Shoreline is a day of immersive somatic and compositional practice at Anglesea Memorial Hall and in the surrounding coastal and riverside environments. The day features two facilitated workshops:

10-12:30 Fluid Patterns & Perception with Kim Sargent-Wishart
2-4:30 Field trip: Practising and Composing with Site with Emily Bowman

(While we hope you can stay for the whole day, it is possible to attend just one of the workshops)

Fluid Patterns & Perception
Begin the day with a fluid-focused somatic warm-up into dancing. We will play with ways of orienting – to earth, space, comfort and curiosity, the sensory world, other people – through developmental patterns and reflexes. We will explore multi-sensory perception and composition through guided improvisation scores, shifting between dancing, imagining, writing, listening and photography.

Field trip: Practising and Composing with Site
In and out of the studio, this excursion invites us to explore how dancing emerges in relationship with place as an active collaborator. We will extend principles from contact/improvisation, somatics and choreographic practice into an outdoor environment, attending to how we move with human and more-than-human materialities such as rock, wind, seaweed, sand, birdsong, and air. We will explore simple movement explorations grounded in listening and sensory tuning, whilst allowing time to dwell, wander and attend to your own practising. Later we venture into more choreographic provocations and compositional strategies that work to get us dancing and composing with site as collaborator. We will dance in solo, in partners and in groups, with time to observe and simply be in practice attending to what emerges in the moment. 

Kim Sargent-Wishart is an artist, researcher and educator living on Wadawurrung Country, Bellarine Peninsula. She specializes in somatic movement education, embodied anatomy, somatic writing, contemplative photography and dance improvisation. A certified Teacher of Body-Mind Centering® (BMC) and BodyMind Dancing™, she co-directs the BMC® certification program at Somatic Education Australasia. Her practice-led PhD in Performance Studies explored somatics, experiential embryology and Tibetan Buddhist philosophies in creative practice. Through in-person and online classes, Kim creates generous and generative spaces for moving, thinking and collaboration. kimsargentwishart.com

Emily Bowman is a Djilang/Geelong-based contemporary dance artist, choreographer, and improviser whose practice moves between live performance, site-responsive works, movement research, and choreographic exhibition. She creates work that foregrounds improvisation as both ecological and compositional, often developed through long-term collaboration and dialogue with place and more-than-human materialities. Emily is currently completing a practice-led PhD at Deakin University (2022–25), where she theorises contact improvisation, site dance, and improvisational composition as “practising” in relation to ecological thought. She holds a BA in Dance from the Western Australian Academy of Performing Arts (WAAPA) and First-Class Honours in Creative Practice from Deakin University. Emily teaches and shares her dance practice nationally and internationally.