What have I done?

(for the last months)

Maybe because of the end of the year, it feels right to reflect back and share where I am at and what I have done for the last half year. After initiating, coordinating and facilitating over 16 workshops from research for my thesis until spring 2024, I understood that I am in need for a sustainable manner to keep doing what I feel most alive in - hosting and facilitating. This is why for the last months I was silent – no newsletter – no Instagram posts. Although I didn’t invite you to join, I facilitated some closed workshops, and some others are cooking. Mostly, I have been re-thinking and stirring my curiosities differently.

What have changed for me is that beyond reaching out to organizations and institutions where my hosting practice can find home, I also look for allies in the two main aspects of what I do – education as an artistic practice and relating to the body as a methodology to form knowledge. Summer brought movement – physically and intentionally. I participated in a few workshops, and in one I encountered what was already tickling – to think in movement.

By chance, and maybe not, I found Larret en Mouvement in France. For a week I joined dancers and dancers-scholars on research on ecosomatics. Beyond the topic in itself, in this co-created programme, a group formed around sharing embodied practices outside the dance sphere, asking questions about conditions, and skills that are necessary to spread the practice beyond the usual suspects. During this week, I encountered read dancing sessions, that are listening sessions to texts while being still or improvising alone or with others to allow different meanings to arise; I met video dance as philosophical research; I found kinship with others.

On my return from France, I dove into the collaboration with Fonds Podiumkuntsen coordinating the visitors programme – performing arts for young audiences and it was a success at the end of October. It was also time to be in question. It feels I am drifting, and branching, but also distilling my own interest. Some things started to shape – one is a fruitful collaboration with Dr. Thijs Witty, who was my supervisor in my research process. Together we look at RSVP Cycles - Anna & Lawrence Halprin work about collaborative creative processes and activate their work in education and research settings. The first workshop took place last month at MEiA.

With the same group of MEiA first year students, we shared time on their first day at school. I had the good chance to welcome them into their two years journey as peers. The fullness of nothingness was the title for that day and it included learning through touch while blindfolded the surroundings of WDKA building, taking in the soundscape of the streets, mapping their lost way to the classroom, automatic writing as a way to discover where are they now, and asking a question that the answer may unfold in the coming months.

Besides sharing my thoughts and process, there are some invitations to join a session that we have planned with partners with whom I had the pleasure to collaborate this year and I will be back in 2025. Have a peek under event. Some other plans are still in fragile state to put them out there, but rest assured I will let you know once they ripe.

Sending you much love and wish you restful days in between years, to revisit where have you been and where you would like to go.

Merry merry winter days,

Natalia.