With its ‘Training for Political Imaginaries’ FreelanceDanceEnsembleBerlin (FDEB) offers cultural workers vital tools to navigate personal, professional, and political crises with resilience and vision. In this time of fragmentation, we explore how to sustain momentum and mental health while staying attuned to grief, rage, and collective possibility. We invite you to ground, feel, connect, strategise and imagine otherwise. For those working at the intersections of culture, conflict, and care.
16th Aug 12-18pm
How to De-colonise Non-Violent Communication (Siegmar Zacharias)
Non-Violent Communication (NVC), while powerful, often reflects colonial norms—centering neutrality, politeness, and individualism over embodied truth, relational accountability, and structural awareness. This workshop invites you to decolonise NVC by rooting communication in the body, history, and interdependence. We’ll explore how to meet conflict not with avoidance, but with presence—especially in times of crisis and polarization. Through somatic practices and collective dialogue, we’ll unlearn habits of dominance masked as “peace,” and build tools for courageous, relational conflict work. This is a space to feel, speak, and listen in ways that honour complexity, connection, and the transformative potential of discomfort.
Intervention (Jule Flierl)
This practice aims at empowering our voices, bodies and minds. Through expanded voice techniques, slogans and collective movement, we will experience demanding, rejecting and practicing solidarity for situations of protest.
17th Aug 12-18pm
How to Sustain Momentum / Mental Health (Luísa Saraiva)
The workshop offers a supportive space to explore, understand, and manage anxiety and emotional exhaustion. We know the dance world can be incredibly demanding: from constantly fluctuating work, unpredictable conditions, and the pressure to keep up financially and creatively. It’s common to feel drained and disconnected from your goals, especially when these feelings pile up over time. This workshop will focus on deepening self-awareness and developing practical tools for emotional resilience.
SocialBody Apothecary (one on one and one and many)
Come be nourished by the allyship of plants. We invite you into conversation about your struggles, how they tie into the places you inhabit and the places you are from. Through storytelling, herbal knowledge, and gentle inquiry, you'll meet plants as companions, allies, and guides through grief, overwhelm, and transition. We’ll explore how the social body—its wounds, pressures, and histories—shows up in your personal body, and how tending to the personal can shift how we show up for collective transformation.
A collaboration between FreelanceDanceEnsembleBerlin and LAKE Studios Berlin in the frame of SUBMERGE Festival.