Healing/Arts Workshop with Gwynneth VanLaven (Wednesday September 13, 2023)
The Theater of Wellness
On Wednesday, September 13, 2023 at 9am pacific/12pm eastern/5pm london artist, educator, and therapist-in-training Gwynneth VanLaven will lead a workshop titled “The Theater of Wellness.”
Once you “get there,” to a state of health or wellness, what does “there” look like? Are you frolicking alone, swallowed up in a field of yellow flowers? Caressing whisps of cattails on a sandy beach path? Are you are flying a kite with your forever-mate pressed beside, smiling through impossibly white teeth? What are the implications of this imagery for our *actual* health and wellbeing?
Since becoming a wheelchair user, when “frolicking” in flower fields became less feasible, Gwynneth VanLaven began to question these idealized, norm-(re)enforcing, and surrealized images. Her work challenges some ways our cultural conception of wellness and health is proscribed, exposing theatricalities and disrupting them through art interventions. In so doing, VanLaven has begun to imagine new possibilities to embrace health. In this workshop, Gwynneth will use some forms from InterPlay, a mind-body connecting method of playful exploration, to together poke holes in these cultural discourses around health and wellness, and to reimagine them through disruption and (re)invention. Bring an open mind for an incrementally led journey into the “newly possible.”
You can register for this free, virtual workshop here: https://forms.gle/cZqwP44oD3UEhHd1A
Multi-modality and interdisciplinarity have been a key in Gwynneth VanLaven’s lifelong studies and approach to community, with an independent undergraduate degree “Multimodal Language,” (BA, Knox College), Critical Art Practice in the School of Art (MFA, George Mason University), and as a current therapist-in-training (MSW candidate, University of Michigan). The medium of VanLaven’s art practice can be hard to define, as it is often socially engaged, improvisational even within doldrums of the everyday, and it pokes at life, art, and other institutions. Thus one of her favorite media of art engagement is “playful agitation.” Gwynneth VanLaven (she/they) co-facilitates for DanceAbility, and is a certified leader for Community Conversations and InterPlay. More at www.vanlaven.art
Healing/Arts 