The Body as Oracle: Emotional Movement
Today I want to tell you about a workshop I attended with Meg Stuart, an American choreographer who lives between Berlin and Brussels. She runs a school called Damaged Goods, and her work is truly extraordinary: a fusion of contemporary dance, somatic movement, and spirituality. Her practice reflects personal transformation, collective energy, and the autonomous body as a vessel of universal energy.
The event took place at the Archipelago cultural center in São Miguel, Azores. There, Meg facilitated an activity within the residency program of Mystery School, a program that brings together various immersive and experimental activities: a living experience of self-knowledge and art, somewhere between the performative and the mystical.
The sessions often unfold as “open rituals,” where participants are co-creators. There are no fixed choreographies, but rather processes of deep listening, trance, play, and collective resonance.
Our practice began with a brief introduction. Meg explained that we would be sharing an experimental and spontaneous method: she would offer us a few guidelines, but everything would be guided by improvisation.
We began by “emptying ourselves” with gentle body shakes. As the minutes passed, the intensity increased. A purge of burdens, thoughts, expectations, desires, and emotions began to loosen, dissolve, and make space for a state of presence.
The body began to take control, and the mind began to empty. Rationality slowly withdrew, like short steps fading into a curtain of smoke, giving way to a new energy — purer, more radiant.
Little by little, we began approaching others in the group, who started touching us all over the body: they activated our energy field through claps, sounds, and sweeping gestures. The cleansing process expanded: it wasn’t just the biological body being cleansed, but also our more subtle layers.
A radiant shower of light permeated and energized our bodies.
The energy was calibrated, and the body was ready to share its vibration with the collective frequency. Vibrant and active, I felt ready to enter the common field, where we would shape an individual-collective creation.
Meg’s explanation for the next activities was simple and direct: we would do a sensorial reading of how we perceived music through our senses.
I loved how she gestured the act: projecting the energy’s journey, which could be distorted, linear, interrupted — like when a TV without signal shows noisy lines — or simply remain as a fixed image.
It became clear that we needed to connect with sound through the body, not the mind.
This exercise marked the beginning of a deep release process: moving without judgment, connecting with rhythms, sliding, jumping, letting oneself be carried by speed or simply by the pleasure of softness. An exploration without limits.
Then, the dynamic became entirely collective. Meg guided us using her body language: we had to receive the energy from others, transform it, create with it, and release it.
There were no technical terms, just an intuitive and organic flow. The whole room seemed to organize itself as if by magnetism, and each person began their own process, unique yet interwoven with that of the others.
Emotions became tangible, and the sensation of multidimensionality enveloped the space — a fusion of threads, a volcanic catharsis gave movement to so much inner flowing.
The body felt like water, sliding like electricity expanding through one’s own and others’ bodies. Our expressions, our movements connected through that energy which, with an infinite-voltage force, we shared, we connected.
The first act ended with the division into two groups. Both groups were to move and create a sequence — nothing planned, only feeling.
Our group began to slowly gather in the middle of the room, each of us coming from different corners. Suddenly, organically, we began finding each other and aligning like a snake slithering in zigzag; some were the tail, others the head. We flowed with such synchronicity that we seemed like a single body.
The act expanded, and in a climactic moment, our breathing became one: we breathed as this hybrid animal made of bodies, wanting to create a solid structure, with vital and latent energy. There was a total climax, and from there, we all slowly fell with the satisfaction of having formed a great collective act that required no expertise, marked instead by raw, concise energy of connection and emotion.
Days later, I must admit I’m still amazed by all the psychosomatic work that practice left within me — and how, truly, through movement and intuition, we come closer to a more intimate knowledge of ourselves.
On this island, the waters move our emotions powerfully, like the dense sea currents that merge and boil on the shores of this great volcano. It’s a mysterious, surprising, and intense phenomenon, but it embraces us, invites us to become active observers, to be in a state of presence, to act with subtlety, and to trust.
I send you a hug and hope that you’re moving with fluidity and gentleness as you walk this beautiful and blessed path that is life.