Join us for a workshop with artist, somatic movement educator, and therapist Michele Minnick, co-sponsored by the Johns Hopkins Institute of Planetary Health.
The Peale’s exhibition, The Future of Here: A Glimpse of a River Culture to Come, invites visitors to contend with the remnants of a culture of disposability and the many scars it leaves behind. This ruinous landscape provokes waves of environmental grief as the items of our fossil-fueled present are laid bare before us. In order to create pathways towards healing both the land and ourselves, it is essential to open space for experiencing feelings of ecological grief and climate anxiety. This workshop will serve as a container for holding and moving what needs our attention in this moment, with a particular focus on welcoming grief, sorrow, and loss.
The first half of the workshop will focus on sensing into the body and identifying and working with essential inner resources. We will explore connections between water and emotion via the concept of rasa, a Sanskrit word meaning juice, sap, or flavor, and corresponding to elements of both the body and the natural world that supports it. We will briefly explore the fluid, musculoskeletal, and organ systems of the body, with a particular focus on the lungs.
In the second half of the workshop we will work multimodally and creatively in direct relationship to the relics of the exhibit’s future worlds–finding ways to touch and share grief, anger, joy, laughter and other emotional energies through movement, writing, drawing. We will end by creating a communal ritual that considers mourning as medicine, and celebrates what can be found in the streams we walk along, and the feeling streams that move inside of us. We will welcome sorrow as a necessity for resilience and revolution.
Date and time: Friday, March 14 | 5:00 – 7:00pm EST
Location: The Peale Museum | 225 Holliday Street
