The Body The Player The Journey returns to Paleohori’s forest for the fifth time, moving even deeper into what it means to go WILD.
In this space, fullness is welcomed: movement becomes a living resource, desire begins to shape the room, and wildness transforms into a nurturing ground for creativity and vitality. With time, space, and support, participants are invited to navigate, meet the body of each day, and recharge the dance that lives within.
Sensorial – shape-shift is a workshop within the methodological framework of The Body The Player The Journey, inviting dance through mechanisms of perception and bringing each person closer to their own landscapes as inseparable from the environment around them.
Dedicated to movement practices, the workshop expands a repertoire of senses connected to cognitive, subjective, and imagetic layers in each individual’s learning process.
Through improvisation, participants gather information from the present moment, witness what emerges, and hold space for a wide range of shape-shifting responses within the vitality of ever-changing choices.
Throughout the workshop, the dance is modulated by exploring the specificities of our living, transformative body and its interconnected systems. By scanning structural layers and drawing from bodily experience, participants access available resources and, through integrative processes, generate new ones to work with.
The Body The Player The Journey recognizes the body’s natural capacity for attunement. Rather than separating inner and outer worlds, this proposal cultivates the relationship between them as one connected field.
Participants will also learn and relearn how to co-regulate presence as something to embody, actualize, and work from as a form of agency. A deliberate listening to sensory reception will help direct the dancing outward, turning the space into a living field shaped by the technologies each person brings.
By charting the multidimensional anatomy of desire and tuning into its particularities, the process becomes authorial, negotiable, collective, and physically sustainable.
Within the broader spectrum of practices, The pulsing anatomy unfolds through play-based proposals that evolve from simplicity to complexity, supporting a cognitive developmental journey while strengthening sensorimotor connections.
This work is grounded in bodily mobility through biotensegrity, expanding the somatic complexity of the body as an integrated living network and opening new ways of questioning and experiencing the relational fields we emerge from.
Using improvisation, scores, games, and experiential anatomy, participants will explore:
This multi-sensorimotor work invites participants to meet stimuli and asymmetrical situations as catalysts for forming neural connections, strengthening the ability to perceive, decode, and reorganize information while developing new strategies, perspectives, and pathways. Grounded in shared resources, it supports the co-creation of new memories.
At its core, The Body The Player The Journey creates the conditions for people to move together and exchange the vitality that pulses within and among them — an invitation to collectively shape a space for potential, inspiration, and support.
Rafaela Sahyoun is a Latin American artist from Brazil of Arab descent — Lebanese and Palestinian — who lives between São Paulo and international territories. She works as a dancer, choreographer, and educator, moving through the relational landscapes of performative practices and context-driven co-creations.
As an educator, she has developed a grounded pedagogical framework for dance that continues to evolve through research and facilitation. Her work spans undergraduate and postgraduate programs, professional companies, cultural centers, and other artistic platforms. Since 2019, she has taught at PERA School of Performing Arts in Northern Cyprus, leading contemporary technique, improvisation, and composition projects.
As a guest choreographer over the past six years, she has created annual works, most recently The Trouble is Wildly Wet (2024). She studied dance in New York City, moved to London in 2019 to complete a degree in Dance Studies at Trinity Laban Centre for Movement and Dance, and previously graduated from SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance in Austria in 2013.
Since then, she has deeply explored somatic practices, which form the basis of her teaching approach, and is currently studying Somatic Therapy with the Inner Balance Method. She also took part in the Atlas – Create Your Dance Trails program at ImpulsTanz 2023, mentored by Mélanie Demers and Angélique Willkie.
As a performer, she has worked since 2012 with dance companies and independent productions in Brazil, as well as with international choreographers abroad.
As a choreographer, Fôlego (2022) was her first creation for Balé da Cidade de São Paulo. The work was nominated for the 2022 APCA Dance Award for Best Premiere and toured in Brazil, Germany, Switzerland, and France. In 2025, she created BOCA ABISSAL, her second work for the company. Both creations are part of the company’s current repertoire and are featured in a tour program across five French cities, including Théâtre de la Ville in Paris and Maison de la Danse in Lyon, presented together as a double bill.
In 2025, she launched ELETRO-RAIA, a dance company developed through years of collaborative research and creation. Its first work, CRUSH, began in 2022, premiered in 2024 at the PERFORMdANCE Festival at ARGEkultur in Salzburg, later showed in Portugal in co-production with Teatro Alba in Aveiro, and premiered in Brazil in 2025 at SESC Ipiranga in São Paulo. In 2026, C R U S H will be part of CROSSOVER, a program by Ballet National de Marseille under the direction of (LA) HORDE.
Other choreographic works include The Trouble is Wildly Wet (2024), NINGUÉMMESOLTA [Don't Lose Me], Yeah, I've Been Watching You Lately (2023), Something to Phase Us: who goes there (2022), Wheel of Radical Affection (2021), VAWM (2020), and Pequenos Atos Para Desacostumar (2014).
Dates: August 28 – September 16, 2026 (including arrival & departure)
Part of: WILD 20-day dance intensive
Location: Paleohori Eco-Art Space, Lefkada island, Greece
Included: Shared accommodation and 3 full daily meals
For: Experienced dancers and movement practitioners
Rafaela Sahyoun is a Latin American artist from Brazil of Arab heritage, with Lebanese and Palestinian roots, who lives between São Paulo and international locations. Working across dance, choreography, and education, she moves fluidly through relational, performative settings and context-specific co-creations. Her teaching practice is shaped by a grounded pedagogical framework for dance, continually evolving through research and facilitation. Her work...
Read more
Price
On request
Please contact the organizer directly for pricing information
Fri, Aug 28 – Wed, Sep 16