Hydro Feminine | Embodied Workshop

Hydro-Feminine: A Workshop on Filmic Bodies, Breath, and Movement
with Jiaying Gao and Marie Theresa Crick

This embodied workshop took Hydro-Feminine, a filmic fragment from my ongoing project Filmic Bodies, as its point of departure. Developed in Seville, Spain over the summer 2022, the workshop emerged through an ongoing collaboration between myself and Jiaying Gao, a Chinese dancer, choreographer, and curator, during her residency at the Flamenco Museum in Seville.

Together, we invited participants into a shared space of somatic inquiry and collective movement, exploring how breath, memory, and the maternal relation emerge through the interplay of moving images and the moving body.

Through guided improvisations, stillness, and reflective prompts, participants explored the relationship between film and bodily sensation, considering how breath, gesture, and affect shape our engagement with visual and archival material.

No prior dance experience was required. The workshop welcomed anyone interested in the relationship between body and screen, between movement and memory. We moved together with care, attuning to our own rhythms and capacities.

Jiaying Gao brought her deep research into body perception and dance archives, informed by her background in Chinese dance and her critical investigations into cultural and ethnic policy. Her practice-based work reflects on the performativity of identity and affect within archival dances, expanding how we understand embodied knowledge and representation.

Developing from Place: Seville Embodied

Developing from Place: Seville Embodied

These images reflect the textures, rhythms, and atmospheres of Seville, where this workshop was developed during a shared summer residency. Together, Jiaying Gao and I shaped the movement prompts in dialogue with our surroundings: patterned pavements, falling leaves, heavy-rooted trees, and the weight of heat and history. Our bodies moved with these materials, improvising gestures from the ground up. The city became both site and collaborator; its surfaces and shadows shaping how we breathed, moved, and listened.

Although Seville is a landlocked city, our collaborative practice unfolded through a shared attunement to the hydro-feminine; a modality rooted in my film of the same name. The film draws from Luce Irigaray’s writings on marine breath and what I term the feminine-to-come, offering a poetics of filmic breath that listens to oceanic rhythms, feminist fiction, and the texture of water as archive.

In the dense summer heat of Seville, we explored how the absence of water could still carry its memory. Jiaying, in residence at the Flamenco Museum, was immersing herself in flamenco technique and its deeply embodied relation to land, ancestry, and resistance. As she learned steps traditionally grounded in the earth, we began experimenting with how these could be loosened, re-routed, or softened through breath, through water’s imagined presence in the body.

Drawing on her solo piece that choreographed with droplets of shower water and my film’s oceanic imagery, we moved with the beads of heat suspended in the air, allowing sweat, gesture, and breath to trace new affective and somatic scores. The streets of Seville—its glazed tiles, fig trees, shaded courtyards—became a live archive through which our movement prompts evolved.

Our shared inquiry asked:

How can the hydro-feminine move through dryness?

How does landlocked breath hold memory of tide?

This dialogic and site-responsive process culminated in a collaborative performance workshop in London in autumn 2022. Bringing the textures of Seville with us, we invited participants to explore what we began calling filmic bodies of breath, an embodied method of working with moving image, movement, and memory that resists fixed form. Through breath-led improvisation and somatic experimentation, our collaboration proposed a relational methodology, where film and dance converge as porous, co-created acts of return.

Hydro Feminine