Jill Sigman is an interdisciplinary artist and agent of change who choreographs with bodies and materials. She founded jill sigman/thinkdance in 1998 to think about pressing social issues through the body, and in 2016, she founded “Body Politic”, a program of workshops and performance laboratories to ask salient political questions somatically. Working with things we throw away such as “garbage” and “weeds”, Sigman helps us to understand the connections between social justice, racial justice, and environmental justice and to envision a world in which we re-connect with the natural world and each other in meaningful and empathic ways. Sigman was the first Gibney Community Action Artist in Residence; has been in residence at Movement Research, Guapamacátaro Interdisciplinary Residency in Art and Ecology (Mexico), The Rauschenberg Residency, MANCC, and the Tisch Initiative for Creative Research at NYU; and is a Creative Campus Fellow at Wesleyan University. She was born and raised in Brooklyn.
Somatic Tools for Survival and Social Justice
How do we live in our bodies surrounded daily by a vast array of injustices, stresses, and traumas? How do we stay present and grounded? And how do we use what our bodies know as a source of wisdom for the social justice struggles that we choose to undertake? This workshop (open to trained and untrained movers and disabled and non-disabled participants) explores those and other questions about the role of the body in this complicated time. We will begin with a grounding warm up based on the ideas of vibration and bone to bone contact. We will then investigate how the body can prepare, question, and support us in different forms of response such as silent actions, protest actions, dialogue, and one-one relationship in order to think through movement about how to be in the world right now. Note: This class is appropriate for small spaces. Please make sure you have some way to rest your device so your hands are free, wash hands with soap and water before class, and try to find a quiet place with minimal distractions. Accessing the chat function is not necessary to participate in this class. For questions about participating with a disability, please don’t hesitate to reach out.