ARAB 14
Empowered Embodiment: An Introduction to Movement Improvisation Winter 2025

This guided improvisation class incorporates diverse movement modalities that bring awareness to our sensations, emotions, and thoughts, and aims to build new patterns in service of better relationships with our bodies as sites of learning, liberation and power. Appropriate for movers of all levels, this studio-based course encourages physical exploration to develop and deepen an embodied practice for participants that supports creativity and mindfulness, while enhancing compassion, mental health and emotional well being. Drawing on techniques including authentic movement, visualization, meditation, performance studies, music and play, as well as diverse movement traditions, participants will spend time moving, observing and reflecting in each 3 hr session (2 x week). Students will be encouraged to keep a daily journal and respond to prompts and readings, and develop a short daily movement practice both as a creative outlet and means of reducing stress and anxiety. Conversations and readings will interrogate the role of cultural and gender-based expectations on our physical patterns and well being. Movement prompts will provide new tools for critical thinking and creative problem solving by getting participants out of their “heads” and grounded in the liberatory and exploratory space of the body. Evaluation will be based on in-studio participation, reflective writings, and the creation of a personalized embodied practice program including an original movement score.