Training Programme #18: Visceral empathy

This multi-day workshop will explore our bodies as a complex site for the world of sensation that defines our interpersonal relationships — physical, psychological, and emotional. Our bodies know what it feels like to be held, to be pushed away, to be stripped of control, to have it given back to us . . Amidst the pandemic, Davis and Gould’s research has veered toward psychosomatic investigations of aloneness and being together. Using physical principles and structures from their collaborations (such as “self-administration” and “visceral empathy”), this workshop will cultivate tender, difficult, and intense interpersonal states, and explore how they can be transformed through isolation. We will thus expand our personal senses of connection to our own bodies, as well as to other people and theirs.

This workshop will take place both indoors and out and use interior/exterior space and the presence of the public as a live variable of connection, consciousness, and movement possibility. There will be no contact between participants. On some level, we are left with a sense of preparing our bodies for the future, when we can hug people again, laugh with strangers, etc.  How can we cultivate embodied ideas that allow for the eventual presence of others, and yet acknowledge and accept their absence?

© Patricia Bordallo