Body Narratives Lab
Thursdays, 12:30pm – 2pm // 27-Oct thru 8-Dec
$12

Body Narratives Lab is a improvisation-based workshop that welcomes participants from different ages and backgrounds to investigate their own and personal manner of moving. The participants are invited to approach movement alternating between the particular physicality of the own body and the symbolic scope of embodiment. The aim of the laboratory is to focus on each person’s body in order to assist the practitioner in finding the body’s own way to express itself, acknowledging at the same time its central agency and its integration with the whole being.

Body Narratives Lab is designed to experience the body from a more concrete to a more symbolical way—from object to subject, from the physical characteristics of the body to its most metaphorical qualities of embodiment. The use of guided improvisation encourages the discovering of each body’s specificity, and thus embraces diversity over uniformity. It is because of all the above that the laboratory focuses the experience individually. Although there would be more than one person in the room, the practice is delineated as a personal encounter with the own socio-cultural trace in the body.

In order to engage this conscious body-practice it is important to keep a record of the experience. The intended topics are shared at the beginning of each session so for the student to know what would be the frame of the experience. What is important in the practice is to investigate how each topic relates to our experiences, rather than to discover what is the topic about.

It is highly recommended to keep track of the practice by taking notes.

Daniela Tenhamm-Tejos is a 30-year-old Chilean woman. As a body practitioner, she is interested on the art’s social duties, and how to meet the body as an aesthetic and political experience. In 2011, after finishing her BA in Dance
with focus in Teaching (Santiago), she came to USA to further develop her artistic path. In 2014 she was granted with the Chilean Government Scholarship, to pursue her Master degree in Arts Politics at New York University. She has performed and shown her work in different venues among Santiago, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Washington DC and NYC. She has three times produced Sample Festival in NYC, a site-specific festival that brings artists and audience into collaboration, inhabiting the space in new manners. She dev