# data[].attributes.body
Social Presencing Theatre (SPT) - the word "presencing" is a combination of "presence" and "sensing".

Founder Arawana Hayashi writes SPT seeks to bring forth our "embodied knowing” as human beings, tapping into the innate intelligence that comes from feeling equally or more than thinking. When we feel, Hayashi writes, we are able to “co-create with each other the systems in which we live and work.”

https://arawanahayashi.com/spt.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Social Presencing Theater (SPT) is a social technology developed to enable, and facilitate systems change. It has been developed through a collaboration of MIT Professor Otto Scharmer, and Arawana Hayashi, as a part of the Presencing Institute.

SPT is one arm of the Presencing Institute. It is an emerging art form that explores the creative potential of Theory U and presencing. The word theater comes from the Greek thea, which means "the act of seeing." The word, theater, can be defined as a "place of enactment of significant events or actions." SPT emerges from the community to enable that community to collectively see itself and enact its emerging future.

How do we transform our social systems to generate wellbeing for all? Whether it is an organization, a community, a network, or a team, Social Presencing Theater (SPT) allows change-makers to gain actionable insights into their current situation, seeing potential opportunities for change and stepping into this potential collectively. When applied as a systems transformation process, SPT helps shift the collective awareness and mobilize key stakeholders towards a sustainable future.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Social Presencing Theater (SPT) is a social technology developed to enable, and facilitate systems change. It has been developed through a collaboration of MIT Professor Otto Scharmer, and Arawana Hayashi, as a part of the Presencing Institute. SPT is one arm of the Presencing Institute.

# data[].attributes.body
“We may unconsciously be acting out ways of being that actually align with a belief system that we feel is outdated or unjust"

“Embodiment, to me, is being aware of our bodies. How we actually feel, the actual sensations that happen inside of us. There’s so much that’s going on all the time and so many of us are numbed out to it. So, embodiment is being aware of that but it’s also being aware of the practices, the habits that we have deeply rooted inside of us and that we act out in the world all the time.”

"it’s really critical... for us to heal so that we don’t keep replicating the same power dynamics that leave so many people out. Embodiment is a way for us to change holistically…”

- Prentis Hemphill

# data[].attributes.body
"There are no new pains. We have felt them all already. We have hidden that fact that in the same place where we have hidden our power." - Audre Lorde

# data[].attributes.body
The newest in the Emergent Strategy series, Susan Raffo's Liberated to the Bone "addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our social relations which are shaped by violence."
https://www.akpress.org/liberated-to-the-bone.html

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
A way to deepen our understanding of the relationship between social justice and the work of healing—healing as individuals, communities, and societies.

The newest title in the Emergent Strategy Series, Liberated to the Bone, addresses the intersections between healing our physical bodies and healing our social relations which are shaped by violence. Bodyworker and cultural worker Susan Raffo addresses intergenerational trauma, social justice, organizing, and how all of these things are relevant to our bodies. The book illuminates three different approaches to healing: ending violence, the significance of being rooted in the present, and creating the conditions to address unfinished histories and generational trauma. By showing how these approaches are intricately connected—physically and emotionally—Raffo interrupts the traumatic binaries of the political and spiritual, the physical and intellectual, and healing and organizing.

Praise for Liberated to the Bone

"This book speaks to the relationships we need for our collective liberation. This is a vibrant, complex and a veritable feast for our hunger, our hearts, our collective spirits and breath. Raffo speaks to our kin and asks us to shape our relationships to earth, to bodies, to histories, and transformation. Her words are a path toward shedding our fears and building new cosmologies for connection and healing. This book is medicine as necessary as blood, as bone, as air, as seeds, as water is to our collective memories and futures."
—Cara Page, Cultural Worker/Organizer, co-founding member of the Kindred Southern Healing Justice Collective

"There is much talk in Indian Country about decolonizing our minds. Raffo has set readers on a path to decolonizing our bodies, our entirety. Unlearning, learning, and 'being' ourselves into healing from seven generations of dis-ease. And doing so willingly and ably in community—doing this together, collectively, for the better of the whole. Miigwech, Susan."
—Marcie Rendon, author of Cash Blackbear Mysteries

"Reading Susan Raffo is like coming home to what we know is true and didn't quite know how to say. Her essays move us inward and forward. She grounds us in deep and ancient love and calls us to claim our own version, a fierce invitation to ourselves and each other. She teaches a poetry of belonging, she urges us to sacred truth, she offers such grace, all grounded in the imperative to heal into our mutual liberation. This book is a balm of truth telling, the kind we all long for and rarely find in our current culture of fear and denial. The truth will set us free and Susan Raffo's book offers us a pathway into a kind of knowing that we desperately need and is long overdue. I am full of gratitude for Susan and her wisdom."
—Tema Okun, author of The Emperor Has No Clothes

"Susan shows us how intergenerational memories are alive in our cells. How the longings for love and justice are calling to us from our bodies. She weaves together embodied healing and organizing for liberation, revealing it as one cloth. This book will usher you into radical practices for freedom."
—Staci K Haines, author of The Politics of Trauma

"This book literally feels like lifeblood to me as a survivor, an activist, a writer, and a white person unlearning whiteness. We need Susan Raffo's stories, wisdom, and questions as we inch toward liberation. With brilliance, compassion, and ferocity, Liberated to the Bone helps connect us to our bodyminds, to each other, and to liberatory strategies."
—Eli Clare, author of Brilliant Imperfection

Susan Raffo is a writer, cultural worker, and bodyworker. She is part of the Healing Histories Project, which focuses on transforming the medical-industrial complex and confronting eugenic legacies. She works with REP, a Black-led community-based crisis response model grounded in the belief that we have the ability to love and protect one another without giving our agency to systems built to destroy, consume, or commodify us. Author of Queerly Classed and Restricted Access, she is published in a range of anthologies and websites. She is based in Minneapolis, MN.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Liberated to the Bone Self-transformation requires social transformation. Social transformation requires self-transformation.
The newest title in the Emergent Strategy Series, Liberated to the Bone addresses the intersections between healing our physical

# data[].attributes.body
"I locate PAIN and POWER together because I believe holding both is how we sustain presence and therefore feeling. Through the duality of pain and power, I have tapped into a love so fierce that I want to reclaim theatre and simultaneously burn it to the ground. brown suggests that “perhaps humans’ core function is love” and I agree. Why else do theatremakers like myself show up again and again to, as brown phrases it in the context of social justice organizing, “work tirelessly with broken hearts?” - JvM

# data[].attributes.body
"our disciplines often unwittingly sustain the very inequalities some of them purport to address because they have been shaped by that same system of compartmentalization and separation" - Diana Taylor

# data[].attributes.body
5 minutes:
- Spend 5 minutes exploring this Padlet asynchronously.
- Return to Zoom breakout room.

5 minutes:
- Each person share one phrase or idea from this Padlet that is making you think.
- As a group, create one question in response to this Padlet. Write it down.
- Seek to answer your question until time is up.

# data[].attributes.body
Definition:
Emergentheatre is a black feminist systems change theory

Lineage (3 big ideas):
1. Black feminist thought: the HOW is as important as the WHAT
2. Emergent strategy: small shapes big and vice versa
3. Performance theory: humanness is a set of iterated performances

Seeds:
1. To make better theatre we must be better people
2. (Emergen)theatre can be used to make us better people
3. What is the 'root' of theatre?
4. How to make emergent strategy practice-able?

# data[].attributes.body
(naming)

about locating our pains as a means of power

embodiment = an entrypoint into systems change