Erica Charalambous

Manifesting Movement: body-mind rewilding
Our attention span is being tugged and pulled in all directions simultaneously rendering our memory into diffracted bits and bytes of data. However, our ‘bodymind’ constitution has a longstanding ability to process vast amounts of data (information) every second of every day and embodied practices are more in need than ever before.
This workshop is a Symposium of learnt and unlearnt movement in association with body and mind connection.
The focus of this workshop is to cultivate body awareness and somatic exchanges through rewilding within a moving and thinking body by drawing on ancient somatic and feminine practices on the island of Cyprus, using imagery (Ideokinesis), experiential anatomy (body-mind centring) and dance improvisation technologies. A key factor in this session is to explore how we as “dancer organisms” are having to re-adjust, re-configure, re-assess the relationships with our bodies, other bodies, animals, plants (nature), our habitat (homes) and move through and within these contingencies and connect with our environment. We are, after all, innately developing new relationships with all that is non-human in our environment currently!
To end the session, we will learn and make use of different dance improvisation tricks to play around in a final group dance jam altogether. Enter a primitive realm where the body waltzes shamanically, like an orchestra, communicating Divinity!

Erica Charalambous (MA, PHD) is a highly motivated researcher, artist, educator and cultural community connector who enjoys developing her writing skills and nurturing her artistic research and choreographic practice in inter-related fields. Her passion lies in the fusion of art
and science, drama and cognitive neuro-aesthetics, the body and the environment, which plays a key role in her work as a researcher, somatic and dance practitioner and cultural operator in the field of Creative Process, Arts Management, New Dance Ecologies of Research, Contemporary Dance, Somatic Practices, Interdisciplinary Artistic Research, Digital Archives of Dance, documenting Intangible Cultural Heritage and Cultural Diplomacy strategies.
Additionally, Erica continues her artistic practice and enjoys exploring various methods of writing and undoing content such as: an un-published journal I am an Archive (ongoing project) funded by Hosking Houses Trust and Coventry University fund – Writer’s Residency for Women Writers (2018), an experimental installation Dance Data Distillery (2018) presented at Digital Echoes 2018 at the Centre for Dance Research Coventry University and a video art digital performance Room under my skin (May- November 2018) presented at the Venice Biennale 2018. Her current research and artistic practice explore the by-products of her PhD research through a variety of writing and publishing projects, installations, workshops, storytelling, embodied practices, talks and dance research-related activities presented in various institutions and festivals in Europe, the UK and Australia.