Short Abstract:

This lab draws on theatre exercises to engage participants’ imaginative and sensory ways of knowing. Led by our feet, we will move through imaginary landscapes and explore the potentials of play in creating wellbeing in an unwell world.

Long Abstract:

This lab engages participants’ senses and imagination in their interaction with each other and their environment. Exploring the imaginative, embodied ways of knowing that creative methodologies speak to, it interrogates the potentials of play in creating wellbeing in an unwell world and imagining how things could be otherwise. We will start with a warm-up with sensory exercises borrowed from theatre to increase our awareness of our bodies. Playfully, participants will be instructed to listen with their knees, see with their elbows, and observe how this changes their experience of their bodies and surroundings. In a longer exercise, we will then go for a walk through imaginary landscapes without leaving the room or the corridor just outside. Cued by sonic impulses and the experiences of the feet, with instructions like imagine walking on wet grass, on hot pavement, or through clouds, we will explore how bodily sensation, imagination, and interactions with others and the environment are intertwined.

What potentials does this approach hold for exploring and extending moments of wellbeing in an unwell world? How could it contribute to imagining alternative futures? What would an anthropology that teaches these creative, embodied practices as routinely as it is done in performative arts look like? We will conclude our walks by collaboratively mapping and drawing our imaginary landscapes and reflecting on these questions.

The maximum number of participants is 15, please register here: https://forms.gle/p9xWRDe1CUf5nLbTA