Life-Whetter and Momentum-Booster
A mobilizing workshop (in the spirit of empowerment) led by artist Dorottya Szonja Koltay
Life-whetter is a mobilizing workshop, a series of activities that will invigorate you, prepare you for the rumble and promotes regeneration. It will lead to, but is not a prerequisite for, a participatory art event – merely provides an opportunity for the latter. It initiates knowledge sharing, connection and community formation; it is an artistic space where we practise liberated sharing and uninhibited shaping in preparation for the (trans)formation that is always imminent.
We’re not going to war; what we’re mobilizing are the resources we use every day. Our concern is getting back on our feet and staying upright. We will welcome our own and each other’s capacity for transcending ourselves day after day. We will commend our faculties and will practice commitment. We will encourage each other to connect with the community, to release our inhibitions in rewarding ways, and to use the public space freely.
What is your strength?
The six-part workshop series will help us to turn our attention to our own strengths with the help of group games, visual art and theatre. We will create texts, images, sounds and movements so as to be able to bring to the surface, and thereby identify, our individual strengths, our positive qualities. As we take stock of our resources and look at individual coping practices, the workshop also seeks to encourage us to focus our attention on each other and practice sharing. We will seek points of contact through cooperative methods. Using games, artistic forms and our imagination, we will use transferences that allow us to channel our experiences into a new playing space which makes it possible to practise how to communicate them safely. At the end of the workshop series, participants will have the opportunity to try out, in public space, the objects and performative methods they have created.
What happens at the workshops?
At the workshop sessions, we will create fictional frames for our experiences, train our imagination and concoct worlds. We will draw on our own experiences to create collective stories and visual narratives. There will be focal points to concentrate attention on the various tasks; while these will be different from session to session. The workshops will include work in small groups, dialogic situations and individual tasks. No prior training is necessary to take part in the games.
1. Mobilization – getting to know each other, outlining the framework, a taster of the methods
2. Image-Vivifier – creating and developing visual narratives, practising methods of image-making
3. Word Weaving – games to jointly develop texts, rhymes, borrowed texts
4. Hum & Whirl – a session with a focus on sound and motion
5. Situational Exercises – improvisation, developing fictional worlds
6. Summary Mobilization – Preparing the Serpent of Strengths
The participants will have the opportunity to join the dance of the Serpent of Strengths. This will be a performance and a public celebration, where the participants can bind together the visual signs they have made of their experiences of strength, creating a serpent-like figure or spatial form that they bring into motion in a public space. In addition to the participants of the mobilizing workshop, the broader community is also welcome to join the dance of the Serpent of Strengths, and the event will be an occasion for the meeting of groups who have participated in similar exercises. We will practise owning our strengths in a broader context and use the opportunity to seek points of contact between us. Through performative exercises, we practice synchronized movement and peaceful mobilization in communities. Offering an opportunity to connect, the assemblage creates a shared playing field for participants with different backgrounds, various age groups and vulnerable groups.
The Serpent of Strengths is an opportunity to take stock of the skins we have shed, and to gather, as well as show, our ability to grow new ones. It is an occasion for connecting so that we can find a common voice/give voice to a community. ‘It is not I who shouts, it is the earth that rumbles!’
My moulting face, what do you seek? Don’t you see you’re hiding me?
Don’t turn stagnant; find your flow. Your old form stays, even as you let go.
By the time you shed your skin, you’ll find the space to dwell within.
Set free, you’ll find your way to go.
