Reflection from participant in SomaHut Study Group 2025-2026 Marina Brajdić

Participating in the SomaHut Study Group meant being supported throughout my learning process and in developing new skills: teaching skills, dancing skills, research skills, and, most importantly, the ability to record and reflect on experience in many different forms—through writing, sound, drawing, discussion, and making—and to organise the whole process on a larger scale.

I was supported in studying somatics more deeply and in gaining experience through working with others. The Study Group offered me a community and a group to belong to in relation to my interests, while also giving me the opportunity to witness and participate in the interests of others. This included my colleagues, who are currently engaged in somatic education, as well as people who came to our workshops from different backgrounds, outside artistic or somatic circles.

It meant sharing and processing somatic knowledge in many different ways and developing an understanding of the wider community context of somatics. It encouraged me to open up my methods, personal experience, and overall practice to others. New people and new perspectives were continually brought into the process through SomaHut, a platform with a mission to invite and include everyone. It was easy to reach people by sharing invitations through the SomaHut network, and one particularly accessible and valuable resource was that SomaHut was already an established platform and community.

Through this experience, I learned specifically how to work with children and their parents who are not dancers or professionals in body- or somatic-based practices. I was a co-leader of a workshop at the SomaHut Festival in May 2026 called “What Are Bones For?”. The workshop was rooted in our research into human anatomy with colleagues through the Study Group, but was then shaped into a format accessible to children under the age of ten and their parents through dance-based methodologies.

In one hour, we explored different approaches to warming up, naming and memorising bones in the body, experiencing our own bodies through movement, exploring different body alignments in relation to music and group dance, creating a bone from paper, and joining the bones together to create a skeleton. These activities offered children and parents a starting point from which to experience their own bodies and gradually develop a deeper somatic awareness.

Together, we also developed a curriculum for a year-long programme that will take place at SomaHut once a week, giving children the opportunity to regularly practise movement and learn about their bodies.

This programme is an important part of my professional development after completing a BA in Contemporary Dance, Teaching strand. Without a place in which to communicate, exchange, and learn from one another, it would not have been possible—or at least not as successful—to develop programmes such as this. The SomaHut Study Group has offered me two years of learning about community on a broader scale.

The LACE conference in July 2025 was another important part of this learning process. It gave me the opportunity to encounter and learn extensively from the artistic practices of others and, through this, to develop my own practice. I was immersed in contemporary dance culture by meeting both professionals and people who simply wanted to come and practise every day. We shared experiences regardless of our different expectations and reflected on them together through conversation. I also had the opportunity to interview people and gain deeper insight into how others learn, experience, and create through dance.

Through my involvement in the organisation of the project, I also learned to take on financial and administrative responsibilities, including ensuring that all the necessary arrangements were in place for participants to attend the LACE conference in Vienna. This experience taught me more about the financial and contractual aspects that are essential to making such a valuable and fulfilling event possible. I also gained insight into how large-scale productions such as ImPulsTanz function, and how communities of different sizes and backgrounds can grow and remain open and accessible to everyone.

Looking back, I see how a group can be one of the most valuable ways to progress: a space in which to test ideas, learn how to organise, understand what it takes to make an event happen, and at the same time remain supported by colleagues. The project also connected people across different countries, and I look forward to continuing to build these connections within dance culture.

Zagreb, 24 September 2026