Body Weather - A Field Guide to Embodied Awareness

In this 5-hour experiential workshop we will playfully investigate our sense of embodied awareness and expression. 

Through creative and immersive movement tasks and explorations we’ll consider how body and mind are intrinsically interwoven and how we can discover multiple relations and connections between them, as well as between ourselves and the world in which we are embedded.

Participants will

• Enhance their capacity for attention, relaxation, and concentration.
• Recognize prevalent thought and movement patterns and thereby gain the possibility for change.
• Acquire a fresh sense of physical and mental well-being
• Have fun and explore ontological questions in a light way.

The workshop will involve movement, touch, improvisation and partnered activities. Please consider that this is comfortable for you before registering.

There will be a lunch break (no catering) from 12.30-1.30pm.

Who is this workshop for:

• This is a workshop for anyone interested in the relationship between mind, body and world.
• It also offers a professional development opportunity for Somatic and Mental Health workers and Creative Arts Therapists. (We can issue a certificate of attendance, but no CE credits)
• It will be of interest to a broad variety of performing arts, dance, theatre and movement practitioners, mature students and artists.

No special movement skills are required but participants need to be able to monitor their own physical and mental well-being and level of engagement.  Please email us when in doubt: tickets@miecat.edu.au 

Our facilitator: Frank van de Ven

Frank has 30 years experience of teaching dance, theatre and creative movement in many Art Colleges, Universities and Dance Institutions around the world. His main practice is Body Weather, a comprehensive approach to training and performance that investigates the intersections of bodies and their environments. Bodies are conceived not as fixed and separate entities but as constantly changing - just like the weather. Weather is seen as a complex system of forces and influences coursing through and beyond bodies and the world.

About Body Weather:

The term & philosophical basis for Body Weather was founded in the early 1980's by dancer Min Tanaka and the Maijuku Performance Company, with whom Frank worked in Japan, from 1983-1991. Since 1995 he conducts the annual, interdisciplinary Bohemiae Rosa Project with Milos Sejn (Academy Of Art and Design, Prague, Czech Republic), connecting body and landscape with art, geology and architecture. Body Weather was introduced in Australia by Tess de Quincey in 1989. 

Photo credit: Bertram Dhellemmes