RITUAL RIOT: bodymind trainings for endless common(ing) dances

Bio

Polena Kolia Petersen is a Greek-Danish dancer, facilitator, and choreographic researcher based in Athens. Her practice moves at the intersection of participation, community engagement, and expanded choreography, approaching dance as a space where ritual and uprising can coexist.

Working through social choreographic scores, feminist and decolonial pedagogies, and somatic research, she investigates how gathering to dance can generate contemporary collective rituals — spaces that nurture resilient, sensuous, and critically aware communities of movement. Central to her work are questions of memory, loss, and the continuous rebirth of the collective.

Drawing from Greek folk dance practices, endurance-based movement, voice, text, and sound, her work treats stepping together in space and time as both a social technology and a gesture of resistance. Her practice is rooted in the ongoing reassembling of the commons through dancing.

 

RITUAL RIOT: bodymind trainings for endless common(ing) dances

RITUAL RIOT proposes dance as a practice of endless commoning, where movement becomes a way to

rehearse futures, resist erasure, and imagine how we might live together otherwise.

The workshop brings into dialogue two intertwined practices:

Open Training, a collective bodymind physical practice,

and common(ing) dances, a participatory choreographic research rooted in queering folk dance and listening to land, space, and collective desire.

 

Together we ask:

How do we create collective rituals of movement in a present that often feels futureless and how can these become gestures of resistance?
What if body practice is not about executing movement correctly, but about entering a shared site of investigation?
What changes in how we move when we attend to how our movement affects environments, human and more-than-human?
How can dance mobilize new possibilities for living, organising, and sensing together?

Participants will work through repetition, rhythm, footwork, voice, endurance, and co-leadership practices,

training the body as permeable, responsive, and relational.

Through score-based collective dances, deep listening, and shared movement-making,

the workshop explores how rituals can emerge from the act of stepping together.

Moving between structure and emergence, guidance and self-organisation, the practice proposes dance as both rite and riot,

an embodied method for rehearsing collective resilience, resistance, and rebirth.

 

 

Register here!