The Art of Making a true Move (Workshop with Arwana Hayashi)
2. Mai 2025 // 18:00 - 21:00
How does Social Presencing reveal the higher potential of the moment?
„The dance is more than the dancers,“ says Arwana Hayashi, creator of Social Presencing Theatre at the Presencing Institute. Hayashi has worked with systems change catalyst Otto Scharmer to bring together her experience as a dancer with his work with organizations. What does it mean that the dance is more than the dancers? The dance has its own energy and coherence beyond, but not separate from, the dancers. In other words, the fields of connection between us hold wisdom that our bodies can sense. Social fields—the energy and knowledge implicit between us—can open pathways to understanding and response that the rational mind cannot see.
The Art of Making a True Move is the title of Hayashi’s book. She has developed a practice that brings meditation and movement together that enable new shared potentials to be revealed. Working with the „stuckness“ that often gets in our way individually and collectively, Hayashi teaches us to respond from a deeper, embodied place that opens up ways to truly move through and beyond being stuck. A greater whole is tapped into that is accessed through the social field.
When we relax a little bit, then a gesture emerges that is not planned or thought about. That’s what we call the true move. It comes out of nothing or a gap between discursiveness or conceptual frameworks. An openness that ties with genuineness and simplicity. And it can open completely new possibilities that we cannot access by thinking or individual insight.
You are invited to join Arawana Hayashi and Elizabeth Debold in an inquiry into the embodied knowing that leads to a true move. How can we explore the true move even on Zoom? How can our embodiment become a pathway to wisdom? Why does an awareness of the social field open up the potential of our togetherness? Together, we will explore questions like these. evolve Live events are a co-creation—you are part of the process through your responses and questions. They are not podcasts or “talking heads.” You are invited into meaningful dialogue both with Arawana Hayashi and with each other in small groups.
Team of speakers: Arwana Hayashi and Dr. Elisabeth Debold
Arawana Hayashi heads the creation of Social Presencing Theater (SPT) for the Presencing Institute. Working with Otto Scharmer and colleagues, she brings her background in the arts, meditation, and social justice to creating “social presencing” that makes visible both current reality and emerging future possibilities for individuals and groups. Arawana’s pioneering work as a choreographer, performer and educator is deeply sourced in collaborative improvisation. Her dance career ranges from directing an interracial street dance company formed by the Boston Mayor’s Office for Cultural Affairs in the aftermath of the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, to being one of the foremost performers of Japanese Court Dance, bugaku, in the US. She has been Co-Director of the Dance Program at Naropa University, Boulder, CO; and founder-director of two contemporary dance companies in Cambridge, MA.
Elizabeth Debold, Ed.D. is a developmental psychologist, writer, activist, researcher, and co-developer of emergent Interbeing practice. For the past decade, she has been an editor of evolve Magazin, a German-language quarterly, where she writes feature articles on gender. For over thirty years, she has been engaged in discovering and exploring the potentials of collective emergence. With her partner, Dr. Thomas Steininger, she has developed a dialogical process of “Emergent Interbeing,” that enables us to co-consciously engage with differences to create unexpected synergies. Through the platform of evolve World, she, Thomas, and their team of practitioners seek, in some small but meaningful way, to catalyze islands of coherence in a fragmented world. Through events such as the 24-hour online vigil One World Bearing Witness, she is helping to bring sacred activism into the global digital age.