BODYECOLOGY
BodyEcology is a practice centred in relationship and inclusion. Zsuzsi Soboslay is its founding practitioner. She works as a performer and director, choreographer, artist, writer and bodywork therapist across the eastern states of Australia. The practice makes contemporary some of the most ancient shamanic principles: that everything has life and ‘language’ and deserves our consideration and respect.
The term ‘ecology’, in our daily lives, relates to how we take care of ourselves, how we caretake and relate to our landscape and each other, and whether or not we feel ‘at home’. Such thinking can make a great difference to our health and wellbeing and the choices we feel free to take in our lives.
Performance projects range from site-specific events to inclusive community classes, professional collaborations for the concert stage and events at national institutions such as the National Gallery of Australia, the CSIRO and the National Film and Sound Archive.
Zsuzsi is currently focussing on ecology, inclusion projects, immigration history and the refugee experience. She has curated three nationally-significant museum exhibitions. Her work as a writer spans essays, playscripts, and two decades of writings on music, dance, art, theatre and performance. She has recently completed a PhD on care ethics in community arts.
Ongoing projects
From the Blog
Compassion Plays begins!
Anthems and Angels: The Compassion Plays: A performance event about longing, loss, and the resilience of people in exile. Developed from years of research in and amongst community. There will be live music, singing, dance, intercultural storytelling, and a share community feast!
The Compassion Plays
So...we are about to embark on Anthems and Angels,Mark II: the Compassion Plays. The project theme is the condition of exile and the experience of refugees. The performance structure is the medieval 'passion play', which invites its audience to travel through different ‘story stations’ and interact with and help [...]
Rest as engagement, not retreat..
I lay in my bath, at the end of a long-road day, feeling sore and tired, glad to be held by the water. I came to an understanding that what feels restful is often not about feeling 'in retreat'. I feel the support of water across all my limbs, my [...]
“Let’s Act Out”
A client talked about how embarrassed he had been about his recent behaviour. A trained facilitator, he was about to embark on a great Odyssee and he feared his ego had got the better of him in the last few months. "There I was, acting out..." he complained [about [...]
equivalence (finale)
So, what did I observe, as I sat in the 'spectator space' as an outsider to a long, slow process of education into tradition... I watched my friend pause (cautiously, nervously, in her act of pouring tea, sweat forming on her upper lip, her eyes sliding towards her teacher, [...]
equivalence and tea
My flatmate had been studying Tea Ceremony for 10 years. I went with her to one of her lessons. On the way, we visited a tea ceremony shop, where she needed to purchase something essential to her learning. I was put well in my place by the shop owner. [...]
revisiting ‘equivalence”
I visited Japan in 1996. I experienced a country of delicacy and madness, an intersection of 'old' and 'new' time, Crowds swarmed through crowded train stations; suited commuters seemed shamed by the 'floating world' of tramps and kicked them as they passed. Chain-smoking was popular but so too were [...]
receptivity, and vulnerable authority
I perceive the body as a microcosm of all this. I believe the body’s polyrhythm [complex of rhythms] is a key to health, to flow. I hear the rhythms of the internal body as a kind of orchestra. It doesn’t all play in the same time or tone. I tune [...]
the question of relativity
Whilst pondering the nature of acting, I also pondered the theory of relativity, and came to the realisation that if e=mc2, then the relation of matter to energy, of inside the body to outside of it, is one of relative densities. Logically, then, one should be able to access [...]
searching the invisible…
The role of the shaman has always been to cross the border into the realm of the not-yet-know and bring it back into cognition. Along the way, the shaman may encounter cultural or emotional taboos. It is one reason why the healer exists—to cross the border, retrieve missing information, [...]
New Works
How Rainforests Talk (2019-21)
A multisensory project on the way ecosystems develop, communicate and sustain themselves. In development with the Australian National Botanic Gardens, to coincide with the opening of their new greenhouse Conservatory, part of the ANBG [...]