Decomposing (decolonizing) Somatics: decentering the human
Workshop
by
mayfield brooks
In the frame of Emerging Change Tanzfestival
What does it mean to decompose somatics? What interspecies interactions or relations can offer up different ways of understanding the body, environment, movement, voice and dance? Many Eurocentric modalities such as Feldenkrais, Alexander Technique, Laban, and Body Mind Centering, have been trademarked by Europeans and European Americans. How can we begin to develop somatics practices that speak to our own bodies and experiences, from different cultural locations other than Europe that center the global majority? How can we continually tap into humor and play to also access our somatic selves? Inspired by my practice of Improvising while Black, I will share some of my own journey in the world of mainstream somatics and how it has shifted and decomposed over time through a decolonial lens.
This workshop is only for Black, Indigenous, People of Color only.
Information on accessibility will be published here 2 weeks before the workshop.
This workshop is only for Black, Indigenous, People of Color only.
Information on accessibility will be published here 2 weeks before the workshop.
mayfield brooks
mayfield brooks (they/them) improvises while black* and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. 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. www.improvisingwhileblack.com/
*mayfield’s choreographic approach, Improvising while Black or IWB, developed after mayfield began to write about their personal experience of being racially profiled as they were Driving while Black or DWB in San Francisco, California. IWB is an interdisciplinary dance project that lives in the question of Blackness, and explores vocal and dance improvisation, (de)composition, breath choreographies, and pedagogies of embodied liberation. Like an ecology, IWB is continually evolving and moving.
Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds (HKF) and Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Gesellschaftlichen Zusammenhalt (IMPACT Förderung).
