Join Claire O’Neil for a Somatic Movement workshop during her artist’s residency.
Claire is interested in the way the self generates resources that contribute to long-lasting creativity, embodied health, energy, social action and sustainable practices. Soma means body, not just the physical body, but the living process and wholeness of the body, where we connect with the ideas of fluidity, change and adaptation and self-regulation. To be nomadic means to travel borderless, outside of societal constraints and in tune with nature. I propose to be nomadic in our thoughts, movement and creativity within our place of home. Balfolk is a popular dance movement that has reinvented traditional European social dance forms and music as a vibrant dance experience. We will explore somatic exercises, embodied narrative, and body/landscaping processes for making connections to our primordial individual and collective ‘bodies’, culminating in folk dancing together, a kind of ‘dannsa rathad’ with live musician, Anne Wood.
This workshop will be held outdoors and may be cancelled due to weather conditions. Bring a yoga mat. For more information, contact jon@anlanntair.com
Claire O’Neil is a soma-nomadic artist, director, performance maker, embodied practitioner, movement and dance educator and community project builder. She has created, collaborated and presented over 35 performance works. Her creative processes are open, inclusive, and adaptable to all ages and bodies, to create safe and playful collaborative projects that utilise self-educational tools for lifelong creativity and physical mobility. Claire resided in Belgium for 10 years and developed an international career in performing and teaching dance in Europe. She returned to New Zealand in 2011 and achieved a Master’s in dance in 2016. Currently, Claire is in her third year of a PhD in Creative Practice at the University of Auckland, where she explores the intersection of somatic arts and sustainability. She is a leader of Balfolk, the national Dance review editor for Theatreview and Mum to her two girls, Georgie & Iris.