Learn to listen to your body and excel at your workplace

BENGALURU: Three friends — a researcher, a theatre artist and a dancer — believe that there aren’t enough women at corporates. The trio has devised a workshop for women executives to make their presence more visible.

This is not a talk but rather a dance and a theatre performance produced from their own journal on how they felt at their workspace. City Express catches up with Anita Ollapally,  a PhD scholar in organisational behaviour,  who along with theatre artiste Deepika Arwind and dancer Diya Naidu, curated the workshop after months of intense research. This workshop will travel abroad this coming month to Singapore and Sri Lanka.

What made you come up with this concept?
From our research in organisations and interviews with multiple employees, we discovered that there is a lack of representation of women as compared to men. Women have to face multiple challenges and feel the need to prove themselves more than their male counterparts. Women often lack confidence.

These are the three pillars around which our workshop is based — presence, visibility and confidence. We realised there was an opportunity to have such a workshop to empower women using dance and theatre. Individually, our work has been in the areas of gender and feminism, and so we had already started to devise expressive research tools in order to articulate these issues. Theatre and dance lend themselves to inner expression, and therefore, to healing transformation and empowerment.

Elaborate on how the workshop will be conducted and your part in it as a facilitator.
The workshop is experiential and hands on. We encourage them to write a journal through the day, noting down their feelings and thoughts that come up. We end with a piece devised and performed by the participants. We also use movement to help them let go of their inhibitions.

Tell us how somatics bring about change at a workplace?
Research has proven that as human beings, we somatize everything we experience. The body remembers all trauma as well a pleasant life experiences, and our intellectual, physical, emotional and psychological selves are not isolated but are deeply interrelated. Every day, there is also more research to prove that for the brain to function properly, movement is essential. In fact, a moving body and a deeper mind-body connection results in health of their neurological activity, faster learning and better memory

Can this be practised outside of the workshop and the workplace?
This is not an ‘art’, but several tools and activities are drawn from the arts  in order to use at the workspace and personally.

What will be the take-away of this workshop?
The message is ‘you are not alone’. Post the workshop, the group becomes closer, we encourage them to keep in touch, use each other as sounding boards and use what they’ve learnt.
The other takeaway is ways to tune into the self through the senses and the body. To remind and reiterate to participants that we have miles to go in the area of complete and absolute equality – opportunity, sense of self, pay.

The workshop was launched in July and it takes place every alternate month at Shoonya. For details, visit info@shoonya space.com or corporateofferings @shoonyaspace.com.