MAKING MARKS //\\ LEAVING TRACES
CREATIVE MOVEMENT FOR ALL BODIES
In-person, July13, 2025
11:00am-1:00pm | The Berkeley Alembic | 2820 Seventh St. Berkeley
By Donation, REGISTER HERE
Making marks is fundamental to our learning — an experimental and messy process through which we self-reveal and self-create. We express ideas and emotions to others, tell stories, and invoke meaning through the marks we make on paper, on land, in space, and in time. Through these and other modes and mediums of mark-making, we explore our creative range, develop our artistic voice, and come to better understand our impact on the world around us.
This workshop invites participants to investigate the relationship between movement, drawing, and writing — all forms of mark-making. We will traverse and translate across page and ground, using embodied prompts to discover new pathways of creative flow and expression: we will splatter, curve, open, close, straighten, dot, scribble, circle, stipple, mirror, pour, erase, darken, tangle, scatter…
Although the workshop will unfold in response to the particular group, there is a loose structure as follows:
Opening meditation, inviting grounding and orientation
Guided warm-up for breath and body
Structured exploratory movement practice and composition (translating from movement to page, from page to movement)
Opportunity to share & closing practice
Photo by Robbie Sweeney
ONGOING DROP-IN MOVESHOPS
In-person, first Saturdays | Next date: June 7, 2025
10:30am-12:15pm | Ellen Webb Studio, Oakland
$20-$30 Suggested Donation (NOTAFLOF)
Moveshops are in-person movement-based group workshops for folks interested in exploring embodiment as a means of empowerment, expression, and connection. Moveshops integrate guided experiential and improvisation-based practices with somatic skill building to cultivate resilience, creativity, and embodied agency. Unless otherwise specified (e.g. workshops for postpartum support), Moveshops are are meant for EVERY BODY. No prior movement experience necessary.
Moveshops are responsive to the group, but a loose structure includes:
a welcoming circle (community agreements, grounding)
an experiential, full body warm up (body, breath, voice)
expanding from solo to group awareness (opening the senses, orienting toward the collective)
group body puzzles (scores, composition exercises, games) *can always be done solo!
a closing circle (reflections, sharing, containing)
PAST WORKSHOPS
EMBODYING OPPOSITES
Sunday, May 4 2025 | 2:30-4:30pm
The Berkeley Alembic | 2820 Seventh St. Berkeley
If we stay with the tension of opposites long enough– sustain it, be true to it– we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.
– Marie-Louise von Franze
We all carry divine opposites within us– a longing for connection and an impulse to return to self, a desire to slow down and an expectation to keep apace with the mind, a wish to be free and a fear of losing control– but we don’t often explore their generative qualities of complexity. As Jungian psychologist and scholar, Marie-Louise von Franze reminds us, when we engage strong polarities with curiosity and reverence something new emerges.
Embodying Opposites invites you to go deep into the messy mystery of the mixed state. Through improvisational and durational prompts and scores, we will explore oppositional dynamics (contraction/ extension, accumulation/ dispersion, inward/ outward, earth/ air) as an expression of contrast and continuum. With curiosity and imagination as our guides, we will embody edges and linger in transitions, exploring what blooms in the field beyond extremes, between states, and beneath surfaces.
REMOVING CREATIVE BLOCKS THROUGH EMBODIED EXPRESSION
October 19th, 2024 from 10am-2pm | Oakland
Feeling stuck and constricted in your creative flow? This workshop is an invitation to get out of your head and drop into your body as a source of inspiration and wayfinding through creative blocks. We invite EVERY BODY to join us, no prior movement experience necessary!
We will draw on the principle of improvisation* (finding a yes, and…) to accept the offer of the present and draw on direct experience (sensation, emotion, location etc) as a source of possibility and generative inspiration. With pleasure, ease, and playful curiosity as our guides, we will offer a range of contemplative and creative movement practices to alchemize paralysis into potential and move through constriction to connection.
The workshop will integrate somatic techniques that participants can take into their daily practice for future encounters with creative blocks.
The workshop will draw on a range of somatic practices including: contemporary dance (release technique, improvisation), contemplative and developmental movement (Body-Mind Centering, Feldenkrais, Qi Gong), and Energy Medicine.
*This is not a contact improvisation class.
