In April 2025, a group of artists led by Kate Sagovsky gathered at Casa Nirvana on the coast of Italy just South of Naples. The collaborating artists all work in live performance & also have professional training in one or more somatic movement practices in which a participant is offered guidance through touch. This time of collaboration focussed on identifying how these known one-to-one somatic practices - such as the Feldenkrais Method, the Ilan Lev Method, & Cranio-Sacral Therapy -  can be used as a foundation for a new form of interaction, which we are calling Sensory Rewilding Encounters.

The majority of somatic practices focus on sensations in relation to the self, especially when a trained practitioner works with an individual in a one-to-one context. However, in this new form of Sensory Rewilding Encounter there is a fundamental shift in focus. The experience aims towards sensing interconnection & the audience-participant is invited into dialogue not only with themselves but with the more-than-human world around them. They are guided not only to experience internal sensations, but also to notice what happens when they are brought into embodied awareness of deep connection with the world external to the individual self. While a more traditional one-to-one session seeks to facilitate change in the participant’s limiting or damaging personal narratives, Sensory Rewilding Encounters engage with the collective narrative. These encounters seek shifts in the stories we tell about our place within the whole ecosystem of which we are a part, leading towards healing in & through dynamic, ongoing, relationships with all life forms.

The encounter is an improvisation that happens in a created field of play. The set-up of the encounter means both the artist-guide who offers & the audience-participant who receives are given permission to play freely. Cultivating lively curiosity allows the artist to follow their instincts during the improvised encounter to create an experience that brings attention to sensory feedback, opening up awareness of an extended web of interrelationship for the audience-participant. The encounter seeks to foster kinship by bringing attention to the more-than-human environment. Bringing embodied awareness to non-human manifestations of life creates resonance between life-forms. The physical actions that happen during the encounter allow a dropping of the traditionally socialised adult self to happen, & can allow a feeling of self as ‘human creature’ to emerge.

A Sensory Rewilding Encounter is an experiential container in which a profound shift in perspective can take place: a recognition of future possibility arises as the audience-participant experiences that there are other ways of being. Visceral acknowledgment of more-than-human others, de-centres the human: global capitalism peddles a powerful ‘ego-centric’ ideology in which the human is believed to be at the top of a hierarchical pyramid of life-forms, all of which exist to serve our needs. This leads to the over-extraction, over-consumption, & widespread pollution at the heart of climate breakdown & ecological crisis. Witnessing, experiencing, & recognising that human existence is just one strand of life in a constantly emergent, interwoven web is the foundation of a vital ‘eco-centric’ perspective that challenges this dominant norm.