Body Talk: Music, Movement, & Mindful Creativity For Queer & Trans Folk
Hosted by Imani Noel Ford
Sunday, March 29th
4-6PM
Daya Bushwick
sliding scale $20-75
Body talks are a poetic approach to somatic healing grounded in creativity and cultivating a sense of spiritual health. Spiritual Health is a part of your wellbeing that encompasses exploring, finding, and grounding yourself in purpose, meaning, and inner peace. People often explore spiritual health through religion and spirituality, but everyone has access to spiritual health. Spiritual health is ultimately about connecting to something larger than yourself, such as personal values, nature, community, creative practices, or even liberation movements and social justice. Body talks are about how to collect and cultivate tools and practices to sustain us and ground our liberation work in healing.
Body talks encompass:
an intuitive dialogue between the body and mind & their relationship with creativity and space.
healing collaboration between the left-side brain (responsible for speech and abstract thinking) and the right-side brain (responsible for image processing and spatial thinking)
A way to simultaneously engage the spiritual & somatic aspects of healing trauma
Slow, progressive, somatic engagement with the nervous system (titration)
Reconnection to your embodied, ancestral knowledge
An educational space to share & find resources to liberate the body as well as the mind
Body talks are for everyone. Artistic, meditation, Reiki, or somatic experience. Creativity and spiritual health are human birthrights. Body talks will always include mindfulness/meditation, somatics, and creativity because these are its grounding modalities. However, workshops that are not signature/flagship Body Talks, like this one, will include other modalities. Body Talk: Music, Movement, & Mindful Creativity For Queer & Trans Folk includes improvised movement, "embodied circle sings" (inspired by Bobby McFerrin's circle songs), and "movement mirrors" (Imani's somatic approach to collective embodied harmony, attunement, coregulation, & improvised movement).
Please fill out the Google form so that I can get to know you and you know our standards.
ABOUT IMANI NOEL FORD
About Imani Noel Ford:
Imani Noel Ford (they/he/she) is a black, trans-masculine, genderqueer interdisciplinary artist, cross-genre writer, expert teaching artist/arts educator, and aspiring yoga teacher, born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, now based in Queens. They teach visual art, music production, creative writing, and healing-centered art workshops to students and families across NYC. He earned degrees in African American Studies and Visual Arts in Sculpture from Princeton University in 2018; an MA in English & Comparative Literature from Columbia University’s PhD program in 2020. She began making music shortly before being accepted to Berklee College of Music. They decided to self-teach and continue to make and learn music. He is currently taking music classes with Berklee online for two projects he hopes to produce through Black Body Productions. They have been practicing both Vipassana and Anapanasati meditation since 2016. They are Reiki II attuned and are a Focalizing Somatic Practitioner. They trained at the Focalizing Institute with Nick Werber and Jo Miller, both of whom continue to pass on Dr. Michael Picucci’s groundbreaking work.
Imani's art practice explores black, trans embodiment and flesh as healing technologies and sites of knowledge production. He is concerned with intergenerational trauma, gender and patriarchy, genre, displacement and estrangement, erasure, in(di)visibility, accountability, love, and emotion. Across artistic mediums, she focuses on subcultures and marginalized experiences of black (urban) life through her lived experiences, embodied memory, and modes of archival practice. They create experimental art criticism that draws from their perspective as a black, trans-masculine, genderqueer person on their Substack Vibin' High with Black Art. His movement research and performance art is intuition-focused, Orisha and ancestor veneration, prayer, and self-healing that focuses on releasing stored survival stress (trauma), shifting energy (emotion), and somatically bearing and breaking free from systemic oppression. (She is currently taking Afro-Brazilian Orixá dance classes to learn and deepen her practice.)