The Body The Player The Journey | Sensorial shape-shift  &  The pulsing anatomy

with Rafaela Sahyoun

 

The Body The Player The Journey meets Paleohori’s forest for the fifth time, leaning further into what it means to go WILD.

Here, we invite our fullness, where movement becomes resourceful, desire shapes space, and wildness turns into a caring terrain for creativity and vitality. And yes, we build our pathways toward that: with time, space, and support to navigate, to meet the body of each day, and to recharge and reinvent the dance that lives in us.

 

About

Sensorial – shape-shift is a workshop under the methodological frame of The Body The Player The Journey, which invites the dancing through mechanisms of perception, approximating each individual to their landscapes inseparably to every aspect of the environment.

Sensorial shape-shift is dedicated to movement practices that access and expand a repertoire of senses linked to cognitive, subjective, and imagetic layers in each individual’s learning process. 

Through improvisation practices, we hack information from here and now; we witness, hold space, and charge a large spectrum of shape-shifting responses within the vibrancy of the ever-evolving choice-making instances.

 

During the workshop, we focus on modulating the dance by exploring the specificities of our

living—transformative—body within its interconnected systems. We access available resources by scanning our structural layers and drawing upon our bodily experiences. From that conscious playground and the willingness to work via integrative procedures, we catalyze new resources to interact with.

 

The Body The Player The Journey acknowledges the body’s innate capacity for attunement. This proposal cultivates the intricacies between inner and outer realms as one interconnected field instead of separating ourselves from our contextual circumstances. 

We seek to learn and relearn how to co-regulate our state of presence as a quality to embody, actualize, and work from as a means of agency. We will listen deliberately to a symphony of sensory reception and, from that attuned feedback, vectorize our dancing outward, transforming the space into a powerhouse that draws from the different technologies each individual brings, dancing as a relational field that constantly recycles itself.

Charting the multidimensional anatomy of desires and tuning to its particularities, we cultivate an authorial, negotiable, collective, and physically sustainable process.

 

Within the large spectrum of practices held by The Body The Player The Journey, another aspect is The pulsing anatomy, which unfolds through play-based proposals evolving from simplicity to complexity, cultivating a cognitive developmental journey while building sensorimotor interconnections. This process stimulates the integration of sensory information with motor responses, sustaining brain-body interrelationality.

The work anchors in bodily mobility through biotensegrity, expanding the somatic complexity of the body as an integrated living network, orchestrating information and sense-making, while opening new doors to questioning and experiencing the relational fields we evolve from.

Through mediums such as improvisation, scores, games, and experiential anatomy, participants will be exposed to and experience the following principles: (1) sensitive & systemic mapping of the body,(2) fascia network, (3) gravity & body axis, (4) distribution of tension & modulation of tone, (5) the folds

of the body, (6) the fabulous universe of spirals, (7) multidimensionality, (8) asymmetry, and (9) body pulsations & impact absorption.

 

This multi-sensorimotor work triggers individuals to meet stimuli and asymmetric situations, serving as catalysts for forming neural connections. Nurturing our capacity to perceive, decode, and reorganize information – assisting with developing new strategies, perspectives, and pathways. Grounding us with our resources to co-create and generate new memories.

The Body The Player The Journey sets the groundwork for the interplay of people moving and exchanging the vitality of what pulses within and among every participant —an invitation to collectively shape a space for potential, inspiration, and support.

 

Facilitator’s Bio

Rafaela Sahyoun, a Latin American artist from Brazil of Arab descent — Lebanese and Palestinian, lives between São Paulo and international territories, working as a dancer, choreographer, and educator. She navigates these roles through the relational landscapes of performative practices and context-driven co-creations. 

As an educator, she has developed a grounded pedagogical framework for dance practices, continuously unfolding through research and facilitation. Her work spans undergraduate and postgraduate programs, professional companies, cultural centers, and other artistic platforms. Since 2019, Rafaela has taught at PERA School of Performing Arts (Northern Cyprus), guiding contemporary technique, improvisation, and composition projects. As a guest choreographer over the past six years, she has created annual works, most recently The Trouble is Wildly Wet (2024).

Besides Brazil, she studied dance in NYC then moved to London in 2019 to complete a degree in Dance Studies at Trinity Laban Centre for Movement and Dance. She then continued her studies at SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance in Austria, graduating in 2013. Since then, she has extensively studied somatic practices, which form a foundation of her pedagogical approach, and is currently studying Somatic Therapy with the Inner Balance Method. She was part of the Atlas – Create Your Dance Trails program at ImpulsTanz 2023, mentored by Mélanie Demers and Angélique Willkie.

As a performer, she has been working since 2012, integrating dance companies and independent productions in Brazil, as well as collaborating with international choreographers abroad.

As a choreographer , Fôlego (2022) marked her first creation for the renowned Balé da Cidade de São Paulo. The piece was nominated for the 2022 APCA Dance Award in the category of Best Premiere and has toured in Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and France. In 2025 she created BOCA ABISSAL, her second work for the company. Both creations are part of the company’s current repertoire and featured in the tour program across five French cities, including the prestigious Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and the Maison de la Danse in Lyon, presented together as a double bill of her works.

In 2025 she launched ELETRO-RAIA, a dance company conceived over years of collaborative research and creation. The inaugural work of the collective is CRUSH, a research initiated in 2022 and premiered in 2024 at the PERFORMdANCE Festival at ARGEkultur in Salzburg, Austria, later presented in Portugal in co-production with Teatro Alba in Aveiro. In 2025 it premiered in Brazil at SESC Ipiranga in São Paulo. In 2026, C R U S H will be part of CROSSOVER, a program by the Ballet National de Marseille under the direction of (LA) HORDE.

Other choreographic works are:

“The Trouble is Wildly Wet”(2024); “NINGUÉMMESOLTA [Don’t Lose Me]” (2018-2023); “Yeah, I’ve Been Watching You Lately” (2023); “Something to Phase Us: who goes there” (2022); “Wheel of Radical Affection” (2021); “VAWM” (2020); “Pequenos Atos Para Desacostumar” (2014).

 

 

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