Director of Photography- Aarya Rothe, Chaitanya Guttikar, Nachiket Pendse
Editor- Aniket Kale


About the workshop:

You are probably reading this piece on your computer screen while sitting down in a chair, or maybe on your iPad or your mobile phone. But nevertheless, you are sedentary right now. So am I, as I am typing this to you. This wonderful thing called technology that is enabling me to reach out to so many of you at once has also (unfortunately) affected our mobility, our movement. How do you commute to work? Are you mostly sitting at your workplace? What about getting food or clothes delivered at our place instead of actually going out to the market?

Let me share with you a brief outline of the workshop below.

Have you tried stroking a baby’s palm? It tries to close its fingers in a grasp. That’s called the grasp reflex. It hasn’t been taught to do that. It is an uncontrolled movement. As they grow up, movement becomes more controlled and intentional as they develop awareness about their own bodies. It is said that reflexes in infants are an important sign of nervous system development and function.

One of the first things we do in this workshop is that we simply walk, run, or jump while paying attention to what is actually happening to our body while doing these movements that we have been doing since childhood. Through decoding these movements as well as trying to understand other simple movements we move towards what is called body intelligence. This then brings us to the need to look at our body as a unit, held together by our brain and our spinal cord. If I were to move my hand laterally, what happens to the rest of my body? Does the weight shift? Is my spine still in the same form or has it transformed to facilitate the movement of my hand?

Secondly, have you noticed that the word ‘emotion’ has the word ‘motion’ in it? The word emotion finds its roots in the Latin word ‘emovere’ which means to put in motion move out, remove or agitate. Studies have shown that feelings and attitude are affected by changing proprioceptive input from the muscles and joints through the adoption or mimicry of a certain facial expression, posture, head movement, or certain expressive whole-body movements. The clinical implication of this is that motor behaviour or let’s just simply call it movement can be easily used as a simple, readily available, free of adverse side-effects, inexpensive intervention for emotion regulation, i.e., for reducing inappropriate fear, anger, sadness and other negative emotions or increasing happiness, pride and other positive feelings. In the section, we look closely at the relationship between our emotions and our body. And how through the manipulation of our body (i.e. through conscious bodily movements) we can change our emotions.

The third and final part is about expressing through your body. In this section, we will look at our body history, our body memories and see.

This is just a frail outline of the workshop. It is a physical workshop. You will be moving and thinking and moving a little more and thinking a little more all while having a lot of fun because the very notion of ‘play’ is also one of the aspects covered in the workshop.

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