The Train Wreck Session
September 26, 2021 (Producer and Performer)
The Train Wreck Session was an online event featuring three presentations: a talk by Ghinwa Yassine, a movement class by Maxine Chadburn, and a contemporary piece by Nicole Bayntun and Jennifer Summer Ashley.
This event was offered as an outlet for the collective trauma of navigating a global pandemic and to showcase the various applications of expressive art therapy.
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Maxine Chadburn
This class offers a score of self soothing movement that plays with comfort and curiosity. Generate expressive choreography for yourself and find flow in the body. Dance to feel good! Support the nervous system and calm anxiety with guided movement.
No dance experience necessary, just soft, brave attention to oneself and a desire to move.
Artist bio:
Max Chadburn is a performance artist based on the unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓íl̓witulh (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. Over the last decade she has worked with various independent choreographers and dance companies, performing nationally and internationally. Max has focused her studies on contemporary dance (Modus Operandi), contact improvisation (EDAM), Meisner’s Technique and Fitzmaurice Voicework (with Lori Triolo). She believes in the importance of playfulness and pleasure in physical expression and teaches dance as well as the GYROKINESIS movement method centering these values.
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Ghinwa Yassine
In this talk, Ghinwa shares her journey of healing through creating autobiographical work and later on teaching about autobiographical art to many artists and non-artists. She tells us about some techniques that she has discovered along the way and how her artistic research practice and her training in trauma studies and somatic movement became intertwined, the reason she founded her education platform, Arts Embodiment. Ghinwa will show examples of renowned artists who have used their art to process pain and trauma and will leave you with some inspiring tips and tools.
Artist bio:
Ghinwa Yassine is an anti-disciplinary artist based in Vancouver. Her work uses various media, including film, installation, performance, text, and drawing. Born in Beirut at the end of the Lebanese Civil War and raised in a traditional Shiite Muslim family, she witnessed the entangled historical traumas in Shiism and war narratives.
Yassine’s work confronts the ideological and patriarchal systems that she grew up in while exploring collective feelings and what it means to be a marked body. She seeks a radical historicizing of individual and collective traumas where embodied memories are put into question. Using hybrid forms of storytelling, where story manifests as somatic experiencing, ritual, and gesture, her projects are portals to factual/fictional dimensions that activate collective memory. She pursues community-based research around embodied writing and the healing potential of autobiographical art.
Yassine holds an MFA in Contemporary Art - Interdisciplinary Studies at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, an MA in Digital Video Design from the University of the Arts Utrecht, and a BA in Graphic Design from the American University of Science and Technology in Beirut. Her works have been exhibited in Amsterdam, Hilversum, Dubai, and Vancouver. She is the founder of Arts Embodiment, a trauma-informed interdisciplinary education platform.
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effect/affect
This experimental piece explores movement as a means of communication, transferring intention, and establishing connection.
In indulging our inclination to be understood, effect/affect ponders to what extent movement can transcend other forms of interaction.
Performed by Nicole Bayntun and Jennifer Summer Ashley.