and visual imagery using voice and movements to can gain access the unknown and known expression and function of physical and emotional states. After each of the activity, the group sits and discusses their experience. We further develop our gains through movement and voice in form of role-playing.  Each of the participants fills out three empathy casualty cards***, a suite of symptoms and behavior of actions ranging between real to fictional scenarios. We further extending our understanding of movement vocabulary possibilities and creative practice by randomly mix the cards and express them. These phases run from 3 to 5 minutes. Between each action the group retreats for a group debriefing. Each person single movement actions become the other person response creating together a kinesthetic field of emotional sculptural landscape. In this diverse improvised scores, we search for times and space of intimacy, risk, touch, separation, comfort, self-reliance and dancing on the in-between line of art and life.

The workshop choreographic educational structure is inspired by the structure from the artificial military battlefields in the Mojave Desert, Arizona (USA) where soldiers for war get prepared by acting out “disaster” scenarios and then debriefing on them.

WHO IS THE WORKSHOP FOR:

Participants who like to be physically, mentally and emotionally be challenged.  The first time we did the workshop In November 24^th, 2013 in Brooklyn, NY participants ranged from dancers to actors to long distance swimmers to activists.

SET-UP OF WORKSHOP:

The workshop can be hold indoors or outdoors but can not be in an open public space. An hour before the workshop Andrea Haenggi sets up the space with objects found in the existing space plus survival blankets and half-mask respirators and creates a kind of set where the participants then can play in and around during the workshop

 WORKSHOP PARTICIPANTS RESPONSE:

It was physically, mentally, and emotionally challenging. I am glad I could be part of this!  Yuko (Dancer)

Twas a stirring, bracing, bend into strange battlefields. Thank you all for the challenge and the camraderie. Amanda (Long Distance Swimmer)

 At a certain point early on yesterday I told myself to stop trying to figure out what was happening, stop trying to place the emotional battlefield into some bigger picture--and just follow the cards, the actions of everyone around me, my breathing. So glad I did. Most excellently wonderful experience. Take it further.                         Chris (Activist, Educator)

Andrea Haenggi

Swiss born and now Earth Citizen artist Andrea Haenggi lives in New York City and works in the field of dance, the public realm, visual art, and activism as a choreographer, dancer, director, educator, somatic therapist, performance and video artist.  She is a Certified Movement Analyst on the faculty of the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies in New York City, has a private practice as a Somatic Dance Movement Educator/Therapist for movement re-patterning, and gives creative laboratories, improvisation and choreographic workshop nationally in New York City and internationally in Nigeria, Switzerland and China. She shares her experimental practice and creative process in multiple formats and expressions.  Between1998 and 2009 she founded and directed AMDaT (Dance art Technology) – an ensemble of performers, musicians and artists- and produced interdisciplinary dance works for the stage, museum and site-specific locations. In recognition of merit in dance aesthetic research and innovative choreography she received in the 2008 Canton Solothurn Dance Award in Switzerland. As an independent artist since 2010, she initiated the intervention group the Direct Action Flâneurs with its “Sense Collection with Bodies and Typewriters (2011/2012)” that created over 10 mini-autonomous performance zones projects using kinesthetic principles of dance, choreography and writing to interrupt controlled public spaces; the Zvieri TV performance-talk show The Terror of Nothing (2013) presented at the Storefront for Art & Architecture (NYC )and in the summer 2013 she was a performance participant of the mobile desert performance project Shuttle in Tucson, Arizona. As a cultural initiator of live-interactions she took over in January 2013 with journalist Robert Neuwrith a garage/lot in Brooklyn, NYC, as a 5 -years project called 1067 PacificPeople to cultivating creative practices, experiences and reflections of live-interactions to find new forms, new practice, new ways of thinking about what the notyetknown humanity and dance could be.