Photo by Robin Michals
Free, RSVP required (limited participants)
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2026 AiR Valentina Baché presents a guided workshop of group and paired improvisational exercises that use movement and voice to build trust while encouraging confession, confrontation, and communion with strangers. Through escalating physicality and vocal intensity, participants will develop strategies to access states of raw honesty and heightened presence, culminating in a sustained spinning practice, with guidance on technique, balance, and managing nausea, inviting participants into a trance state that activates the vestibular system, increases adaptability, cognition, and spatial awareness, and offers a sense of physical exhilaration.
Framed through ancestral and spiritual perspectives on circularity and rotation, the spinning practice connects participants to natural cycles and collective flowstates, cleansing and recentering both the body and the shared space, and leaving participants grounded, present, and more deeply connected to their authentic selves and to one another.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Valentina Baché was born into a cacophony of color and macaws, in the isolation of the Caribbean jungle in Playa del Carmen, México. They learned the language of movement before they learned to speak, taught by sea, dogs, and blood. At fifteen, they skipped high school to attend Bard College at Simon’s Rock, later transferring to Hunter College, where they graduated in 2020. Since then, they have done everything in their power to love and share their art. In a lifelong battle against the imperialist soul, Valentina has found that love is the reason and that greed must be expelled from within each day. Through a spiritual devotion to dance as prayer, they explore the magic of nature and reveal the surreal ways in which we all contribute to cycles of harm. From this devotion, they have birthed a new technique, practice, and way of resisting. They spin because the divine is always spiraling, and they bark because the dog is a mirror reflecting our own malleability.They believe it is in the suppression of rage that energy becomes dangerous instead of transformative. Valentina is a multidisciplinary artist, a performer, textile artist, sculptor, and designer of beauty, violence, and truth, all at once.
OPEN LAB is a series that encompasses theoretical and practical discussions, movement research, and workshops open to the public that invite practice-based inquiry and creative exchange of ideas.