In taking on challenging topics like racial justice we incorporate embodied practices like breath and movement to help open pathways so we can have conversations differently. Where there are stuck places, we work on dropping the story line and paying attention to what is happening in our body. Dropping our story and staying with embodied feeling, not just our own but the collective, we discover our yearning for wholeness, healthiness, liberation. If you can stay with the body, ask what the body wants to do, you discover a conversation. The soft spots are revealed and transformation is possible. Not focusing on ‘how did we get into this mess’ we focus on where we are now and how it feels. We ask what is holding us stuck on the rails, and what are the conditions that enable us to move toward a healthier, saner, more compassionate future.

Social Presencing Theater (SPT), founded by Arawana Hayashi, is an embodied social art that makes current reality visible and explores emerging future possibilities. This is not “theater” in the conventional sense, but uses simple body postures, movements, and spatial design to dissolve limiting concepts, to communicate directly, to access intuition, and to make visible both current realities, and the deeper, often invisible, leverage points for creating profound change.

It is a set of practices that synthesizes embodied presence, movement theater, stillness, and dialogue. It can reveal insights for individuals, teams, organizations, and larger social systems. The practices have been used for over fifteen years in business, government, and civil society settings, in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States.

The Atlanta Shambhala Center aspires to develop a cohort of SPT practitioners. This program qualifies as training in the Social Presencing Theatre Basics which is step one in training to become a facilitator of SPT. For those who have previously done this training the weekend will be a further opportunity to do practice in Social Presencing Theatre. For everyone else it will be an opportunity to open our hearts in a whole new way.

Open to everyone. No movement or dance experience needed.

For questions and additional information please contact Brenda Collins at [email protected].

Limited scholarships are available for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Email finance@atlantashambhalacenter.org for details.

Arawana Hayashi co-founded Social Presencing Theater and is the author of “Social Presencing Theatre: The Art of Making a True Move”. Her pioneering work as a choreographer, performer and educator is deeply sourced in collaborative improvisation.

She has been practicing and teaching meditation for more than four decades. Arawana is currently on the core faculty of the Presencing Institute. She joins Peter Senge and Otto Scharmer for the Executive Champions Program co-hosted by the Presencing Institute and the Center for Systems Awareness. She co-hosts social arts residencies with Claudia Madrazo and Ricardo Dutra in Mexico and joins Michael Stubberup and Ninni Sodahl for the Sustainable Co-Creation program in Denmark. She co-teaches with Phil Cass in the Physicians Leadership program in Columbus, Ohio.

Arawana’s dance career ranges from directing an interracial street dance company formed by the Boston Mayor’s Office for Cultural Affairs in the aftermath of the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, to being one of the foremost performers of Japanese Court Dance, bugaku, in the US. She has been Co-Director of the Dance Program at Naropa University, Boulder, CO; and founder-director of two contemporary dance companies in Cambridge, MA.