May 31 – June 2, 2024
Acrobatics as Attention Practice
With Naomi Ullian & Tender Tierney
About This Immersion
Using mindfulness practice, this research lab invites participants to investigate thinking, feeling, communicating, and experiencing the body in the field of acrobatics.
Goal 1: Explore how acrobatics can help cultivate attention and awareness.
Goal 2: Explore how mindfulness tools can support acrobatic practice and living in the body.
Daily activities will include seated and walking meditation, somatic centering, and acrobatic warm-up, hand balancing, tumbling, aerials, and partner work. Please note that some part of each day will be taught in silence or with minimal speaking. Students are asked to commit to participing for the full weekend. We also ask that you bring food, beverage, and whatever else you may need each day so that the class can maintain a collective container. Coffee and tea will be provided.
Details
When:
Friday | 5:30 – 8:30 pm
Saturday & Sunday | 8:30 am – 12:00 pm & 12:45 – 3:45 pm
Where:
Cotton Mill
Cost:
$480
Register By:
May 17, 2024
Prerequisites:
All acrobatic experience is welcome as long as you are comfortable with the following: 30 second plank hold, kick up to handstand at wall, and either three push-ups OR three pull-ups.
Ages:
18 & up or by permission of instructor
About The Coaches
Naomi Ullian is an acrobat, performer, writer, and herbalist who studies mindfulness through hand balancing and meditation at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, MA, where she learned from Pascal Auclair and Anushka Fernandopulle. A graduate of the professional programs at the New England Center for Circus Arts and a founding member of Big Teeth Performance Collective, Naomi has had the good fortune to practice collaborative theater-making of dark comedies about social ecologies since 2017. Leaning heavily on creative activity as a balm for existential confusion, Naomi is very pleased to share the worlds of hand-balancing, trapeze, partner acrobatics, physical theater, and creative practice with her students. You can learn more about her at www.bigteethperformance.com and www.tinyponyapothecary.com.
Kalen Tenderness Tierney (aka Tender) is a person (also known as a multispecies assemblage) navigating the world in a gender expansive practice, working at the intersection of somatics, meditation and social/ecological justice. Tender is a facilitator, educator, ceramicist, queer philosopher, and builder for social change; a student, sharer, space holder, and collaborator rather than an expert; and a Somatic Experiencing practitioner and meditation teacher. Over the previous decade, Tender has worked with various groups to combat social and ecological injustice, including their work with Braddock Tiles and as a core member of WHAT’S UP?! Pittsburgh. Tender is invested in working for the total liberation of all beings, and loves wild blueberries, the ocean, rocks, trees, sky, animals, tea, far out theory conversations, fire, reading and being in the forest. www.tenderspaceelementalsomatics.com
