Stabilization, Innovation & Breakthrough – Cultivating Resilience through the Embodied Arts
WAEF is a global event platform to support the development of the creative arts and somatics in a wide range of fields within education and therapy, including healthcare and wellness, performing arts, community arts and other allied professions. With multiple layers of challenges each of us and the whole world is facing, we are eagerly searching for stabilization and breakthrough paradoxically in our life and profession. WAEF 2023 strives to support our global community and will focus on the use of the embodied arts in imagining and re-creating new possibilities in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. They provide innovative pathways towards building resilience and healing, and for integrating cultural and spiritual practices that include and invoke multiple histories, ways of understanding and perceiving as well as other indigenous knowledge systems to theorize and imagine anew. Participants will be offered the opportunity to reflect upon their own artistic and embodied practices, learn from others in the field and gather virtually online and in person regionally to dream, create and utilize their art-forms in responding to psychosocial challenges in a globalized environment through the use of artistic expressions as embodied practices.
WAEF 2023 consists of four Summits: Dance Therapy & Movement Therapy (DT/MT), Creative Movement (CM), Laban Bartenieff Movement System (LBMS) and Authentic Movement (AM) which are ineluctably entwined disciplines addressing the fundamental law of human movement, its application and evolution to mystical and spiritual practice. Professional colleagues and practitioners in these fields will present and share their best practice and cutting-edge development in training, practice, and research. With the combination of the four fields, we aim to advance collaboration and cross-disciplinary practices and conversations.
WAEF will take place mainly online with option of in-person sessions with local partner institutions in America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Each summit lasts three days allowing for a time and space of unfolding and sharing. Over 120 presenters will participate in these four summits and Pre-Conference with Presentations, Workshops, Performances and Panel discussions (Key conversations) which will form the platform for the summit events.
All participants will be offered the option of on-line engagement and in-person attendance where local partners can offer that format. They will have access to the recordings of all on-line sessions. All participating groups and speakers are encouraged to submit their work for publication in the WAEF conference proceedings to be distributed worldwide. The main language of WAEF will be English. Translation of other languages will be provided to allow participants from different regions to contribute and to encourage international collaboration and networks to unfold.
WAEF also intends to make a breakthrough in the ways of organizing and structuring the conference by finding innovative pathways and integrating diverse cultural and spiritual approaches to practice. Rather than focusing on a few ‘expert’ individuals and authority in a hierarchical approach, we intend to develop a series of ‘Key Conversations’ as groups with each of them corresponding to the focus of the summit. As a result, we hope to dismantle the power structures of ‘mastery’ and ‘ownership’ of the work, to truly hear a diversity of underrepresented voices in our fields and further advance the engagement of all those who make up the rich tapestry of our communities and networks. Some of the key themes and areas of WAEF 2023 include clinical applications, indigenous healing traditions, education, ecology, performance, social justice, wellbeing, spirituality, art practice and the neurosciences etc.
DATES
Pre-Conference
February 25 & March 3/4, 2023
Dance Therapy & Movement Therapy Summit
March 9/10-12, 2023
Creative Movement Summit
March 23/24-26, 2023
Laban/Bartenieff Movement System
April 10/11-13, 2023
Authentic Movement Summit
April 20/21-23, 2023
FACTS
