MODULE #4

This workshop is for all those bodies that wish to deepen the felt sense of pleasure, raising consciousness on the politics of feeling. 

‘Feeling good’ is a commitment to feel, though feeling trespasses sorrow, doubt, heartbreak, fear, anger, discomfort. We gather here to practice and play to articulate sensations and shapes to become resonant with each other.

Pleasure is somatic, that is, physical-intellectual-spiritual-emotional-social.

The body, alone and together with others, has implicit technologies to awaken the sense of connection with the vitality to which we belong. Mirror neurons prove that we evolved through empathy, entrainment shows we organize around a beat, gravity allows for prayerful cycles of rising and decaying…..

this time together aims to be a welcoming container to dispel the myth of normality, a gentle Erotic-Political-Sensorial Psychedelia where we alone and alone-together get to use dance technologies towards mutual empowerment and liberation. 

Why feel and feel ourselves if we risk being harmed? Who can afford it and who can't?

How do we educate or dis-educate ourselves to pleasure? Who taught you to feel good?

To quote Adrienne Maree Brown in 'Pleasure Activism, the Politics of Feeling Good', where they ask "What would it be like to center pleasure as an organizing principle?"

The workshop is a polymorphic collection of practices derived from:

1. Choreographic research based on improvisation and altered physical states///Collective guided trance journeys, hands-on experiential anatomy puzzles, performance as radical gift.

2. Queer raves///Consent games, contextualization and tributes to ‘the beat’.

3. Fascia-informed somatic activations and active resting/// Fascia and Yin Yoga tuning.

Maria F. Scaroni (IT) has been active in the Berlin dance scene since 2004, both interpreting and choreographing works and building community through teaching workshops and hosting events. Trained independently, between 2004 and 2014 landed in San Francisco where she met, trained and collaborated with artists such as Sara Shelton Mann, Jess Curtis, Stephanie Maher, Keith Hennessy, Guillermo Gomez-Peña a.o.. These encounters deeply shaped her physical and performative practice, where dance is intertwined with healing, queer methodologies, social justice and radical play. Her workshops and curated events swell beyond the dance field and include dancers, queers, theater makers, visual artists, academics, social workers, ravers, activists. Since 2011 Maria regularly teaches at the BA and MA programs at HZT Berlin and numerous international dance festivals and educational programs. Part of Maria's performative and educational inquiry is evolving aspects of the work on physical states and improvisation as collective dialogue developed by Meg Stuart, with whom she closely collaborate since 2009 (Politics of Ecstasy, Auf den Tisch!, Built to Last, Sketches/Notebook, City Lights, Until Our Hearts Stop, Waterworks). In 2016 Maria joined collective Lecken Berlin, organizing community around queer feminist praxis and rave culture, meeting the intersection between art and activism. Currently her work hybridizes somatics with collective rituals, where dancing is the mean to help reconnect the social bond (Totentanz and Tanzregreß, Tanzkongress Dresden 2019 and Technodrift, a free technology of ecstasy and a choreographic intervention, offered to survive isolation during Pandemic). Since 2021 she is hosting Social Pleasure Center, a community space for somatic post-activism, queer feminist joyful militancy, radical redistribution of resources and temporary social choreography.

https://www.allalways.org/  https://www.socialpleasure.center/