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.