Co-Teaching with Gesa Piper
Center for Joint Studies of the Theater Academy Helsinki
June 12-16, 2023
The course ‘environmental organs’ integrates working with the organ centers of the body and particular local plants that are allied with these organs, such as dandelion and the liver, for example. It merges both our backgrounds in dance/somatics, traditional Chinese medicine and ecology with practices to connect with more-than-human elements, particularly of the plant world.
The course investigates, among other questions, how we can be in mutual dialogue between inner sensory qualities and outer environments? How do our interconnected perceptual understandings inform how we live during these times of planetary transformation?
In sharing the sources that have informed us, the course opens a space for acknowledgement of various sources of knowledge, inquiring into a decolonial approach to learning and exchange. The course is facilitated in a dialogical way with the students that enable them their own processes within the frame and the themes that are offered. The students will be encouraged to consider their own relationships to human and more-than-human knowledge that are included in the course’s context. It is open to students from various fields, departments and degree levels.
