THE BIG PICTURE w/ Shelley Senter + Margaret Sunghe Paek, 1/30-2/1
Peaceable Barn Studio
THE BIG PICTURE ~ an Alexander Technique + Ensemble Thinking Lab
with Shelley Senter & Margaret Sunghe Paek
Friday, January 30 - Sunday, February 1, 2026
In this weekend lab, participants will dive into two techniques - Alexander Technique & Ensemble Thinking - to explore how our perspective and choices affect our experience and creativity.
Questions that will inform the weekend include:
~How can our perspective change everything?
~How do our individual habits impact the ensemble as a whole?
~How can our physical choices create dynamic shifts?
~How can we build community through practice and play?
Using individual and ensemble dance improvisations, we'll compose, question, and play with possibilities!
The Alexander Technique is an approach to understanding human learning and development through conscious awareness and kinesthetic intelligence. It begins with identifying unconscious patterns – habits that can reveal deep creative insights as well as those that may interfere with our ability to be truly present. Experimenting with principles such as (un)learning and self-observation will support efficient and conscious presence in our dancing, which will then inform the compositional, improvisational scores of Ensemble Thinking.
Ensemble Thinking is a system of collaborative, improvisational scores that build group attunement towards increasing capacity for collective action. Through experimenting with foundational scores, we will explore relational space and tap into our creative power.
Workshop schedule:
Friday, January 30th at 5:30 - Sunday, February 1st at 2:00
The workshop also includes:
*Healthy, delicious meals
*A gorgeous, buttery, radiant heat dance floor
*Accommodations for overnight stay
*An outside bonfire, inside fireplace, woods for walking, and birds for
watching
Workshop Cost:
$325 - pay-it-forward price: this helps folks attend the workshop for whom the regular price would be a hardship
$300 - regular price: fully covers the teacher's fees and overhead expenses
$250 - 3 spots available at this rate
Registration:
- $75 deposit is due upon registering. Payment can be sent to:
Venmo: @leslie-cohen-rubury (phone: 203-240-4742)
PayPal: peaceabeb...@gmail.com
Check made out to Leslie Cohen-Rubury, mailed to the below address
Workshop Location:
The Peaceable Barn
90 Peaceable Street
Redding, CT 06896
*from NYC: MTA to Branchville. We will pick you up!
Have questions, need more information? Reply to this email or call/text Jovanina @ 917-238-7473
MARGARET SUNGHE PAEK (she/her) is a collaborative dance artist whose research engages in practices of curiosity, compassion, and rigorous play as methodologies of inclusion and ensemble making. As a mixed-race, Korean-American maker, middle-child, former gymnast, mother, educator, performer, and community builder, she finds connection in liminality and has been irreparably influenced by her relationships with contact improvisation, Ensemble Thinking, Alexander Technique, Barbara Dilley, and the collectives Lower Left, the Resident Artists/Dancing Mamas, Uh Oh Trio, Dr. Shamell Bell’s Street Dance Activism, Shireen Hamza and Alison Kopit, and her family trio. She has been a movement educator since 1990 and is currently piloting the Ensemble Thinking Certification program with Lower Left. Her collaborative choreographic work has been presented in venues including at the Whitney Museum Biennial, Judson Memorial Church in NYC, and Links Hall in Chicago. In 2015, Margaret moved from NYC to the ancestral homelands of the Menominee and Ho-Chunk people (Appleton, Wisconsin) to teach dance at Lawrence University where she co-directs the minor and interdisciplinary area in “Dance: Embodied Collaborative Practice.” Especially when things are hard, she loves a lot of things in her life (including singing with her sister, jamming with her family, deep listening, and mango with sticky rice). www.margaretpaek.com
SHELLEY SENTER is an independent dance artist whose work has been presented throughout North and South America, Eastern and Western Europe, Japan, China, Russia and Australia. She has collaborated with many distinguished artists, including Bebe Miller, Deborah Hay, David Thomson, Wally Cardona, Maria Hassabi, Susan Rethorst, Axis Dance Company (a mixed-ability company) and LOWER LEFT Performance Collective, among others. Senter is an alum of the Trisha Brown Company, performing, restaging and transmitting this work worldwide, with companies such as the Stephen Petronio Company, Lyon Opera Ballet, Ballet Rambert, Ballet de Lorraine, the National Academy of Dance in Rome and at the Centres George Pompidou, Barbican and Royaument Abbey. A repetiteur of Yvonne Rainer’s TRIO A, she has been presented as a “living archive” of the seminal choreography of Rainer, Brown and others in autobiographical performance-lectures at MoMA, the Tate Modern, Berliner Festival, with Boris Charmatz/Musee de la Danse and with Cori Olinghouse. Her work is deeply informed by the principles of the Alexander Technique, which she has been exploring and teaching for more than thirty years to dancers, musicians, actors and other human beings at numerous institutions such as Sarah Lawrence, Mills and Reed Colleges, The New School, Juilliard, NYU, Rutgers University, the Universities of Utah, Colorado, California and North Carolina, Cal Arts, UCSD, the American Dance Festival, SFADI, and at the Clown Conservatory of the San Francisco Circus School. Internationally, she has taught at P.A.R.T.S. in Belgium, CND and CNDC in France, La Manufacture in Switzerland, La Biennale di Venezia in Italy, Casa Hoffman in Brazil, Casa de la Danza in Equador, Las Condas in Chile, San Martin in Argentina, Tripotamus Arts and Metaneira in Greece, Circuit Est in Canada, ArtEz in the Netherlands, DOCH in Sweden, Dansens Hus in Denmark, Las Bellas Artes in Mexico and Impuls Tanz in Austria, where she was honored at the US Embassy in Vienna for her distinct approach to movement, performance and pedagogy. Senter maintains a private practice in Alexander Technique in New York City, internationally and online.
photo credit: ©Julie Lemberger www.JULIELEMBERGER.com