Empowerment Through Embodiment: Methods for Overcoming Powerlessness

In our activist work for the right to a socially, ecologically and economically more sustainable, fairer city, we constantly encounter a variety of challenges, resistance, feelings of powerlessness or stagnation. The right to the city means being able to change ourselves and our coexistence according to our wishes by transforming our cities. It is therefore directly related to our respective abilities to act and our plural, experienced realities.

As training in how we can constructively transform experienced powerlessness into an expanded scope of action, we would therefore like to use a methodical empowerment in this workshop, with which we can make the wishes in our respective work more tangible.

Therefore, we practise transformative methods of reflection, encounter and collaboration. The co-creative exercises central to this workshop allow us to draw on our emotional & embodied experiential knowledge and are derived from Social Presencing Theatre and Improvisational Theatre. They support solidary and interactive experimentation with shaping and experiencing processes of change. We deal with the change of a system from an actual state to a target state. This makes structures of transformations more visible, which can strengthen the ability to act and the understanding of a collectivity in processes.