Broken Heart Dances (NL/EN)

This workshop aims to guide participants to a place of integrating a rich and personal emotional interiority with and through movement. If we consider the cartesian dualism, prevalent to our western society as a (somatic) wound and a cultural training, could dance support the process of mending and re-habilitating or re-weave a physical and emotional fabric, which speaks of and to our human and more than human communities.

Participants are guided through different levels of their sensorial and emotional bodies to attend and give space to layers of crisis of our socio-political realities and singular lives. How do they exist as politically relevant notions in our felt, day to day encounters?

At the same time Toni invites you to use the power, joy and deep intelligence of dance as an art form and bodily practice to help locate your bodies in this world and with one another. They believe that feeling, healing and resistance are processes that are situated in our bodies and that dance can support us cultivating them and helping us create a form of agency around how we are subjected to feel. You are feeling – so, what are you going to do with this superpower?

Toni asks how dance can help us make sense out of our sensibility, share, carry and care for such states and communicate it. They hereby use an ontology of witnessing each other and being witnessed to create a deepened sense of awareness for the entanglements we are part of, that stretch beyond control and surveillance and lead to communication and states of co-emergence and solidarity. The workshop is open for all levels of movement enthusiasts and Toni can adjust it to different levels of physical needs.

Toni Steffens currently asks themself why they are (still) dancing. In the past two years, Toni approached dance as a survival and community preserving mechanism, extending across human and animal lives. As a choreographer and acupuncturist, they are trained to see thinking, feeling, sensing and moving as interwoven. Approaching cartesian logics as a collective and ongoing wound, they ask how healing may look like in our futures to come and what role dance has to play in it. Toni uses sensitivity, imagination and emotionality as intelligent technologies of our bodies, to assist rewiring the relations we create with our realities. They are a graduate of the Sandberg Institute Master’s programme, Planetary Poetics, co-initiated by Framer Framed.

This event took place during the festival in September 2025.