QUESTION FESTIVAL
Saturday, November 13th, 10am-10pm EST
QUESTION FESTIVAL (Saturday Nov 13th) is a virtual festival featuring immersive, interactive, embodied workshops about life's biggest questions. Each workshop is led by a different facilitator who will use deep play to guide participants through one vital question. These workshops will be interspersed with breaks for collaborative drawing, collaborative music-making, snacking, resting, and conversation.
Our questions will include: Are we there yet? What is happiness? Is your love bad medicine? What choices do we have in this play? What if our shadows could dance? Who are my other selves? What is attention? What’s happening right now? What is a question?
Workshop activities are inspired by: authentic relating, authentic movement, contact improv, clowning, theatre of the oppressed, deep listening, parts work, tavistock group relations, surrealist word games, interactive storytelling, childhood games (ex- truth or dare), dance, circus, psychodrama, internal family systems therapy, and clowning.
Tickets: 1 workshop $20 / 3 workshops $60 / 6 workshops $80 / Full day pass $110
Discounted tickets are always available for those in financial need (please contact [email protected])
Our questions will include: Are we there yet? What is happiness? Is your love bad medicine? What choices do we have in this play? What if our shadows could dance? Who are my other selves? What is attention? What’s happening right now? What is a question?
Workshop activities are inspired by: authentic relating, authentic movement, contact improv, clowning, theatre of the oppressed, deep listening, parts work, tavistock group relations, surrealist word games, interactive storytelling, childhood games (ex- truth or dare), dance, circus, psychodrama, internal family systems therapy, and clowning.
Tickets: 1 workshop $20 / 3 workshops $60 / 6 workshops $80 / Full day pass $110
Discounted tickets are always available for those in financial need (please contact [email protected])
10am EST |
What is a question? |
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As an introduction to the Question Festival let's question questions! How do questions feel? How do they behave? How do we behave with them? Questions are a means of using words to demarcate the boundaries of things and thereby clarify the unknown. To form a question is not to eradicate the unknown, but rather to begin to see it more clearly. This workshop will use surrealist word games, guided meditation, and collaboratively composed dream-imagery to explore the inner landscape of questioning.
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Facilitator: Aaron Finbloom
Aaron Finbloom is a philosopher, artist and pedagogue. He is the co-founder of The School of Making Thinking (SMT) and the director of The Deep Play Institute (DPI). His practice involves expanding transformative inquiry through relational games, performance art and structured play. With training in Circling, Authentic Relating, and Psychodrama, he facilitates experimental sessions inspired by these practices. He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities & Fine Arts from Concordia University in Montreal, and is currently teaching Philosophy at the City College of New York. www.finblooming.com |
11am EST |
What is attention? |
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“Something like collage is at the heart of the unstable and highly personal process of perception.” - Jenny Odell The nature of our experiences is mediated by the quality of our attention to the world. Therefore, the specific realities that we find ourselves within are correlated to how we perceive internal and external stimuli. In this session we will investigate the dramaturgy of our attentional patterns and play with new modes of attending to ourselves, each other, and our environments. We will be guided towards repatterning reception to become more attuned to a wider set of possibilities in the here and now. The exercises we enter will embody a pedagogy of gentle disorientation and are drawn from disciplines such as Deep Listening, statework, and somatics. All are welcome!
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Facilitator: Julia Gladstone
Julia Gladstone is an artist working in the expanded field of choreography to figure socialities. Forms take shape through performance, sculpture, video, and experimental pedagogy. Her work has been presented in France, Belgium, Israel, and across the U.S. She is a recipient of the DAAD Fellowship in Performing Arts, organizes Clouds Gathering performance festival, and is a certified facilitator of Deep Listening. She is currently in the midst of a MFA at University of Pennsylvania and MSW at Simmons University. |
12pm EST |
Who are my other selves? |
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This workshop is about accessing the interior world of our alter-ego. We will use guided associative meditation to contact an alternate version of ourselves. This unique other/self is a reflection of our known daily self -- intimately related but possibly different in behavior and appearance. In our imaginations, we will embody this reflected alter ego and experience a memory from their perspective. What will we learn about daily selves, through this familiar yet warped vantage point? What memories are living within us that belong to a different dimension of understanding? In this practice, the provided meditation functions as a scaffold. The narrative material is generated in the shallows of the participant’s subconscious. Therefore, each experience will be personal and rich in meaning, similar to a dream. At the end of our session, we will record our alter-ego memories with as much detail as possible.
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Facilitator: Chloë Engel
Chloë Engel (she/they) is a performer, improviser, early-childhood Waldorf teacher, and nanny currently based in Brooklyn, NY. Chloë makes performance about Madness, hazy trauma, nostalgia, and queer reverie as rebellion. Chloë’s performance work has been shown at Open Performance, No Theme Festival (Poughkeepsie, NY), Little Berlin (Philadelphia, PA), Middlebury College, Bennington College, and AUNTS Festival (Brooklyn, NY). She teaches a weekly online associative meditation class called: suggested methods to feel your feelings. chloeengel.org |
1pm EST
BREAK & Collective Drawing
2pm EST |
What choices do we have in this play? |
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Shakespeare called the world a stage, assuming there is a creative source called God, what choices do we, players, have in this play? Join us to explore this play full question using improvised theater, collaboration, connection and interactive exploration. Participants will brainstorm characters and will be assigned characters to experiment with the possibilities of free will and assigned roles. The facilitator will guide the storytelling process that will allow for processing and risk taking.
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Facilitator: Kiona Medina
Born in Colombia, Kiona Medina is a San Francisco Bay Area based interdisciplinary artist, heartful facilitator and consultant with a MA in expressive arts therapy. Her practice and work is centered around the intersections of Catholic mysticism, creativity and embodiment in all ages. She specializes in a metaphorical pedagogy that involves participants of all abilities with an emphasis on trauma healing, grief, storytelling, transitions and reconstruction. Offerings range from body awareness to symbolizing found objects around us to using dramatic play, animation techniques and dynamic engagement with nature. She has presented her work internationally and throughout the SF bay area. |
3pm EST |
Is your love bad medicine? |
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Have you ever wondered if your love hurts people? Or thought maybe you were bad at loving, or not cut out for love? In this workshop, we'll play a game that's like a hybrid of 'truth or dare' and 'let's pretend.' We'll brainstorm what you want to get out of love, and what you fear from love, and uncover some of our unconscious working theories about love and suffering. Then we'll create dares and pretend situations in which we test out these theories. You might buy lunch for a stranger, or declare your unconditional love to the person next to you, or vow never to speak to a certain workshop participant ever again... all with the goal of breaking our expectations and habits around love.
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Facilitator: Indigo Esmonde
Indigo Esmonde is an artist living in Montreal. You can find their work at daydreamsandassociates.com and realitycalibration.com. Indigo has been described as 'brilliant and terrifying,' 'naive,' 'an acquired taste,' 'a bit overbearing,' 'the best at throwing online parties' and 'lives on their own planet.' |
4pm EST |
Are we there yet? |
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We’re getting closer. … To what? And who are we? Where are we going? When will we arrive? Also, why are we doing this? Together we’ll discover that Are we there yet? isn’t limited to a whining child in the backseat. Instead, Are we there yet? can serve as a valuable resource to support our examination of readiness, willingness, and ableness for myriad life milestones as individuals, in relationship, and as a collective. Drawing upon intuition and embodied wisdom, we will personalize, identify, and explore our guiding question. Through work as a group and in dyads, this session will empower us with a grounded tool of inquiry inspired by Carl Sagan’s observation: “For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
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Facilitator: Dara Bram
Dara Bram is an interdisciplinary writer, curator, facilitator interested in peaceful encounters with the unknown. She studies Deep Listening, NVC, and various somatic movement forms. Her research on post-conflict healing rooted her in Kraków, Poland for nearly a decade and led her to related projects in Southeast Asia. Dara currently teaches Altered States: Experimental Embodied Explorations at The Beaubourg School in New Orleans and is a PhD student in cultural anthropology at Tulane University. She is learning to garden, dream, and live without a refrigerator. darabramson.com. |
5pm EST
BREAK & Collective Music Making
6pm EST |
What if our shadows could dance? |
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To get in contact with our shadows and fears in a playful way, to materialize our monsters and invite them to play. Through one on one connection, this workshop will exercise an empathic feel towards parts of us that are not always easy to face. Those that are connected to past experiences and traumas and restrain our movement to the same forms. This workshop is about generating movement for our statues or frozen postures, and about giving shape and color for sides of us that are hidden, and acting unconsciously. Drawing, fictionalizing and dancing will be our paths to lighter and ludic ways of looking at our monsters and creating new movements and strategies to deal with them.
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Facilitator: Anna Costa e Silva
Anna Costa e Silva is an artist, director and professor from Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Owner of an MFA in Visual Arts from the SVA, NYC, she works in the intersections between visual arts, performance, social practice and healing. She has won awards such as Terremoto Ubisoft Grant, American Austrian Foundation Prize and FOCO ArtRio. Has shown her work at institutions such as BienalSur (Buenos Aires), Art In Odd Places (NY), Contemporary Art Center (Vilnius) and Centro Cultural São Paulo (SP). Anna has been trained in Transcendental Meditation, Mindfulness, Aura Reading and Reiki and teaches ArtLife Practices at Parque Lage Visual Arts School, Rio de Janeiro. |
7pm EST |
What is happiness? |
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For the past six months I’ve been in a creative process with Almanac, a dance, circus and theater group based in Philadelphia. The name of the piece we've been creating is Happy Hour, and our task was to be happy for one hour, which led to the question, “What is happiness?” This workshop will be an experiential (and interactive) tour of that creative process adapted for a virtual gathering. It will include a guided movement warm up, followed by questions and scores that draw from authentic movement, circling, deep listening and other somatic practices. For this workshop please be in space big enough and clear enough to swing your arms and lay down on the ground. Ideally you will also have an area of wall space to lean on. Please wear comfortable clothing and have paper and pen handy.
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Facilitator: Gabrielle Revlock
Gabrielle Revlock is a choreographer, performer, improviser, somatics educator and creator of Restorative Contact, a mindful touch-based movement practice. Described by the press as inventive, mesmerizing, and a gifted comedian, she has toured the USA, Japan, Netherlands, Singapore, Hungary, India, Russia and was awarded a 2020 Bessie Award for Outstanding Breakout Choreographer and named ‘Newcomer of the Year’ by the performance journal Tanz in 2018. As a teacher she has conducted workshops at American Dance Festival, The Barnes Foundation, The Fabric Workshop & Museum, various schools and universities and is on faculty at Movement Research in NYC. More at GabrielleRevlock.com |
8-10pm EST |
What's happening now? |
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On the one hand, when we say 'be present,' it can seem obvious what that means. But sitting with the question, we find there are many layers: perhaps a fluttering in the belly, a role you play, a nagging doubt, the pending sense of climate change, the change of seasons. These layers somehow coexist and interact, sometimes in conflict with one another, and with all that noise, we sometimes shut out parts of what's present. Netta and Sarah offer you a two hour gentle dive into a more curious wakefulness, through a roadtrip among a few of the layers that make up a more intricate 'now.' We'll conclude with an invitation to playfully notice what's really present within and between us in our group-as-a-whole. Come play with us!
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Facilitators: Netta Sadovsky & Sarah Ledbetter
Netta Sadovsky, MFA, LSW (she or they) is an artist and therapist living in Philadelphia, PA. She provides group and individual counseling specializing in alternative sexualities and relationship structures at West Philly Therapy Center, and is a teaching artist at Center for Creative Works. Netta is a student of Internal Family Systems, Tavistock Group Relations, Relational Psychodynamic Therapy, Mindful Facilitation, Theater of the Oppressed, and Psychodrama, and makes artwork that borrows from and experiments with these practices under the moniker Suso Phizer. Sarah Ledbetter is a dancing writer and a body-based psychotherapist whose work has been presented or published nationally and internationally at such cool spots and publications as the Sans Souci Festival of Dance Film, the Berlin Black Film Festival, Earthdance E|Merge Interdisciplinary Arts Residency, the Body Mind Centering Conference, floromancy, Fourth River, Right Hand Pointing, and R and R Literary Magazine. Her main interest is how the fiesta of being in a body flows reciprocally into creative, social, site-specific, and therapeutic process. She is currently based in Nashville, Tennessee and Skull Valley, Arizona where her body-based creative and psychotherapeutic practice is anchored and winged. |