Nice to meet you! I am Joanna.

​

I am a dance artist-researcher and a somatic movement educator and facilitator in the Body-Mind Centering approach.

 

I have a BA in dance and choreography from Tallinn University (Estonia), a postgraduate diploma in Advanced Dance Studies from London Contemporary Dance School, The Place (UK), a MA in Cultural Anthropology from Tallinn University (Estonia), and I am currently enrolled in the artistic research doctoral program at Estonian Academy of Arts (Estonia.)

​

Since 2015, I have worked as a contemporary dance artist, producer and curator, and as a somatic movement educator. As an artist, I work primarily as a choreographer and director, thus initiating, producing and executing my own projects. Since 2020, my interests have turned towards somatics, both in practice and academically. I am interested in the ethical, philosophical and aesthetical implications of somatic movement and artistic practices, especially the ways it broadens and counters mainstream mentalities regarding embodiment. 

​

My artistic research practice centres around the self-organising/regulating, self-knowing and self-moving aspects of personal movement and collective systems thinking, also known as autopoietic theory. This has brought me to investigate the notion of somatic agency, both in everyday embodiment, group practice and performance space. As a somatic movement educator, I am interested in the affective capacities of embodiment (both as a teacher and of students), non-verbal and embodied knowing and knowledge transmission, and experiential accounts of the somatic study of anatomy and expanded space. As an artist, I am investigating how somatic cultures and methods  – more present in a studio context – can be transcreated in public spaces and performance situations. I am observing how somatic cultures re-shapes performing arts etiquette and informs new ways of audiencing. Overall, I am interested in entwining the workshop format and embodied facilitation with performance methods in order to create somatically enminded audience participation .

​