In this workshop, dancer-choreographer and interdisciplinary artist Patrick Gunasekera will share tools from his practice of reclaiming gender expression through movement and performance. Participants will be offered different options for exploring safety, agency, and emotional integrity in the body through improvisation, tasking, scoring, and learning planned choreography.

Participants will work at their own pace in solo movement and choreographic writing exercises and some guided group discussions. Connecting with their own methodologies, creative interests, and lineages of gender as a starting point, participants are invited to create a personal toolkit for using their own embodied voice(s) to challenge prescriptive movement environments and reclaim dance from institutional purposes and binaries.

Ideas explored in this workshop can be applied to dance, choreography, and other body-based or storytelling practices, and are particularly relevant for artists who also navigate institutional systems of culture-making. It is open to body-based artists working in any form, but will mostly explore personal, cultural and social contexts of gender using dance and choreographic ideas.

Please bring a pen and paper, and wear clothes that feel comfortable and affirming to dance in.