A practice-based research workshop that opens space for poetry as an embodied inquiry.

During these days at Unplugged Dance, we will have studio practice as well as field study sessions on the land surrounding Paleohori. We will work with movement and creative writing. We will also experiment with natural materials such as wood, plants, and soil, as well as with paper, and we will play with sketching and drawing.

We will cultivate a symbiotic perception and a kinaesthetic sensitivity—a sponginess and softness in our attention—as we search for the roots of poetry.

We will work with an approach that considers poetry a state of being, a perceptual state, rooted in the physical world of our own human bodies, as well as in other more-than-human bodies, such as those of trees, flowers, rocks, clouds, insects, soil, or water.

We will engage with practices of embodied listening and tuning, as well as somatic and creative practices, to perceive and compose a body beyond the body: a super-sensitive body, a transient body, an imaginative body—a body that can be an experiential crack for the unknown, or a liquid territory of wild possibilities.

We will create dances as ephemeral poems, and we will write poetry as if we were dancing, working with instant composition as a process of decomposing, melting down to essence, and becoming recomposed again.

We will navigate toward a merging of the potentialities of ourselves and the potentialities of the place, to allow new becomings, transformations, and perhaps monstrous ways of being and ways of being with poetry in the monstrous.

The workshop will hold space for the creative exploration of the interstices between movement, imagery, and words.

Our practices will also be underlined by playing with natural materials, such as colours from flowers or plants, or dirt, with sticks, stones, charcoal, and paper, in an attempt to create imprints of poetic or imaginative processes, as a way of making traces of the untraceable.

The workshop will unfold:

– along the line of in-depth personal inquiry through a series of individual research assignments and practices;

– collective group practices through group scores that may cultivate a collective poetic body or suggest poetry as a social practice—a practice of moving together and co-becoming;

– the work will also be framed with material from the 15 introductory classes of Skinner Releasing Technique.

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Skinner Releasing Technique, developed by Joan Skinner, is a method in which a series of 15 classes offers a framework to explore imagination as an embodied reality. Through poetic images, music, and hands-on studies, a deep kinaesthetic experience of dance becomes possible as one opens to both the inner and outer landscapes. Thus, there is an experiential understanding of the technique and the creative process at the same time, and the perception of the moving body unfolds across many layers that come into play when dancing.

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Vasiliki Tsagkari has been working on her own dance pedagogy, MELT, since 2022. Her main interests are sensitivity and sensuality in movement, the kinaesthetics of language, and the transformation of elements of everyday living into physical poetry—the experience of the moving body that asks to be shared and articulated as a public statement. For the last ten years, she has been looking after an olive farm in Messinia, Greece. Physical work close to the earth, as well as the observation of nature’s elements through the process of cultivation, opened up a wide research field and has greatly informed her approach to dance. She has been a certified introductory teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique since 2017.