Somatic Partnering Workshop with Ilya Vidrin

Workshop Overview

Somatic Partnering offers a framework to develop meaningful connection, physical sensitivity, and train focused attention on mutual attunement with others. Throughout the workshop, participants are guided through a series of partnered movements that promote receptivity, responsiveness, and resilience. Movements focus on subtle shifts in position, orientation, and direction communicated between partners. Partnered movements are designed to be cumulative and iterative, layering information into a meditative, generative, shared experience between partners. Each class involves “flow” sessions for partners to play, troubleshoot, and explore transitions between movements.

About the Venue

Vivid Oblivion is a studio in Inman Sq Cambridge dedicated to strengthening intersectional, international, and intergenerational co-creative dialogue to catalyze change, deepening networks within ourselves, place, and each other in service of visioning new and better futures. The studio opens new trajectories within body and landscape, through the wilds of interdisciplinary exchange, rigor and the untamed in performance, dance, somatics, design, and emerging spiritualities.

Address: 288 Norfolk St, Cambridge, MA 02139 (2nd floor)

About the Intructor

Dr. Ilya Vidrin is a choreographer, researcher, and somatic educator. Born into a refugee family, Ilya grew up navigating the nuances of cultural expectations, language barriers, and diverging political ideologies. This experience of code-switching fuels Ilya's research and artistic practice to examine social ethics in physical interaction, including intimate labors of care, cultural competence, and social responsibility.

Ilya began formal dance training at the age of nine, investing time in the study of social partner dancing, Fusion Dance, Latin/Ballroom, Slavic Folk, Argentinian Tango, Horton modern technique, classical and contemporary ballet, and contact improvisation. Ilya holds teaching certifications in experiential anatomy based on proprioceptive neuromuscular facilitation with Irene Dowd, Mat Pilates, and Restorative Yoga.

Ilya has been featured as one of Dance Magazine's "25 to Watch" (2022), and invited as a guest artist at the National Choreographic Center, BallettxSchwerin, Boston Ballet, TEDxProvidence, L.A. Contemporary Dance Company, New Museum (NYC), Jacob's Pillow ('18, '19, '23), AREA Gallery, National Parks Service, Harvard ArtLab, The Walnut Hill School, Interlochen Arts Academy, MIT Media Lab, Le Laboratoire, Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), North Atlantic Ballet, and Ballet Des Moines.

Host or Publisher Partnering Lab + MetaLab (at) Harvard