SYMPOSIUM

1. Programme
2. Opening & Panels
3. Deep Dives
4. Residencies
5. Biographies

PROGRAMME

Lace #1: Topographies of Touch is bringing together experts working at the intersection of art, academia and activism to examine the challenge of place, the restriction of its specificity and to explore strategies for successful interpersonal cross-cultural contact-making in the age of gentrification, polarisation and segregation.

Lace #1 will provide distinctive formats curated and hosted for and by practitioners.

Topography, according to the Oxford Dictionary of English, brings together the origin words topo – that comes from the Ancient Greek for place and graphy – commonly associated with writing. Unlike choreography, however, where -graphy has traditionally been associated with writing, in sciences like geography, -graphy is what designates this particular science as descriptive. Topography, then, can be understood as the science of describing, naming and acknowledging place in its situatedness, its specificity, in its present and its history.

When described, named and acknowledged, the abstract – situatedness, specificity, present and history – becomes sensed, felt. It becomes the experience of colour, of tone and texture; it becomes a source of wisdom and evidence of knowledge. This activity evidences the importance and value of considering place for any (critical) study to succeed.

Topographies of Touch is imagined as a collection of events, each of which functions as a metaphorical place where touch can be examined in its context-specific capacities. The range of contexts we chose to examine this year encompasses a variety of scales: human-to-human, human-to-practice, human-to-institution and human-to-non-human. 

When examined within a variety of contexts in a short period of time by a variety of human and non-human subjects, what about touch will become evident? What about touch, in other words, will we be able to learn only when we accept this simple suggestion: that each of our experience of touch is specific and that each of our experiences of touch is specific for a reason.

• Panels will be moderated by experts in the corresponding field supporting several panelists in exchanging with and through their practices and critical reflections.
• Deep Dives offer audiences prolonged exposure to a practice of experientially based research.
• Two residencies will precede the symposium sharing their process findings at the symposium weekend in the format of Deep Dives.

OPENING & PANELS

Opening
Hosted by Deirdre Morris, pavleheidler, Eszter Gál and Peter Pleyer, the opening ceremony will introduce the ImPulsTanz Symposium for Dance and Other Contemporary Practices to the world’s stage. Like the Symposium itself, this ceremony will be collage-like in structure, drawing from a series of formats to tell the story of how the Symposium came to be, what purpose it might serve and what one could do to unlock its potential.

The ceremony will include a guided somatisation. Please dress so that you can dance, if you’d like to.

Expanding Fields
Moderated by Efva Lilja
What challenges do we face when we do not stay within given frameworks but choose trans-media contexts? Which are the specific challenges encountered by artists and researchers working through and alongside the expansion of their field? How can we act to support the development of a relevant and critical discourse? And a vocabulary that supports new ways of communicating?
The role of the arts is to act past what we already think we know. New narratives, images and thoughts are formulated. Creativity is stimulated. Or? This panel addresses practices that generate trans-media methods of research, work, sharing and communicating, practices that challenge traditions and conventions, ideas of value and utility, maybe of the concept of art itself. Let’s meet, share and discuss from our different places of departure!
Text by Efva Lilja

Panel participants: Eva Meyer-Keller, Jeroen Peeters, Lucie Strecker, Nikolaus Gansterer

3,6,9: Energetic touch and polymathic dancing
Moderated by Mayfield Brooks
How can the practice of improvisation adapt through numbers and archetypes that signify different approaches to touch? Can we challenge the status quo by approaching odd numeric configurations in dance that expand out of the solo and the duet or the 1 and the 2? How do we make the consequence of our actions visible in the present by thinking and moving in multiples beyond the material world and into different energy fields? 3, 6, 9 is a group of numbers that highlight the energetic power of a sum and its parts and encourages shifting from the singular to the multiple, whether it’s understanding the body as time / space / matter or vice versa. This approach also moves away from capitalist notions of the individual who dances with another individual and away from touch as simply a self-gratifying sensory experience. What if touch was a multidimensional experience awakening the polymath in all of us? What if the assumption was that we are always dancing in an oddly, exponential and multiple space with ancestors, sound, organic matter, architectural environments, sentient beings, or the cosmos? Using 3,6,9 as a jumping off point, this panel will be an interactive, associative and embodied conversation engaging with ways to be multiple in dancing, imagining and connecting through touch and improvisation.
Text by Mayfield Brooks

Panel participants: Makisig Akin, Anya Clouds, Ismael Houston-Jones

Mediated Touch
Moderated by Katy Dymoke
Touch is a touchy subject.
The topic of touch has been subject to polarisation, on the one hand the pro-touch discourse recognises touch as essential to human survival, development, the foundation of healthy relationships, a language for the expression of feelings, emotions that are beyond words and so on. On the other hand, the non-touch discourse conflates touch with the violation of personal boundaries, as the conduit for abuse, unwarranted attention, resulting in the regulation of touch within education, care, social settings.
For those protected by non-touch regulation there are incidents of touch deprivation and the choice or opportunity to consent to touch is regulated out – to protect professionals from accusation and recipients from abuse. This scenario reduces touch to a one-dimensional risk assessment. If touch is foundational to personal and interpersonal relationships, how can we populate the space between these discourses and argue for touch and careful consensual procedures to enable inclusion and counter deprivation?
Now we can meet and touch again, further research into touch has ensued and provided a precedent for “consent” for “safe touch” – and a starting point to build from. With the pandemic many felt this through a screen and yet remained touch deprived, longing for contact and having to renegotiate how to feel safe to touch again.
How do we experience touch now?
Are we aware of touch taboo?
Are we subject to hidden social diktat to the expense of touch in our lives?
Is the pro-touch discourse able to withstand the authority of non-touch regulation?
How do we address fear of litigation for inappropriate / unwarranted touch?
Text by Katy Dymoke

Panel participants: Anne Juren, Vera Tussing

Intra-species Contact
Moderated by Deirdre Morris
This panel looks to gather evidence of knowledge-making and creativity within the field of inter-species contact. When successfully establishing inter-species contact challenges the orders established by the western canon, how does the challenge exercise a wider influence on the canon itself? To successfully make “intra-species contact” – in the sense of Karen Barad – we must assume that no distinguishable “species” pre-exist the making of this particular contact. This is because each of the “species” must distinguish itself as “species” through and from this contact, since distinguishment itself is and must remain relational, not absolute. The reason we have already failed in successfully making “intra-species contact” before we even tried is twofold. Firstly, the concept of “species” is so common, Robin Wall Kimmerer only needed to write “george washington” to prove how common this concept is and how effective / affective it is. And secondly, distinguishment is not a word. All joking aside. Whilst not a word, distinguishment is key. At least key to the unlocking of the content of this panel. For what happens when distinguishment is not assumed, but discovered? This panel looks at how successful the notion of “human” is at preventing affective “human” to “non-human” contact. And why! This panels looks at what it takes for “human” to make contact, or, in Haraway’s terms, to make “kin-with,” since “nothing makes itself.” This panel brings together stories of contact, of kinship, of affective experience and knowledge-making emerging from and within the field of entanglement between all Earthly matterings.
Text by Deirdre Morris and pavleheidler

Panel participants: Alex Bailey, Amaara Raheem, Gabriella Zeno

DEEP DIVES

Deep Dive: Shuffling in the tall grass
Alex Bailey

“My deep dive would progress to my most recent collaborative artistic process which I currently develop for a performance in March 2024, which sees me sharing authorship of a theatre performance with an 8-year-old dog called Salat. Much of our working time together could be spoken about in terms of shuffling in the tall grass, although that is not the name of our project together.  

Forms of canine thinking as alternative cognitive processes that are on a par with, if not superior to, the human mind and senses open a field of varying ways of finding ourselves in the world. If what we normally think is inextricably linked with tactile feeling, tasting, touching, and physically sensing, a new understanding of our modes of existence come about.  

My desire is to question our persisting relationships with dogs in our societies. We are the ones who think dogs are a companion species but what do dogs think? This is research that highlights the oppression of animals through the human need for intimacy, rather than adhering to the more intuitive argument that sees humans rescuing animals from oppression by bringing them into our homes. In our intimate relations with animals, we set up an extra human domain where we love animals, and we partner with animals within this domain to the extent that pet owning has become a new mode of management.” 

Deep Dive: Mossbelly Research Project
Angela Schubot & Shelley Etkin

The mossbelly research project explores embodied ways to be with the knowledge and insights of plants and plant consciousness. Angela Schubot and Shelley Etkin bring together a range of experiences that facilitate and offer practices for communication with plant beings. Together, their work integrates dance/embodiment with healing practices. They explore methodologies for entering resonance with particular plants, wherein these encounters are spaces for knowledge-sharing, asking how this moves the body towards reciprocity with plants, land, and other beings within a shared ecology. 

Angela and Shelley facilitate a somatic journey to embody qualities learned from resonance with moss. Through a combination of physical and perceptual attunements, imagery, and language impulses, participants can experience and experiment with how they might be able to meet moss through their (human) bodies. This meditative journey has continually been adapted throughout the recent years of embodied encounters with moss. The skin of the earth, polyrhythm in the body, growing on other structures and becoming the ground for others; these will all be channels into connecting with the consciousness of moss. This can be offered as an experiential meditation accessible to bodies who would rather remain still, journeying through their felt-sense and imagination, as well as bodies who might enter a movement research process during this time-period.

Deep Dive: Through These Fibres. An introduction to technosomatic practices
Klaas Devos/Reach and Collabs.

“In the first part of the Deep Dive, I would introduce S0M_AI, an interactive somatic dance interface. S0M_AI is a software that generates controlled audio-scores and visualization exercises for movement improvisation based on ongoing participatory field research initiated in 2020, as part of my practice-based PhD in dance. After a short introduction, I propose to experiment with the software on the floor. A downloadable beta-version will be available, and a user-feedback session organized online later this year. 

I continue to specify how I use S0M_AI in combination with more recent technologies. I will zoom-in on a collab. between Klaas Devos/Reach and Collabs. and LWT3 engineering lab. We develop a smart-suit with motion-data (MOCAP) and bio-data sensors (EMG, muscle tension; EEG, electric current) to remediate dance sensations in real-time. The case-study serves to clarify how dance practices become more resilient to some of the issues that occur when adapting a conventional dance practice to a technological environment. 

To clarify these adaptive/resilient processes in technosomatic practices, I create Through These Fibres. This is an online platform for support and exchange of dance practitioners in their technological investigations. The structure of Through These Fibres relies on three characteristics of technosomatic practices: superficial embodied awareness (embodied sensations and sensors), geometry in hybrid (virtual and real) performance spaces, and digital and physical temporalities (embodied reaction time and computed processing time). I propose to close with a talking circle sharing our experiences working through or avoiding these challenges.”

Deep Dive: The f/old as corporeal carrier bag
Glenna Batson & Susan Sentler

Our ongoing practice as research with ‘the f/old as somatic/artistic practice’ is now in its 11th year, and tethers directly into this field of interest. Glenna as a seasoned somatic practitioner and Susan’s honed somatic root in image and art making are areas that challenge and dialogue with the discourse in and around the field(s) of dance, creativity, documentation, etc.

This deep dive to be presented in a hybrid mode, holding both online and live participants.

What can a fold be? A bag, vessel, womb, pocket, hollow, pit, gap, a flap … an/other way to enter corporeality through the tactile discovery of the vibrancy of thinginess. In this time together, the virtual collective will explore the f/old – a practice given over to somatic/artistic making – of letting things appear.* The f/old becomes alchemical through improvised languaging, gesture and collaging of media. It is a palpable conversation, one that loosens the laces that bind and unearths the tectonic layers of re-membered textures, the rub and slip-slide of surfaces, of the past as well as of the moment. Here lies discovery…what is gummy and stuck in the known as it meets what is porous and fluid in the unknown. In this space-time, the virtual collective will explore the concept of ‘a carrier bag’ a cultural relic that is an in-vestment in the safeguarding and transporting of historicity.  It is in this iterative matrix that we curate body/space/objects (glean, cull and care for) which is an-archived as process, not product.  Come dive into and out of our enfolded topographies, our cavernous universe of touch.

RESIDENCY: MA – PREGNANT NOTHINGNESS#2

Hosted by Defne Erdur
17–21 July 2023, 10:00–16:00
Location: tba

Last year’s residency in the frame of IDOCDE’s Symposium was devoted the Japanese concept of MA. Then we pursued the desire to co-create “empty space” as an interval, a threshold. We wanted to experience timelessness, spacelessness, pregnant nothingness to allow ourselves to transform, discover/recover, reconnect to our creative potential as artists, researchers, teachers, facilitators, students from any field of knowing, i.e., curious beings on this planet. And we were in awe with the gifts of resting in MA. In this year’s residency, we are going to approach that same desire to co-create “emptiness” as something that can be touched, as something that can touch. Touch will be our orientation device, literal and figurative, as we inquire MA. How does touch orient the experience of discovery? How does touch orient us for recovery? What “hidden realities” can we get in touch with, if only we let ourselves be guided by “what is not there (yet)” in a tactile manner? You are invited to co-exist in an open space for experientially diving into emptiness and touch.

RESIDENCY: ECOTONE#2

Hosted by Anouk Llaurens, Eva Maes & Julien Bruneau
17–21 July 2023, 10:00–16:00
Location: tba

Ecotone are laboratories proposed within the framework of Replays, variations on Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Score, artistic research initiated by Anouk Llaurens (see: http://somework.be/pages/Replays#annotation-14f1b). Replays aims to celebrate and perpetuate the culture of the Tuning Scores through their artistic and pedagogical diffractions. Lisa Nelson’s Tuning Scores offer a practice of the collective, of living and composing together, with all the forces present, especially making explicit the differences and frictions that are present in the shared space. It teaches us to compose with our dissensions.
For Ecotone#2, Anouk Llaurens invites Julien Bruneau (choreographer, dancer and visual artist) and Eva Maes (dancer) who both displace / creolise the Tuning Scores to invent new forms. Anouk and her two guests will share one of their artistic or theoretical practices, in continuity / linkage / resonance with the work of Lisa Nelson.
Opening a transitional zone between Replays and the participants’ research the participants are invited to practise their research by observing the possible resonances, meeting points or frictions with what is shared by Anouk and her guests. An ecotone is a transition zone between several ecosystems. It acts in relation to the inhabitants connecting, separating and modifying the habitats that border it. For dancers and art researchers interested in Tuning Scores, diffraction and learning about their research through the encounters with other ways of being / seeing / dancing. Come with a research question, ready to listen to and move from your sensations.

BIOGRAPHIES

Alex Bailey
Alex Bailey is an artist and performer. They studied at the Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam, with an MFA in Fine Arts and is based in Vienna. Since 2014, in collaboration with Krõõt Juurak they have made Performances for Pets an evolving series of interspecies performances for cats, dogs and their humans companions. They participated in Parasol at TanzQuartier, working with Ian Kaler and Alix Eynaudi. They have worked and performed alongside autistic and differently abled children for Le Studio Film and Bühne. Alex has been invited to show his work, created with Krõõt Juurak, at brut Vienna, Dansehallerne, Copenhagen, and MDT, Stockholm. At TQW, they presented the performance and research project CODOMESTICATION.

Glenna Batson
Glenna Batson, (she/her) ScD, PT, MA is an independent lecturer who has drawn from multiple sites and discourses as catalysts for teaching, research, mentoring, artistic growth and advocacy. For more than five decades, she has honed a trans-disciplinary approach to embodiment studies, bridging between dance, neuroscience, neuro-rehabilitation and the Somatic Arts. Glenna believes that life experience in any milieu – both formal and informal – deserves a place in the evolution of a fresh vision, freeing us from uni-disciplinary silos. Her career path included extensive travel, working in various trades from cocktail waitressing to belly dancing. Professional roles have included professor emeritus of physical therapy (Winston-Salem State University USA, an HBCU, a historically black university), clinical (physical) therapist, somatic educator/practitioner, dance researcher, mentor, performer, artscience advocate and criminal justice activist (abolishing extreme sentencing). She is an internationally recognized teacher of the Alexander Technique and a former Fulbright Senior Specialist (2008–2022), Author of Body and Mind in Motion: Dance and Neuroscience in Conversation, and co-editor/contributor to Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities, Contemporary Sacred Narratives (2014). Together with Susan Sentler, Glenna co-created the f/old as somatic/artistic practice, a collaboration that continues to thrive in its eleventh year. Their book: embodied enquiry in art making: the f/old, awaits publication by Intellect Books UK (early 2024). Glenna currently teaches Somatics: embodiment for the 21st century at Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland, USA. She can best be found on the ballroom dance floor.
https://glennabatson.net

Efva Lilja
Efva Lilja works with choreography as dance, imagery and text in works that take us through different layers of consciousness, erotic episodes, contemplative calm or playfulness with a political edge. Her works are both entertaining and worrying when she tackles the basic human condition with singular suggestive power. She is an unconventional artist, who uses choreographed sequences in the formation of a reality where everyday events and actions are transformed and given new expressions. She creates cross-disciplinary works that have been described as beautiful, poetic, controversial and groundbreaking. Her works have been shown in some forty countries and her books and articles have been translated to several languages. www.efvalilja.se

Katy Dymoke
As director of Touchdown Dance since 1994 Katy has co-created projects and productions integrating visually impaired and sighted dancers. Katy works as a touch and movement based specialist with all ages and abilities. Dance Movement Psychotherapist and supervisor Katy undertook doctoral research into the impact of touch in her practice and has published on this topic. As director of Embody-Move, the Body-Mind Centering^® UK training programme, Katy delivers BMC^® training and sessions in diverse contexts. 

Mayfield Brooks
Mayfield Brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of  the Lenape people, also known as Brooklyn, New York. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie / New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their dance film, Whale Fall, a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist and currently a Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.

Anouk Llaurens
Anouk Llaurens dances, teaches, researches and practices shiatsu. She has been involved in attentional practices since her encounter with the work of Lisa Nelson (Tuning Scores) in 1998. Through her current research, Anouk is investigating the notion of “experience as document” and develops what she calls “poetic documents” in the form of performances and participative practices. She teaches improvisation/choreography at the Royal Conservatory of Antwerp and in various dance and visual arts programs in Europe. She has contributed to the online publication Mind The Dance. She collaborates with the Belgian artist Julien Bruneau. She lives in Brussels. anoukllaurens.be

Eva Maes
Eva Maes, escaped, after obtaining a Master in History, to Cunningham Dance Studio (NY), where she enjoyed the presence of different dancers of several generations of the Merce Cunningham Company (Meg Harper, Louise Burns, Carol Teitelbaum, Foofwa d’Immobilité, Robert Swinston, e.a) as well as Merce Cunningham amongst her teachers. In 2003 she met Lisa Nelson´s ´Tuning Scores´ (a process leading to more workshops and collaborations with her and with the group ‘Tuning Space - Brussels and its humus) and started her studies at the School for Body-Mind Centering®, where she graduated as Practitioner (2006, USA), and as certified BMC® Teacher (2019, IT). She assisted Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen in various workshops in NY (2006, 2018), Brussels (2007), Bratislava (2006), Berlin (2013, 2016), Amsterdam (2013), Claremont (2019) and taught/ teaches BMC at Leben Nuova and Corporalmente, Licensed Training Programs BMC® in Italy and Brasil respectively, and at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp. Other collaborations in dance include Chantal Yzermans/Radical Low and Anouk Llaurens. She loves fluctuating between diverse educational, artistic and research geolocations. Both the project ´Embodiment Embroider´, concluded within the Master Dance- program at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, as well as the research project ´Transmitting the Body´, developed within the CORPoREAL-platform, emphasized a desire to continue exploring ´embodiment´ in relation to ´transmission´ as core themes of Dance. www.evamaes.wordpress.com

Julien Bruenau
Julien Bruneau is an artist working with presence, movement, drawing and language. His interest lies in the dynamic interplay between interiority and collectivity and takes shape in various formats: performance, installation, exhibition, publication, laboratory or transmission. He holds two master degrees, one in visual arts (ENSAV La Cambre, Bruxelles) and one in choreography (AMCh, Amsterdam) and completed the research programme THIRD (Das Research, Amsterdam). He writes and works as an editor in the field of artistic research and beyond, notably for oralsite.be and Revue Corps Objet Image (2016–2022). His first book, Fields, is published by Varamo Press in December 2022. Since 2020, he teaches Authentic Movement.

Klaas Devos
Klaas Devos (he/him/Q.) is a Belgian choreographer and researcher in the arts focusing on perception, attention, and sensitivity in dance. He graduated at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp, PARTS (Performing Arts Research and Training Studios) and a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies) in Brussels. He attained a Master in theatre and dance studies with great distinction at the University of Antwerp with a thesis on practice-based dance epistemology, or how we think through dancing. Since 2020, Devos is PhD. fellow at the Royal Conservatoire Antwerp and the University of Antwerp. In his artistic and practice-based PhD in dance (2020–2024), Thinking Bodies in dance. A somatic REACh. he is researching expanding awareness in somatic dance through algorithmic choreography. Devos is active as artistic supervisor for the educative MA projects at the Conservatoire Antwerp, he is lecturer in dance and choreographic studies in the Brussels Dance Academy and teaches dance practices at the Academy of Bruges. Based in Brussels, Devos coordinates Reach and Collabs. and Reach Studio, a network and residency place dedicated to embodied and computational creativity in live and mediated performing arts.

Defne Erdur
Defne Erdur is a mover, researcher and a therapist working in the fields of performing arts, health and education. She is trained in Contemporary Dance (PhD), Sociology (BA,MA), Inter-model Expressive Art Therapy and Creativity, Meditation (World Peace Initiative), and Trauma Healing (Somatic Experiencing, Integral Somatic Psychology, Full Embodiment, TRE, Deep Tissue Release and Trigger Point Massage Therapy). Having worked with pioneers in Somatics and different theraupeutic modalities, she is actively practising and researching towards a deeper understanding of the body as a bio-psycho-social whole. Invested in building safe, inclusive, and collaborative creative environments she offers workshops (Hunting Gathering Cultivating, Every Body Knows, Consent Improvisation) and residencies (MA-Pregnant Nothingness, Moving Library, Into the Light) around the world. She travels and works with different populations ranging from professional and amateur dancers to therapists; from women and LGBTQIA+ people to migrant children and youth. In the last years, she prioritised founding and coordinating humanitarian task forces for trauma prevention and healing (SE Turkey Covid-19 Support for Health Practitioners, SE Ukraine Task Force, World Human Relief-SE Turkey Earthquake Solidarity). Today she is recovering from burnout, reconnecting to her own resources and building her home. She believes in joy.

Shelley Etkin
Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, gardener, herbalist, educator, and writer. Her artistic research centers around 'landing’ as a methodology for engaging with relations between bodies and lands through process-based thinking, making, and healing practices. She integrates backgrounds in dance/somatics, ecology, pedagogy, and decolonial queer feminist community organising. Shelley’s practices are dedicated to place-based knowledges in connection with plants, soil, and herbal medicines.

Pavleheidler
pavleheidler (they / them) (ADHD-autism) is a movement-and-word artist and activist, educator, curator and researcher. Their work-ing is meant to be encouraging of the continual re-form-ing in and of the emergent field of queer critical practice. www.pavleheidler.com

Deirdre Morris
Deirdre is an interdisciplinary site responsive installation and performing artist, educator,  director and curator.  Deirdre’s artistic work focuses on site relational somatics, contemplative practices, the nervous system, environmental ecology and social justice. Most recently in a series of short films, installations, & associated workshops: Land / Tree / Sky / Window, with collaborative partner Esther Baker Tarpaga. Deirdre’s work explores the relationship between organic wild world, man made structures & ideas and the stories & desires we place upon them. Deirdre directs her own project, ‘The Forgotten Body Remembers’, a site for relational somatics and contemplative practices and is one of the curatorial team for Lace #1. She received her MFA from the University of California Davis (2014), where she focused her studies on contemplative practices and the performing body. Deirdre is interested in mobilising embodied agency – through reciprocal relationships and deep states of meditation, that offer balm whenever possible. Deirdre spends her time in the forests and mountains around Santa Fe New Mexico whenever possible! 

Angela Schubot
Angela Schubot is a dancer, artist, choreographer, researcher and bodyworker-healer. She has developed a body state that resonates with the inner flow in her body and other bodies; an interest that was deepened by her fascia therapy education/method of Danis Bois and intensified by working with healing rituals, plant consciousness, and master-plant diets. Her work finds artistic languages and alternative bodies in the form of dance pieces, in participatory formats, in research, teaching and healing practices and in collaborations with human and non-human beings.

Susan Sentler
Susan Sentler (she/her), BA, MACP is an independent artist rooted in the field(s) of Dance, Performance, Visual Arts working as educator/lecturer, maker/choreographer, organiser/administrator, director, producer, curator, researcher, dramaturg, performer and advocate. She has worked globally with conservatoires, schools, academies, festivals, specialised workshops, conferences/symposiums, etc., and for all levels of higher education since 1992, meriting Senior Lecturer status from Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. As performer, she danced with the original second company ‘The Ensemble’ of the Martha Graham Dance Company in the 1980’s and has returned to performance working in the past decade with artists such as Tino Sehgal, Xavier le Roy, Dora Garcia and Jerome Bel. Susan’s creative, pedagogic and research practice is inter/trans-disciplinary, anchored by a honed expanded somatic relationship to image, interested in dissolving the indexical to open a more expansive associative materiality. She has ongoing collaborative research rooted in the concept of ‘the fold’ with colleague Glenna Batson titled the f/old as somatic/artistic practice. The work has been presented at various conferences/symposiums, showcased in artistic installations, and taught in live/online/hybrid educational courses worldwide, including England, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Germany, Singapore, Hong Kong, and East Coast USA. The practice continues to be disseminated in scholarly journals, chapters, and a book publication with Intellectbooks, embodied enquiry in art making: the f/old, due for publication in early 2024. In 2013, she received an MACP (Master’s in Creative Practice, Dance Professional Practice) from Trinity Laban in collaboration with Independent Dance, London/UK. Susan focuses on gallery/museum contexts creating/collaborating on ‘responses’ or ‘activations’ within exhibitions and through liaisons with individual artists. She also choreographs durational installations orchestrating still/moving image, objects, sound and absence/presence of the performative body. Susan has collaborated and worked with renown institutions such as the White Cube Gallery/UK, Whitechapel Gallery/UK, Hayward Gallery/UK, Museo del Tessuto/IT, MFIT (the Museum at Fashion Institute of Technology)/NYC, National Gallery Singapore/SG, ArtScience Museum/SG, ICAS (Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore)/SG, NTU/CCA (Nanyang Technological University/Centre of Contemporary Art Singapore)/SG, The Substation/SG and DECK/SG. Her work has been exhibited, screened and/or performed in the UK, USA, Europe, Israel, Indonesia, Hong Kong and Singapore. Currently teaching somatics, choreography and interdisciplinary practice at Bath Spa University, UK.  
https://thfold.net