Primary Workshop Offering:

Moving New Futures

Embodied Movement Workshop for Folks Doing Social Justice Work

The Moving New Futures workshop is inspired by the radical imagination necessary for prison abolition and the critical role that our entire bodies—not just our brains—play in thinking. The workshop uses improvised movement to help social justice practitioners—organizers, activists, civil rights lawyers, etc.—imagine new possibilities for a just society. Put more simply, Moving New Futures helps practitioners access new sources of information in their bodies to support their work.

The workshop generally takes about 3 hours, but this can shift depending on the number of participants, as the conversation portions may vary in length.

Having spent years in high-stress activist, legal, policy, and political work, I created the workshop to use my dance experience to support colleagues in those fields. Participants have additionally noted that taking this time to be in their bodies serves as an act of self-care.

Past participants include nonprofit civil rights lawyers, grassroots organizers, artist-activists from Alternate ROOTS, and students at American Dance Festival and Duke University.

My 2023 lecture-demonstration at Duke University discussing the creation of the Moving New Futures workshop:

Testimonials

"In my time at a well-known and accomplished civil rights law firm, we were very aware of the secondary trauma we were steeped in every day, but had very few outlets for discussing or even naming it. Dance was an opportunity I didn't see coming, to express what we carried without words. I was glad I took advantage of the opportunity to attend Brooks' movement workshop. Just holding the space in our fancy office lobby for something very much other than business as usual was a merciful crack in the veneer."

— participant from civil rights law firm

"Brooks combines deep intuition with experience and rigor to guide organizations through an embodied learning arc. Any group would be lucky to partner with Brooks for facilitation!"

— participant; executive director of grassroots organizing group