Polyphony of gestures

Info

Polyphony of gestures – a multidisciplinary research on the therapeutic and creative values of touch

Polyphony of bodies, polyphony of gestures, polyphony created by a multitude of individual worlds brought together. Action, dialogue, complexity and intimacy can only take shape in a territory polarized by the presence of different individualities. How about not reducing ourselves to the lowest common denominator when we enter into a relationship? Can we return to sound and vibration when we meet an individual?

Functioning as an alternative education system, in which touch plays a central role in the development of cognition, Polyphony of Gestures proposes a sensitive look at diversity, reversing the inherited flow of one-way learning relationships. We leave space for the individual, be he a special child or a neurodivergent adult, to become our guide in his care, to lead us into a realm that only he can know. We are gradually detaching ourselves from the idea that we are the ones who know, and thus making room for new languages and methods of communication to emerge.

What is a listening touch? What potential of our children can blossom when we expand time? What is beyond the functionality of our hands? How can we become aware of how we touch others with our gaze and our thoughts?

CONTEXT

A multidisciplinary team bringing together choreographers, therapists and somatic practitioners has gone through a process of research, exchange of practices and training with international experts in somatic disciplines still in a pioneering stage with the aim of creating a broad network of support in fragile communities, based on an interdisciplinary dialog between different somatic methods (Feldenkrais method, Body-Mind Centering, Rolfing, Contact Improvisation), amniotherapy, art therapy, craniosacral therapy.

Starting from trainings facilitated by Carla Bottiglieri and Thomas Greil, professors and directors of internationally renowned training schools in somatic education and psychotherapist Lorenzo Tosti, with extensive experience in Amniotherapy, a group of psychotherapists, choreographers, teachers from UNATC (choreography department), UNIBUC ( Faculty of Special Psychopedagogy), Special School teachers and somatic therapists, for several months have created a network of hope in collaboration with 6 centers, including special schools, DGASPCs and psychiatric hospitals. The project team dreams of an extended network through which institutions and universities, together with associations active in the field, share knowledge giving value to the inner experience of each singularity and at the same time providing valuable tools to jointly capitalize on each individual’s creativity

EVENT

The presentation wants to give each participant access to their own tactile experience.

It aims for tactility to extend beyond the skin, encompassing haptic sense, tonic function, fascia, gaze, awakening bodily intelligence and integrating it with cognitive intelligence.

By taking the explanatory-experiential stages, the school’s teachers will invite the audience to actively participate or observe a polyphony of perspectives on touching

During the presentation we will use the words of the mentors, Carla Bottiglieri and Thomas Greil, and texts by several authors such as Hubert Godard, James J. Gibson, Aline Newton, Elizabeth Behnke, Anat Baniel, together with questions from the collective that has moved into a territory that demands to be reinvented, giving importance to the body and the experience of the body to all people, be they beneficiaries, caregivers or family.

We are learning to pick up the thoughts and the unspoken words of beneficiaries and caregivers, we are learning to listen to what has not yet been said, to what the body whispers to us.

Here, we multi-function: even the teacher becomes a student again. Caregivers become cared for. The basic idea is that we are the ones who learn from the special children/adults….we are not the ones who teach them. We are therefore looking for other languages, other methods of communication, which do not start unidirectionally from us, those who “know”, but from the relationship, which is built differently each time.

With these children/adults a relationship is born in which space expands and time is suspended to observe, to not direct, to follow pre-movement, to laugh, to change pace, to listen inside and outside my body and your body.

All until in this shell of the world, we all feel connected through skin, muscles, orientation system, fascia, relationship to gravity, relationship to mother/father, to gaze.

How do we train the gaze?

Training the gaze means lowering the eyes into the heart and into all our tissues that sense what they see as an expanded perception. Where not just the cognitive and verbal dominate, but where everything we see is felt in the body of the observer. The school of seeing demands a change of perspective and asks us many questions.

What does a special child/adult teach us?

How should the caregiver prepare himself/herself bodily-mind? How should they learn to listen to their body?

How can I express myself if there are no words?

How does touch speak?

How do I feel when I make a gesture as if for the first time?

Am I still beautiful?

Can I reinvent my body with the parameters of my uniqueness?

Who helps me harness my imagination?

The Polyphony of Gestures is dedicated to everyone- our beneficiaries, caregivers and children- to understand human dignity, integrity, creativity in all its forms and manifestations. And we wish that our team will grow…and “we will go to San Francisco and give birth to our children.”( Loredana, DGASPC Milcov)

Special mentions

The presentation is addressed to families with special children, caregivers, psychologists, art therapists, teachers, students, artists active in the community and the general public interested in the topic.