Ghostly Practice
Workshops & Training
Ghostly Practice is a constellation of movement and ritual techniques for working with memory, haunting, spirit, and the more-than-human through the body.
Developed and taught in workshop format over the last 9 years in New York City, Ghostly Practice offers a critical and creative modality for investigating spectrality and liminality, memory and haunting, energy and affect, and alternative temporalities, informed by over 15 years of training in Japanese butoh, expressionist dance, physical and psychodramatic theatre, and ritual practice and performance. Drawing significant inspiration from Japanese Butoh and Symbolist, Spiritualist, and Expressionist theatre in its approach to performance as a liminal mode of consciousness that can be affectively apprehended as a haunted encounter.
Participants often seek the workshops because they are looking not to be haunted, but to actively do something with and through haunting.
“Haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done.”
— Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
Ghostly Practice engages with death and the dead in service of expanding our experience of and relationship to life and living. Moving beyond the limiting framework of trauma, it approaches haunting as a modality of (re)enchantment—activating, dynamic, transformative— that carries a dramaturgical force, a site wherein change can occur through a “something-to-be-done.”
A significant component of this work involves creating conditions in the body and mind for “sensing time” otherwise, for “sending time” and for “bending time,” in order to facilitate the witnessing (within and outside of oneself) a variety of manifestations of ‘spirit’, parallel-presence, present-death and living (with) death, haunted futurities (i.e ”the ghosts of futures past”), animism, ancestral lines, gates/portals/veils and mirror worlds.
Each workshop experience unfolds as an exploration around a theme through Ghostly Practice techniques, collective breath-work, sensual stimulation, guided visualization and movement meditation, and the offering and activation of intentions, grounding, and time for reflection.
Together, we use ritual and movement to explore a liminal space “between the realms of the living and the dead” where we can draw power, where our individual and collective truths and fictions coalesce into lived experience and expand into a transformative, extraordinary state of wonder, where possibility can be experientially encountered and re-membering can occur.
“Haunting is a shared structure of feeling, a shared possession, a specific type of sociality…Haunting is the sociality of living with ghosts, a sociality both tangible and tactile as well as ephemeral and imaginary.”
— Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters
Based in New York City, Jacquelyn has brought Ghostly Practice training in workshop form across the US and Europe.
Ghostly Practice is currently offered in-person locally in the New York City area, as well as online via Zoom.
Jacquelyn is available to lead full-day and weekend-long workshop intensives both locally and out of state, with or without a public performance component. She also provides private training and/or consultation (solo or small-group, both in person and virtually via Zoom.) Please send a message if you are interested in working with Jacquelyn and would like more information.
