Workshop Plan

Softening the Heart and Mind

in Higher Education

Artist Statement
With my experience in teaching and professional career, I am dedicated to debunk the banking education style that art
often takes. Of course, dancers might need to learn choreography and have reference points of the movements as
professionals, but it is possible to go beyond the oppressive ways that society often falls at default: Western-centric,
white-body superiority, gender binary, ableism… I continuously practice to unlearn these myself through reading,
conversation, and listening.
What interests me the most in education is dialogue between the facilitator and participants that could possibly
untangle the knot. Dialogue can be verbal or non-verbal, and the same goes to each discovery and exploration. My
goal is to encourage and invite in creative space for both dancers and non-dancers that is experiential in its foundation.
Space can mean both physical and/or mental environments. Training in awareness with understanding and care
through dance and movement can be a radical way to cultivate connections with ourselves, friends, and society.

Summary
1. Being kind: Creativity has a place to hold everything: the vast range of joy and sorrow.
2. Cultivating awareness: Work of self-actualization through mindfulness practice.
3. Awareness through movement and dance: Spacial and body awareness.
4. Cultivating creativity: Learning about expectation and its limitations.
5. Conversation: Debunking the top to bottom education and learning to listen and share
individual experiences.
5. Requirement: Ability to be curious and zoom out. Prior theater or dance experiences and
struggles might be helpful.

Implementation
Learning Context
This workshop has its foundation in movement exploration and mindfulness practice. Activities include body mapping,
improvisation, reflecting on perspective, and learning how to move with ease as you interpret and exude different
experiences in your body, better allowing artists to connect with their bodies and understand how certain movements

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feel in relation to how they look. It will also focus on how to imbue their movements with creativity and artistry as
opposed to executing them at a level of technical virtuosity, exploring how deconstructing movement and styles can
bring new life to them. The workshop will end with a discussion inviting participants to reflect on the class material, and
on the experiences and difficulties often faced by oppressed groups in higher education settings.

Procedure
a. Welcome and overviews
b. Guided mindfulness practice
c. Guided movement exploration/ improv
d. (Optional: applying creativity to form/ choreography)
e. Conversation
f. Closing

Kei Tsuruharatani (she/they) is a dance artist and educator of trans experience

from Osaka, Japan, based in NYC. She earned BA in dance and theater from
SUNY Empire State College focusing on unlearning oppression in the art form,
and MBSR (Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction) teacher qualification from
Brown University. Her mindfulness practice is rooted in Vipassana (insight)
meditation within Theravada Buddhist tradition specifically rooted in Burma.
They have performed on Broadway — the King and I, Miss Saigon, and Jagged
Little Pill — and danced at the Metropolitan Opera for six years. She is
committed to exploring integration of mindfulness and performing arts for the
progress towards non-harming.

Contact: keipence@gmail.com
(917) 853-2257
keitsuruharatani.com

“In order for this struggle to have meaning, the oppressed must not, in seeking to
regain their humanity (which is a way to create it), become in turn oppressors of
the oppressors, but rather restorers of the humanity of both. This, then, is the
great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and
their oppressors as well. The oppressors, who oppress, exploit, and rape by virtue
of their power, cannot find in this power the strength to liberate either the op
pressed or themselves. Only power that springs from the weakness of the
oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both.”

- Paulo Freire, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, 44

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