Maenad acrobat in Dionisian Procession, Lipari, Sicily Archaeological Museum

Mandorla Arts Labs:

Allowing for the Emergent through Community-Based Inquiry

The Mandorla

“Mandorla” means “almond” in Italian and represents the intersection where two opposing forces come together and create something new, something more than the sum of their parts. The Mandorla is also the symbol of the integration of two polarities: Body and Soul, Masculine and Feminine principles, etc. It is often used in Catholic and Buddhist iconography around a holy figure who has achieved a state of union, as Embodied-Spirit. Also known as the Vesica Piscis, it symbolizes the sacred geometrical pattern of the creative power that ignites in the overlap of contrasting forces, the Birth Canal or Doorway for Creative Emergence..

Arts-Based

“We work with the arts metaphorically, as a way of identifying, reflecting on, and changing our conditioning. We work with art and the creative process as a paradigm for addressing suffering. In such a practice, we place our focus on the process itself, and on the insights that emerge, rather than on the outcome or product.” (Halprin 2002)

We are bringing our questions and living tensions to the power of the arts! Embodied arts opens doors to reservoirs of wisdom within the fertile valleys of the subconscious. We root in the clarity of our questions and intentions, then surrender to the collective creative process and see what living threads emerge. Things don’t have to make sense! And at the end of our lab, we reflect together and witness how the living threads start to weave into a tapestry of collective insight. Like the Mandorla suggests, we are weaving left and right hemisphere wisdom - the analytical, storied with the intuitive, symbolic.

Each session will begin with a lesson and discussion on key concepts, and then we will engage the material through body-based awareness practices and movement games. Through gesturality, song, rhythm, and circle, we will draw out and animate what is within us and dance it into new possibility. Embodied circle practice offers relational teachings through expressing our individuality, while tending to the whole. It can help us liberate bound-up energy and re-arrange our relationship to our stories, as an alternative approach to verbal processing. And it can be joyful! Liberation work can and must include joy!

“The shortest distance between two brains and hearts is laughter”.
 (Thich Nhat Hanh Vietnamese Buddhist monk, writer, teacher and peace activist.)

I am drawing on over a decade of engagement in community music traditions, including women’s healing and threshold-tending circles, and also from my ancestral roots in the community music traditions of Southern Italy and Sicily known as the Tarantellas. I will be weaving rhythm, movement, and song practices from both traditions together in this space.

Inquiry-Based

“This attitude of the artist as seeker brings us into a creative confrontation with ourselves and with our lives.  In this way, our lives feed our art by making it real and authentic, and our art opens and reflects back to us images of who we have been, who we are, and who we might become.” (Halprin 2022)

This is not a traditional Teacher - Student learning space. I do not have ‘learning outcomes’ that I am driving us toward. This is a Collective Inquiry process. I am bringing forth the questions, concerns, living tensions that I want to turn to face with you, alongside you. I am bringing tools and practices for us to do a deep dive with these concerns in our hearts-minds-bodies - as individuals and as a circle mirroring back to one another. After we engage the practices, we will reflect and harvest the living threads that emerge in our circle. The answers we seek are emergent and collectively arrived at. I want our process to be honest, and what’s honest is we’ve never been here before on the planet, and our work is to uncover transformative new possibilities that disrupt the stuck systemic patterning that got us here!!

Community-Based

“Ci balli sulu nu te puei curare.” (“If you dance alone, you cannot heal yourself.”)
- adage from Salento, IT

This work of collective liberation is necessarily community-based.

Just as much as we are learning concepts and tools for our personal growth, we are also practicing how to be in community. We are learning how to take care of ourselves while tending collective space, we are learning how to stay differentiated while linking and relating with others. Ancestral community dances embody this timeless wisdom. We root in our individual expression, while in a dance with another, while we all hold ‘La Ronda’ (The Circle). The dances are embodied teachings in relationality - with self, other, and the community, synchronously.

I believe that the answers we seek in these times will be collectively arrived at. I believe we each hold unique pieces of wisdom and creative potential, and when we come together we can realize our unique contributions inside of something larger than ourselves. In community our suffering can be witnessed, held and lifted, and our joy is amplified.

Whenever there is a circle, there is a door. When we create spaces where our hearts and minds align in coherence, we can create beautiful new possibilities. I see it like a spring in the center of the circle, that flows forth fresh waters of nourishment and renewal.