Description
Dates: Thursdays from June 27th - 17th July
27th June, 3rd, 10, 17 July
Time: 18:00 - 20:30 / 21:00 PM
Where: Habitus Wellness, 61 Loop Street
Bookings: Through the link here
Facilitated by Nico Athene , this 4 part entry level course builds a better understanding of consent through embodiment.
This work offers a gentle yet powerful invitation to notice the gross and subtle moments we step out of self-consent—or consent with others. Through clear frameworks and embodied dialogue, we begin to unravel our habitual patterns of giving, taking, allowing, and receiving, cultivating tools that help us experience each of these realms with greater clarity and choice.
Becoming more conscious in these dynamics, we can step out of old cycles of resentment, entitlement, or manipulation and into relationships grounded in authenticity, intimacy, and open-heartedness. Learn to recognize and advocate for your desires and limits, creating the space for nourishing and adventurous connection.
This approach can enhance your ability to:
Feel and trust your authentic yeses and noes
Clearly express your desires and limits
Navigate consent within a variety of relational dynamics
Create structures that support emotional and nervous system safety
Identify and work with your triggers
Experience intimacy in a more present, wholehearted way
Expand your capacity for enjoyment, pleasure, and connection
Each 2.5-hour workshop offers deeply embodied practices and nervous-system-informed tools for exploring consent. Sessions include take-home reflections and preparation to support integration between workshops.
We work with touch-based exercises and some basic principles of Contact Improvisation, weaving them with Dr. Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent. As the series unfolds, we touch briefly on a broader, more dynamic and archetypal lens on consent—one that honors complexity, and depth.
While partners are welcome to attend together, participants will be asked to work with a variety of people in the space. This creates a rich opportunity to practice consent across diverse relational contexts.
Students repeating Touch as Technique are welcome to use the code TAT2 for a discount.
This series is both a beautiful introduction and a powerful deepening into the work—ideal preparation for, or clarification of, The Erotics of Rupture, Residential Retreat. Upcoming 2025 dates TBC.
Reviews from the previous workshops:
'Nico facilitated this important work around Betty Martin's Wheel of Consent with all the embodied clarity and insight of one who has been working actively for years with conscious movement, performance and sexuality. I really feel like I have more practical tools for my engagement with others more meaningfully in the sensual and other arenas.' - Adam
'I just finished Touch as Technique, the last weekly series that Nico hosted... It was really really really amazing to realise how much the body is able to consent to things or not consent to things that we think we are okay with. That the brain and the body can sometimes differ with its yeses and its nos. Consent is really about tuning into the body, and letting your body tell you what its yeses and nos are, and Nico gives really wonderful exercises to help you interrogate and investigate those sensations and emotions without being prescriptive of what they should and shouldn't be. It's a guided and held space to figure out your own process with these concepts surrounding embodied consent. I REALLY recommend going and seeing where it lands for you. It is deep and was very illuminating for me.' - Astrid
‘The practical exercises, group reflections and Nico's skillful facilitation enabled me to develop a far clearer awareness of and sensitivity to the complex dynamics and relational subtext of touch, communication and consent. It also enabled me to be much clearer about my own desires and how my capacity to seek and receive pleasure are often conditioned and constrained by quite murky motives and assumptions. Highly recommended!’ - Flo
‘Yes. YES AND BIG yes. ?? cannot recommend this enough. Attended the last one and it was deeply insightful.’ - Rina
About Nico:
Nico Athene is a visual artist specialising in performance with a specific interest in butoh and post-Jungain, archetypal animisms. She first became interested in understanding consent when working in the film industry, and has developed her knowledge and approach in the fourteen years since. Athene has degrees in Fine Art (MFA University of Witswatersrand), Public Health (MPH Edinburgh University) and Social Anthropology (University of Cape Town). Athene facilitates workshops in contact improvisation, animist movement, consent-through-touch, and eco-intimacy. She has taught at both Wits University under a grant from the Centre for Human Rights and Arts at Baard University, independently as a consent and eco-intimacy educator with 10 entry level Touch as Technique Workshops already complete, and for the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies. She runs yearly in person retreats.
Photos by Lindsey Appolis
