Did you know that repressed emotions affect your physical and mental health? The research proves that. There are a number of things that you can do to make you feel better. See a counsellor or talk to your best friend. Use your phone as the best friend and record yourself talking about stressful event or write this down. However, you can also choose a different therapy. Let your body speak. As a part of creative workshop series we created a Dance and Movement Workshop called Body Nonsense that is suitable to various age groups around Auckland and beyond.

The idea of the dance workshop is to connect people to their feelings and emotions through body movement. We would like to show people how to translate negative and positive experiences into a dance flow. Move, process and let things go.

The workshop is run by a movement practitioner, yogi, creator of Silent Disco Citywalk®, Yana Kirakovskaya. It is extra magical because it is with the help of wireless headphones that makes it easy for people to connect within the group. The voice guidance and the musical soundtrack help participants to get immersed in their own world with ease.

The Workshop Structure

The dance workshop starts with a 10 minutes breathing session that helps to calm mind and relax the whole body. It is followed by the six senses mindfulness exercises that are drawn to activate and recharge each of the human’s senses – eyesight, hearing, touch, smell, flavour and intuition.

Then we move into the movement and self-expression session where everyone in the group will be using the headphones. During this part the participants  listen to the vocal guidance and perform different exercise individually and in small groups. For example, there is an exercise where you play with various postures in the space and observe how it affects the emotions and feelings; there is an activity where participants listen to the soundtrack of the song and choose a nature element that they will embody and etc.

The movement session finishes off with a connecting exercise that brings the whole group together. It starts with one or a few people dancing in the middle, eventually it attracts other people to join the group and connect with each other through dance moves.