Workshop

Movement, writing & rest as crip practice

What if the floor — or the mattress — were not a place of last resort, but the very stage? This workshop begins from the premise that horizontal is not a compromise of the vertical: it is its own choreography, its own politics, its own pleasure.

Rooted in disability arts and crip culture, and in the lived knowledge of a body that spends time in bed — due to fatigue, to chronic pain, to the act of simply resting — this workshop invites participants to explore movement, sensation, creative writing, and collective care from a lying-down position. The bed is reframed here not simply as a place of illness as synonym of passivity, but as a space of imagination, autonomy, and dance.

Anajara Laisa Amarante is a Brazilian queer artist living with a chronic illness who works in the performing arts, specialising in choreography. Their artistic practice explores queer bodies, marginalised communities and artistic practices, as well as political and personal perspectives. As a Brazilian living in Europe, Amarante is interested in the formation of identity among people from diverse cultural and social backgrounds, post-colonialism, and the creation of joy, inclusion and diversity.

Format & Access

This is a relaxed workshop. That means: there is no expectation of performance, no "right" way to participate, and no hierarchy between bodies. Participants are invited to move or stay still, to write or not write, to close their eyes or keep them open. All instructions are offered as invitations. You can arrive late, leave early, or simply rest. The room holds all of it.

Workshop Arc

We arrive together. A slow, low-key introduction: names, how we feel today, and one simple question — what do you usually do in bed, besides sleep? Can you do it here? This conversation seeds the creative writing and movement that will follow, treating bed-time not as dead time, but as a rich, often invisible practice of self-knowledge and care.

We settle into our bodies. Guided deep relaxation techniques drawn from somatic practice and the facilitator's own experience with chronic pain — a slow scan of the body, deliberate release, and the quiet radical act of allowing ourselves to be heavy. Self-massage techniques — learned in therapy and movement classes — offer participants tools they can take home: touch as self-care, touch as choreography.

We begin to move. Pelvic and spinal movements done lying down — soft, circular, undulating — release tension and invite pleasure. These are not rehabilitation exercises: they are dances. We explore what it means to twerk on a mattress (face up, face down, slow, fast, absurd, joyful), to shake from the floor, to let the body be ridiculous and precise at once. Movement is offered in layers so that each participant finds their own range.

We write from the floor. Prompted by what has moved through the body, a short creative writing moment: not a literary exercise, but a somatic one. What does the mattress know about you? What would your horizontal self say to the standing world? Participants share only what they wish.

We rest, and touch, and close. Yoga Nidra — the practice of conscious sleep — guides the group into deep stillness. Then, for those who wish, a paired somatic exercise: offering or receiving a gentle, consensual point of contact with another body. We close the workshop lying down, together, without rush.

This workshop emerges from disability arts, from crip time, from the knowledge held in bodies that have learned to move differently — and from the conviction that horizontality is not a limitation of dance, but one of its most honest and unexplored forms.

The workshop will take place as part of the ‘Horizontal’ festival (12–13 September 2026).