31st JANUARY - 9TH FEBRUARY
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WITH MAESTRO OF PHYSICAL COMEDY...
ALONGSIDE A SOLO THAT NEVER SLEEPS
BY PRASHANT MORE
WORKSHOP & PERFORMANCE PROGRAMME
What is Body Matters?
What for? Why now?
Embodied Workshop Festival
In 2026, Moving Parts’ Body Matters Festival convenes award-winning practitioners and performers from across the world for ten days of deep embodied inquiry. Bringing together artists, Abhishek Majumdar, Nakula Somana, Susmit Sen, Andrés Fagiolino, Prashant More, InContact, and Moving Parts' associate artists, the festival creates a rare arena, a symposium, where physical theatre, contemporary dance, and contact improvisation meet - to investigate the forms, how they relate and ask why the body matters - through daytime workshops, evening performances, and artist conversations.
Learn - play - connect - inspire - dream - breath - move - learn - play - connect - inspire - dream
Rooted in the lineage of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of the lived body, Arendt’s defence of action and plurality, and the radical performance traditions of Grotowski, Lecoq, Boal, and Bausch, Body Matters aims to ask key questions about the role of embodied storytelling in a time increasingly defined by disembodiment.
As technology accelerates, humanities programmes shrink, artistic funding contracts, and our daily lives migrate to screens, we ask:
What does it mean to remember that the body thinks, speaks, and knows?
Why gather, breathing, sweating, moving together in shared space, when the world is turning away from the physical?
What is the power, purpose and meaning of telling stories through physical vocabulary, rhythm, image, and myth, now?
Across workshops, showings of work-in-progress, and experiments in form, style, and approach, the festival invites participants to practice the body as instrument, archive, and agent of change. It is a call back to presence: to the muscular imagination, to collective authorship, and to the irreducible complexity of bodies encountering one another in real time.
In an age of increasing mechanisation and digitalisation, this Embodied Workshop Festival asserts that the body still matters—urgently, politically, artistically. And that gathering in shared time and space remains a powerful and necessary creative act.
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Body, Myth, Text
By Abhishek Majumdar
Award-winning playwright and theatre-maker Abhishek Majumder shares his creative practice through 4 days of masterclasses and a day of experimentation and sharing. Known for emotional depth, political sharpness, and rigorous formal experimentation, Abhishek has designed this workshop for performers, writers, directors, and makers who are eager to explore theatre beyond conventional structures and dive into a process that is intuitive, embodied, and intellectually alive.
Across the four days, participants will be guided through devising exercises around three central strands: the Personal, the Political, and the Philosophical. Using these as anchors, the workshop invites artists to examine how their own lived experiences intersect with collective histories, contemporary concerns, and possibly, significant human questions.
Exploring the body, myth and text, this masterclass will invite participants to consider the physical, the instinctual, the representative and the poetic; how myths are formed and dissolve; how text can be generated, dismantled, and reassembled to create dynamic theatrical meaning: asking why, what for
31 Jan - 3rd Feb 10.00 - 13.00
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Body, Object, Environment
By Nakula Somana
These masterclasses will use multiple scores for example: standing, sitting, rolling, walks, runs, animal moves, leg extensions from Kalari, sharing weight, momentum, falling and flight.
Nakula works intuitively with groups, gently assembling practices and gestures. Working to bring out personal relationships to the body, space, objects and environment, Nakula facilitates the group to scaffold and compose, adding layers, text, music and whatever the group finds, to create genuinely unique performance.
Develoing spatial, kinesthetic, rhythmic relationships with found material and objects, participants make meaning and accumulate performance conventions that are of their specific and unique qualities.
Nakula Somana is a Dravidian, from the Deccan Plateau born to parents who ran away from pastoral backgrounds to get jobs in big cities. Whilst he isn’t trying his hand at acrobatics, he likes to play the Jewish harp and garden if the Sun hasn’t set yet. He dreams one day of settling close to the mountains, learning to ski or paint, whichever is easier. He enjoys visual art and Japanese cuisine in any order that comes by!
31 Jan - 3rd Feb 15.00 - 17.00
Profound Clown Intensive
'I was once a river'
By Andrés Fagiolino
"We are a river that is no longer the same as before, we will sit on its shores to see it change, to recognize it in its unpredictable dances, first the feet will enter and we will walk with our originality until we lose support and have nothing more than our breathing. With witnesses who will be accomplices, springboards to new adventures, there in the center of the river we will feel the currents that cross us and in an act of courage I let you look and in a fit of mischief I will dare to start the alchemy that suddenly transforms a personal experience into a universal act, the everyday mythology that makes us heroes, those who with honor and dignity almost always lose. "
For a clown the problems are play material, an obstacle becomes a springboard, a stumble is the possibility of a new game, a glance opens a new world. When working the clown we will be working the need to allow us to miss, to not understand, to accept our ridiculous. We will be using dynamics, games and tools extracted from the training and technique of the theatrical clown with the aim of working on the development of the intuition, the conscience of the body as a channel of expression and communication, the construction of dialogue through listening to the present moment, the projection of emotions and the availability to play individually and collectively, learning giving and receiveing to find ourselves with our own essence. This workshop is aimed at actors, dancers, circus and street artists, health professionals, educators, sociologists, people who work with groups and all those who wish to go through this initiatory journey that proposes to know and accept us, to go to thencounter of others, play and let us transform ... It can come very well for those who practice disciplines with a high degree of demand.
