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Re-Storying
Overview
Re-Storying: The Resilience Project is a flexible six-module program open to artists in the ACT region (and beyond) who identify that their livelihood and mental health have been affected and/or disrupted by the COVID19 crisis (no matter how big or small) and its repercussions.
The strengths-based process assists us to re-imagine our futures, even in unstable times. The process encourages us to resume/sustain/strengthen our work and purpose in contexts of such deep challenge and change.
The practice was presented in 6 modules that incorporate bodywork, breathwork, tension-release, arts-centred activities, and remodelling our ideas. Modules were held in person at The Street Theatre, online via Zoom, and filmed classes are now also available to watch in your own time and pace.
Who's This For?
This workshop is offered in good faith to those of us who are tired, finished up, moving on- or somehow still haunted by our dreamings, as artists. It is also for anyone who feels robust! We will engage in some foundational exercises: grounding, letting-go, attuning, exercising, extending. Working across modalities exercises include: moving, breathing, gesturing, picking up a paintbrush, opening our mouths to voice an opinion, or a sound. We invite you to create deposits for a creative store of replenishing processes and ideas which can be shared @creativerestore.
Come just as you are, and who you are. Be brilliant, be in pain, be in-waiting. The future is still talking to us.
Each module is based around a particular theme as below. There is a concrete outcome to each module, something to deposit into a creative store for your own future replenishment.
Read More: The Canberra Times | Australian Arts Review | Arts Hub | Stage Whispers
Lend an Ear: Living Arts Canberra
Module 1 – Reflect; A reexamination of our creative identities
Where have we been? A chance to step back and reflect on the past 18 months.
Module 2 – Reframe; A rethink of structures of support
What supports us in our work? How does the world respond to and talk to us? How might we understand cooperative models of care?
Module 3 – Replenish; A reconstitution of nourishment and self care
Creativity is often understood as ‘flow’. What if the river runs dry? Replenish takes a few steps back to look not only at the nature of our work, but to what is the nature of the river.
Module 4 – Rewire; A refresh of our bodies stories. A rediscovery of flexibility
In this module, explore practices outside your own. Gain tools from other artforms to encourage flexibility back into how you approach your work. Learn how to swap your personal narratives to sustain yourself.
Module 5 – Reorient; Riding the unknown
This module is geared towards providing artists and creatives with tools to find continuity across interruption and disruption. Develop new methodologies that help you reorient, regroup and change direction in your arts practice.
Module 6 – Recombine; Configuring practices for the future, sustaining agency in a time of uncertainty.
As part of Re-Storying, the Resilience Project, Re-Combine focuses on how to understand your agency as an artist in times of uncertainty. Exercises strengthen the ability to reconfigure our practices from a creative base in a disrupted world.
Delivery
These modules have now all been provided in person and online via Zoom. To access the digital content please go to our Vimeo Showcase.
For any queries regarding the online classes please email shellyh@thestreet.org.au
About Arts Facilitator Zsuzsi Soboslay
Zsuzsi’s arts practice spans writing, visual and performing arts (theatre, dance and music) and cultural development, including working with disadvantaged and displaced communities. In 1991, she established Body Ecology as a systemic practice designed to link body-mind processes. Her experience of illness and disability (in herself, and in others) has confirmed her belief that yes, we are shaped by the ‘body politic’ (the contexts in which we live) but can also live and work in hope and capability beyond these limits. Her cross-artform practice is accurate, intuitive, replenishing, and full of surprises.
Zsuzsi is proficient in working across modalities, and with people of profound and complex needs.
Creative ReStore
We invite you to visit @creativerestore on Instagram to share you creative responses to these modules. Whether a drawing, picture of your medicine wheel, a picture of your mask, a story you have written or thoughts and musings; we’d encourage you to visit this page as a place of sharing, inspiration and exchange.
Contributions to the store can be made via this Instagram account by direct message. The aim of this page is to create a store of tools, ideas and inspirations that can help us and anyone in the public sphere whenever and wherever needed. Exersices from modules will also be released here if you'd like to take part in more bite-sized pieces.