Letting the Body Stretch Itself and Other Joys
With Merian Soto
A workshop hosted by The Whole Shebang on Oct 3-4
Letting The Body Stretch Itself and Other Joys is a somatic and improvisational movement workshop, in which Merian Soto will facilitate the group through the prompts and unfolding of Elaine Summers, somatic practices pioneer, celebrating her and her work as foundational and as ongoing opportunities to find new pathways in the body and in creative work. Soto apprenticed with Summers from 1978-1983 gaining valuable tools for the later development of Soto’s Modal Practice and Branch Dance.
Reflected by Soto’s apprenticeship with Summers, these somatic explorations provide catalysts into and mechanisms of embodied choreographic research and insight into how movement practice becomes making practice.
Led by the deeply attuned and rigorously playful Soto, we will move and be moved from within towards new experiences .... for example…
the letting the body stretch itself one simultaneously allows and notices movement travel into extension sequentially throughout the body.
Bone hugging involves applying three dimensional tension to each of our body’s 206 bones.
We will also explore the score of Dance for Carola, created by Summers for the sixth concert of the Judson Dance Theater on June 23, 1963. Soto performed the work in in 2010.
More info
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Dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Merián Soto is the creator of aesthetic-somatic dance practices and methodologies, Branch Dancing and Modal Practice. She is known for works that explore and reflect upon Puerto Rican diasporic heritage, history, culture and the legacy of colonialism, experiments with Salsa, and the Branch Dance Series, which includes dozens of performances on stage, in galleries, and in nature, as well as video installations, and year-long seasonal projects. Soto is codirector with Viveca Vázquez of the award winning documentary Fenomenal: Rompeforma 1989-1996 screened internationally since 2023. A recipient of a New York Dance and Performance Award, BESSIE (2000), a Greater Philadelphia Dance and Physical Theater Award “ROCKY” (2008), a Pew Fellowship in the Arts (2015), United States Artists Doris Duke Fellowship in Dance (2019) and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. She currently co-directs, with Vázquez, La Escuelita Fenomenal de RompeForma, a cycle of dance and performance workshops in Puerto Rico. She also collaborates with choreographers Liz Lerman, Jawolle Zollar, Johanna Haigood and Eiko Otake on Legacy Unboxed, a project that re-imagines traditional notions of what constitutes an artistic legacy and how it is shared with the world.
Since 2016, Soto has been involved in various projects celebrating Summers who passed in 2014. In Elaine in the air and me, she joined forces with Marion Ramírez, Patti Bradshaw, and Noemí Segarra to present a performance at the 92nd St. Y’s historic Fridays at Noon series. Soto’s article celebrating, How Does This Body Want To Move? Dancing the Legacy of Elaine Summers was published in Contact Quarterly in 2019. In 2022, Soto and Bradshaw were featured in the New York City Library of Performing Arts David Vaughn’s The Dance Historian Is In. This October, as part of centennial activities, Soto will join a panel titled Elaine Summers - Intermedia Artist, at the New York City Library of Performing Arts.
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Day 1: Friday, October 3, 10am-4pm (1 hr break)
Day 2: Saturday, October 4, 10am-4pm (1 hr break)
Location: The Whole Shebang, Back entrance, 1813 S 11th St, Philadelphia, PA 19148
Price: Sliding scale $125-300
Have questions? Please email us at art.at.shebang@gmail.com and we’ll get back to within 1-2 business days.