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Description
Immerse yourself in the depths of Desire, Consent, and the Imaginalbody at THE EROTICS OF RUPTURE Retreat, at the beautiful Hearth & Soul Eco-centre in Stanford.
Guided by two leaders in their fields, this six-day experience offers an opportunity to reimagine the patterns of desire and rupture that shape your life. Your interest in Consent, Embodiment, Sexuality, and Archetypal Psychology, will be enriched and transformed through the practice.
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“Any force that is powerful enough to influence and shape my life, without my having a say in whether I want this affect or not, we call that 'God' or ‘the gods’.” - CG Jung
Rupture and Eros come hand in hand. Our desire and loves are marked by the experience of being broken into by forces much larger than us. Intimacy, shame, grief, desire, longing, loss, betrayal, and moments of deep awkwardness arrive unannounced. Moments where we have all but lost the script and stand utterly bewildered. These ruptures bring us closer to the fluxing multitudes of animate forces and impulses with whom we share our bodies and the Earth. How do we understand consent within the context of these perceived violations, to meet life as it is?
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What is Contact Improvisation?
Through deep listening and responding to the impulses and queues of movement in the present moment, a dialogue of dance emerges with the other. Working with foundational skills, we explore gravity and the sharing of weight; momentum, resistance and surrender; and the nature of the creative. Our fundamental patterns are revealed, presenting the possibility of recognising the archetypal structures embedded within them as new pathways to move, respond, repose, and dream.
What is Consent Practice?
Beginning with Dr Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent, we clarify the differences between Giving and Taking, Allowing and Receiving, and our Yes and No. Once this is established as a basis from which to work, we explore the implications of limit consent, which rests on the understanding that our unconscious desires and impulses often violate our perceived moralities and identities, and constantly brush up against those in the other, and in the cosmos. Somatic strategies deepen our awareness and broaden our capacity to meet the imaginal, that plethora of intelligences in the animate universe. While Jung calls this process individuation, Japanese butoh dancers refer to this dance with the forces of fate as the personal flower unfurling.
What is the Imaginal Body in Archetypal Psychology?
The images that possess us or bowl us over, and from which we move, arise from the unconscious and echo the ambivalent desires of the soul. James Hillman calls the continuum of uncertainty that precedes and gives rise to reality the imaginal realm. Speaking of the archetypal and daimonic forces of the imaginal that rupture our sense of control, he follows the ancients, by referring to them as the gods. Turning with love towards the images of soul that emerge with the body through rupture, our human suffering and confusion is revisioned as an electric and erotic dance with the divine, in the between.
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ABOUT
FACILITATOR
Nico Athene’s knowledge and approach to the negotiated space of the ‘between’ and the embodied imaginal has woven and deepened with involvement in ritual performance, contact improvisation, butoh dance, and consent-through-touch. With a BA in Social Anthropology (University of Cape Town), Athene began her exploration into consent and embodiment research, developing it through her work in the sex industry, as well as achieving a Masters Degree with distinction in Fine Art (University of Witwatersrand). Her thesis, Approximating Unknowns as an Ethics Towards Encountering Difference, explored archetypes of the ecological body and included improvised scenes of dialogue and enmeshment with (in)animate landscapes, as a means to deconstruct colonial strategies of subject/object relations.
She now works as a performer, visual artist, and facilitator. Athene has performed as a dancer in multiple ritual productions (including several Brett Bailey productions and a collaboration with Tossie Van Tonder), and has exhibited her work in a number of galleries. She has taught privately, at Wits University under a grant from the Centre for the Humanities and Arts, Baard University, and for the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies. Her on-going study of Butoh and post-Jungian theory continues to invigorate her research into the possibilities of the imagining body as a place for relationship with the mysteries of soul and the animist cosmos.
GUEST LECTURER
For most of the first half of her life, Nan McAughey directed her love of intensity and altered states through drama and physical theatre, working for years with the Market Theatre Laboratory and Moving into Dance Company in Johannesburg. This culminated in a Masters with distinction in Site-specific Living Heritage and Ritual Drama that challenged patriarchal and apartheid constructs of identity. Her final production before she left the public stage, was a techno-ritual opera called earthdiving, that she wrote and co-directed with BBC director Nancy Duiguid, for the Spier New Opera Season in 2002.
With an eye for multiplicity and madness just below the surface, her work then developed into the hands-on practice of Imaginalbody Therapy. This practice combines the living wisdom of an energy medicine called Jin Shin Jyutsu, with alchemic and mythic reflection, in the tradition of Archetypal Psychology as taught by the Tamboo Foundation. Nan works with her hands to harmonise a client's light energy and cultivate coherency as a basis for connecting with the aliveness of our animate world. She guides her clients with practical tools to dialogue with imaginal forces within an affliction, learning to hold the tensions between who they think they are and what is making itself known. Imagination becomes medicine as they live into the intensity of their entanglements with the creative spirit forever in search of soul. Her work includes creative processes, dance, ritual and excursion into wild nature, to embody a sense of ethical belonging to the indigenous mysteries of psyche.
“When we move with senses acute, listening, watching, breathing in tune with the world about us, recognising its priority and ourselves as guests, witnessing its "God-givenness," then we have made a wilderness area or moment. The restoration of the pristine starts in a fresh attitude toward what is, whatever and wherever it is.” James Hillman, A Blue Fire, 104.
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Investment: R11500/ $790 paid in full before October 12th. Thereafter R13000, paid in full by November 16th.
A non-refundable deposit of R5000/ $340 secures your place.
Spaces are limited. Early booking is advised.
Flexible payment plans available.
BOOKINGS AND ENQUIRIES: nicoathene@gmail.com
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Image Credits: Page 1 & 4 Orchid, Robert Mapplethorpe, 1985. Pages 2, 3 & 6 Erotics of Rupture. Nico Athene, photographer Lindsey Appolis.
