Wild Soma Being and Becoming: Embodied Practices for Collective Thriving
With Andrea Nann, Julia Aplin, Roula Said and Shannon Litzenberger
June 23 - 28, 2024
In this time of intersecting social, political, and planetary crises, how do we embrace and honour all that is arising in us as bodies? What if we listen closely to what we feel in our hearts, what we sense in our bones, and what we know in our guts? Can we resonate care and connection across our differences, tuning into our sense of aliveness and embracing a fully embodied, relational way of being in the world in service of collective thriving?
Wild Soma invites you to soften your mind and connect to the wisdom of your body. Move through embodied practices that invite new ways of relating to self, others and our world. Explore ways of recasting the body as self, in specific relationship to the social, cultural, temporal and planetary ecosystems we live within. Resonate inside circles of kindness, wonderment, and connection, illuminating a sense of interconnectedness within the living world. Discover creative practices that gesture toward a world aligned with thriving.
“It was a rich delight to experience the exquisite integrity Wild Soma brings to their workshops – a rare quality that is grounded in the diverse and complementary expertise of their leadership, in the inclusive, welcoming invitation with which their practices are offered, and in the ways those practices support a gentle opening of the heart, the imagination, our embodied sensitivity – and ultimately our full, relational humanity. If you have a chance to experience Wild Soma, jump at it!” – Philip Shephard, Creator of The Embodied Present Process, Author of Radical Wholeness and New Self, New World
Program Highlights
Wild Soma will guide you through intentionally designed practices and experiences that center embodied ways of knowing, being and doing. These include:
- Practices of somatic attunement that foreground embodied knowledges such as feeling, sensation, and emotion
- Practices that support expanded attentional awareness
- Relational practices that support connection to community within the human and more than human world
- Creative practices such as ensemble-based imaginative play, including movement and vocalizing
Together we will explore, experience, feel, inquire, move, sound, connect, question, visit, listen, align, attune, accept, breathe, walk, dance, embrace, invite, honour, celebrate, grieve and rest.
We will do this through games, personal reflection, small group activities, guided movement meditations, nature connection activations, informal dance, non-verbal group discussion, verbal group reflections and other creative engagements.
This experience will leave you with
- An expanded awareness of embodied ways of knowing, being and doing
- A repertoire of individual and collective practices designed to support your wellbeing and aliveness, including sensory, attentional, relational, and creative practices
- An enhanced capacity for cultivating life-giving relationship with self, others, and the world around you
- A better understanding of how embodiment is a world-making gesture
“It was like opening a great door to learning. The ways in which you invited us in to practice allowed us our own seeing, hearing, feeling. I started to be able to be kinder to myself. I got to experience how I “know” differently. I started to feel stronger in my body. I remembered how to play! My heart grew bigger for others.” -Marjorie Campbell, Past participant
Daily Schedule
Presenters
Andrea Nann is a contemporary dance artist, arts educator, founding artistic director of Dreamwalker Dance Company, and founder/co-creator of Conscious Bodies Methodology, an embodied community practice. Andrea dances to reach across distance and to experience herself and others in celebration of possibility, plurality, imagination, originality, and belonging. A graduate of…
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Julia Aplin has been studying and practicing movement for over 40 years. She has an intense curiosity about the human body in motion and draws on a variety of tools and techniques in her current practice. Julia danced full time for 15 years with Dancemakers, under the Artistic Direction of…
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Roula Said is a singer, dancer, musician, actor and poet of Palestinian heritage based in Toronto, Canada. Roula has been studying, teaching and performing Arab music and dance for over 25 years. From within her tradition as practiced here in the west (where she has also explored many other styles…
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Shannon Litzenberger (she/her, Tkaronto) is an award-winning contemporary dancer, choreographer, director and embodiment facilitator. Inspired by the borderless landscapes of her prairie homeland, she creates sensory-rich multi-disciplinary performance experiences that animate our relationship to land, community and the forgotten wisdom of the body. An imaginative creator, she often develops unique…
Learn more about Shannon Litzenberger