An educator and an activist, Jane Elliott was the person who pointed it out to me—via a youtube video I was watching—that educate comes from latin root educere meaning to lead out. “An educator,” Elliott concludes, “is one who is engaged in the act of leading people out of ignorance.” One of the things I am drawn to in Elliott’s approach is the way she associates educating with leading, and education with leadership.

In the way I understand and practice it, Body-Mind Centering® defines an experimental principle-based approach to studying anatomy, where anatomy describes the fundamental condition for the emergence of movement, experience, and consciousness. This is evolutionary anatomy; anatomy as has been felt, anatomy as has been sensed, and anatomy as has been known to each one of us in as much as we’ve already embodied something of our experience of having and being a body. This anatomy, of course, is not the only anatomy. There is also the learned anatomy. This is the anatomy of sciences, the anatomy of measurements, and the anatomy of competing values.

Assuming that we’ve been embodying our experience of having and being a body successfully—we are alive, after all—the question emerges: how have we done that? What have we done to embody our experience of having and being a body? How much of that have we done consciously, how much of that have we done intentionally? And how much of any of that brought us any pleasure? Furthermore, what have we learned about evolutionary and learned anatomies in the process? Have we learned where they differ from one another, and where they are similar, compatible even? Have we learned to relate to either in a way that specifically and critically co-responds to its conditions, and its limits? And transforms its resource from pure potential into the experience of actual, affective support?

BMC® and Body-Mind Centering®  are registered service marks of Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen, used with permission.

This session does not have a predetermined form. It is developed in dialogue.

The goal of the session is to support you, using BMC® and its experimental principles, in developing your inquiry in an embodied sense. You may, in effect, be able to distinguish between sensations, thoughts, emotions with more precision, be able to orient yourself better in relation to your experience, and find it easier to organise yourself, within and without. Emotionally, intellectually, spiritually; psycho-somatically.

“You don’t have to be alone.” — Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen

Apart from dialogue, this session may include movement exploration, guided meditation, and/or hands-on (touch-based) assistance. The methods will be chosen relative to your desires, needs, and/or wants.

This session is educational, not therapeutic in character.

to book a workshop, please write to pavleheidler@pavleheidler.com

The Process of Materialisation of Fiction is: a developing answer to a continual questioning – and is: a self-reflective dance practice. This practice suggests a way in which to study the ability of the individual’s nervous system to translate information (back and forth) between the “felt,” “sensed,” “imagined,” “immaterial” and the “materialised,” “physicalised,” “moved,” “spoken,” “performed.”

In as much as the “felt” and “sensed” etc. is “inwardly oriented,” and so functioning in the realm of the invisible: the “intimate” or the realm of “internal dialogue;” so is the “materialised” and “physicalised” “outwardly oriented” i.e. “performed,” visible to the scrutinising gaze of the public eye. How these two worlds relate to one another is, in my experience, not always given. This practice is developing to look at the specific relationships formed between internal motivators and equivalent performatives in an attempt to understand the relation between: the intimate and the public; or between: the intended and the communicated – always within a specific context. Given consent, studied will be examples drawn from individual participant’s personal experiences.

Over the years, the Process of Materialisation of Fiction has been presented at the ImPulsTanz Dance Festival (Vienna, AT), at AGORA (Berlin, Germany), Earthdance (Plainfield, MA, USA), the Dovercourt House LOVEIN (Toronto, ON, CA), and Footnote (Wellington, NZ); amongst other places.

to book a workshop, please write to pavleheidler@pavleheidler.com

The aim of this workshop is to tackle the following questions:

This work is intended for those who have to work quickly, and transition frequently between aesthetic environments and organisational power structures. This work is intended to be rewarding for queers looking to articulate strategies that are to help maintain spaces of heightened or specific attention for as long as necessary; folk working to hold spaces of fluid but persistent non-violent resistance. It is also intended for those who love a good challenge or are interested in nuanced articulation and precise execution of movement, sound, dance, and word.

Some of the topics that will be encountered during the work week are: gender theory and theory of performativity / language, communication and the production of meaning / systems of valorisation (oppression + order/chaos) / relationality (history-present, reality-fiction) / the notion of scale, in psycho-somatic and socio-political terms / the importance of thinking contextually / psychology of responsibility and consequence / redefining the workings and the purpose of the inner judge / and reconstructing the mind-body split into a functioning body-mind; a thinking, feeling, and sensing organism capable of elemental transformation.

In this workshop, each day of the week is devoted to embodied study of a word / concept. I: Monday. AM: Tuesday. AN: Wednesday. ARTIST: Thursday. Friday is reserved for reflection, and integration. This work is as much about exploring one’s embodied experience contained by said words as it is about asking, What does it take to develop an embodied practice, when the focal point of the practice is an abstract (e.g., a concept, an idea, a socio-political standard).

In developing this workshop, I am relying heavily on my experience of studying and practicing BMC®. I am looking at what happens when I turn or apply those BMC® principles that were developed for the purpose of studying one’s experience of one’s anatomy to studying one’s experience of structures that are embodied, but not strictly anatomical? If I can study my experience of “liver” because I know it’s there—I can name it, I can see its image online or in a book, I can read and read about it—can I not study apply that same principle to studying my experience of other phenomena I can name, see an image of, or read about? Such are contained by the words “I”, or “ARTIST”, for example?

No previous experience with BMC® or other somatic standards is required to attend this workshop.

This workshop could be interesting to those who have a desire to explore (somatically) the depth and the wealth of their experience framed by the words I, aman, and artist. This workshop could also be interesting to those who are looking for examples of intersectional, experimental work that draw its methodologies from multiple fields, e.g., the fields of somatics, pedagogy, and dance- and art-making. In either case, one should know that this is a dance workshop. Dancing will be the modus operandi, the primary mode of communication, and the main orientation device. Dancing here names an experience-based non-verbal form of communication, one that is critically aware of the context within which it is practiced. Namely, the context of the Western professional theatre-based dance and choreography.

to book a workshop, please write to pavleheidler@pavleheidler.com