Rupture and Eros arrive hand in hand, and unannounced.

Our loves and desires are marked by experiences of being broken into by forces larger than ourselves. Intimacy, shame, grief, desire, longing, loss, betrayal, and deep awkwardness leave us without script, utterly bewildered.

Does the skin we learn to inhabit limit our perception of how we engage ourself and others? What deeper mythic worlds move through us unconsciously, animating our life as repeated patterns of inhibition or compulsion? And how might we learn to encounter the forces that arouse, delight, repel, or entangle us, in ways that open us to unknown possibilities for relating with one another and the world?

“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’.” M. Brodie, paraphrasing CG Jung

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Join us, for this seven-day ritual immersion into embodied psyche.

Weaving Consent Practice, Contact Improvisation, and psychological process, we explore the movements and mythologies that shape our lives. Discovering what else you may be in relationship, you reimagine how you meet the forces with whom you share your body and the earth...

You don’t need expertise—only a genuine curiosity about relationship, movement, and psyche’s intelligence.

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What is Contact Improvisation?


Working with foundational skills, we explore gravity and the sharing of weight; momentum, resistance and surrender; and the impulse of the creative moment. Through deep listening and responding to the instincts and queues of movement in the present moment of an encounter, a dialogue of dance emerges with the other. Our fundamental patterns are revealed, presenting the possibility of recognising 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 constantly brush up against these in the other, and in the cosmos. Somatic strategies from contact improvisation to embodied imagery develop our ethical eye beyond conditioning. 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 or move us, arise from the unconscious and echo the ambivalent desires of soul. James Hillman calls this continuum of uncertainty that precedes and gives rise to reality the imaginal realm. Speaking of the archetypal forces of the imaginal that rupture our sense of control, he follows the ancients, by referring to them as the gods. Tending these animating images of soul with love, our human suffering and confusion is enlivened as an electric and erotic dance with the divine.

'The body doesn't tell a story, the body is a story' Tetsuro Fukuhara

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ABOUT FACILITATORS

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.

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Nan McAughey directed her love of intensity and altered states through drama and choreographic theatre, working for most of the first half of her life 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. An ever deepening fascination with the theatre of psyche and its mythic roots informs the rituals and practical tools she offers clients. Learning to dialogue with imaginal forces within afflictions, and holding the tensions between who they think they are and what is making itself known, clients learn to live into the intensity of their entanglements, and dance with the mysterious workings of the creative spirit forever in search of soul. Imagination becomes medicine. Nan's work extends into creative processes, dance, ritual, and excursion into wild nature, to rediscover a sense of ethical belonging to the indigenous mysteries of wild soul.

Follow her on Substack: https://imaginalbody.substack.com/

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COSTS & PAYMENT PLANS

EARLY BIRD: R13,000 before 26 March 2026.
FULL PRICE: R15,500.
INTERNATIONAL: R16,300

A deposit of R5000 secures your place.

Spaces limited for intimacy and depth.

BOOKINGS AND ENQUIRIES: nicoathene@gmail.com

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TO VIEW an Interview on the Work with Nico Athene and Simona Ferrari, Founder of the SOLO Community, SOLO link.

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Banner Image Credits: Dancer Nico Athene, photographer Lindsey Appolis.