Means of Exchange is a series of relational experiences and experiments. Each session includes meditations, creative self-explorations and conversations which invite you to open up about the topics that are hard to look at and harder to talk about. Feel free to take part just once or with all three sessions in which we’ll explore sex, money and death as means for radical politics, generative relationships and vibrant aliveness.
**please wear comfortable clothes to move in and bring paper and pen to write with
FRIDAY, AUGUST 11TH / 7:30 – 9:30pm
Let’s Talk About Sexual Healing
Our bodies and their instincts are constantly being manipulated for marketing purposes and control tactics. Many of us have suffered extremely for, and in, our sexual desires and identities. Many more of us carry heavy burdens of shame and fear in our bodies that have simply been inherited from religious and cultural norms which seek to divorce our humanness from our “goodness.”
In this session we’ll begin with basic body awareness that helps build bridges between our minds and physicality, then we’ll have some real talk about the ways we can buck the system of shame and promote positive sexuality for ourselves and others, finally we’ll end by co-authoring a manifesto to create new relationships between our bodies, minds and hearts.
SATURDAY, AUGUST 12TH / 10am – 12pm
Elemental Economics
This session begins with a presentation on bacteria. Together we’ll learn and explore the different ways that bacteria are conduits of energetic exchange in our bodies and our environment. After the presentation we’ll practice simple movement techniques which play with weight transfer and locomotion, and meditation techniques for turning challenging emotions into supportive sensations. We’ll end with an ideation session for practical resource exchanges that communities can initiate together to help everyone get what they need and feel needed in what they have to give.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 13TH / 4pm – 6pm
Dying is Easy. Comedy is Hard.
The only sure bet in life is one that most of us spend a lot of energy trying to avoid. Physical death is unavoidable, as are the other deaths that occur when relationships end and life cycles change. In this workshop we’ll spend time practicing deep states of meditation in yoga nidra (yogic sleep,) taking trust walks, making blind drawings, and talking and laughing about our hopes, fears and questions in the inevitable unknown.
The artist also invites you to join her during her Open Studio Visits.
RENEE SILLS
Renee Sills is a multidisciplinary artist, author, and educator. The throughline of her work is an ongoing investigation of mindfulness, agency and the adaptive processes of the human body in contemporary landscapes. Compelled by the intersection of embodiment practices (somatics, yoga, dance) and academic discourse surrounding embodiment and identity, Renee’s inquiries invest in experiential research methods and experimental co-creations.
As an artist she works primarily with video, audio, installation and performance. Most of her work is socially engaged and participatory.
Renee has also been a movement educator for over a decade. She currently teaches nationally and internationally for yoga teacher training programs, contemporary dance workshops and her own hybrid programs of experimental arts/life transformative processes. She is the co-founder and co-director of Sola School of Contemplative Arts.
Photo courtesy: Detail, Banner art by Janna Dorothy