The Sensual Race: An Alchemical Summoning
Along this year’s theme of Transmutations, we’re proposing to initiate and conjure nothing less than a new race of Humans - The Sensual Race - through ceremony, ritual, making, moving, feasting, imagining, and communing with one another; taking a deep dive into what it could mean to be Human in these times.
What if Race was a process, or a conjuring, rather than a style or identity category?
What if Race was an exquisite quality of relationship, rather than a box, or an entanglement of inherited trauma and/or displacement?
What might an all new, alchemical identity look like and feel like when informed by the environment, your imagination, and those gathered alongside you?
“The Sensual Race” is a 4-day collective experiment which invites us to shed our weary skins and shapes, and to invoke a new kind of being - a new kind of belonging - which is guided by the ancient technologies of ceremony, ritual, embodiment, and play.
by Christos Galanis and Shay Au Lait
Christos Galanis and Shay Au Lait
http://www.christosgalanis.com
Switchress Shay Au Lait facilitates personal development and self-awareness through a somatic, value-based system that challenges traditional paradigms of thinking. Shay's practical, actionable, and sensual techniques have earned the nicknames of “Vulnerability Doula,” “Intellectual Sensual Shaman,” "The Typhoon of Temptation," "The Maya Angelou of Kink," "The Erotic Goddess," "The Kinky Monk" and a “Cultural Provocateur.” Playfully innocent and dangerously kinky, Shay is a Sorcerer hailing from Chicago; a performer, producer, and teacher. As a BDSM practitioner, burlesque, theater, and pole dance artist, Shay combines a love of eroticism, sensuality, emotion, and storytelling on the stage, in the classroom, and in life through SpeakEasy Noir, and Siren Pack Productions. Shay's also the host/producer of the Spreadsheets and Spreadeagle podcast.
Christos Galanis (MFA) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural geographer who has spent the past 12 years intensely tracking and making visible the various ’spells’ through which colonialism and narcissism inhabit and inhibit relationships, both individually and culturally. In addition to his extensive academic publishing, lecturing, and ethnographic field-work experience, he also brings years of experience teaching workshops on play, performance, kink, and eco-sexuality. A practicing Animist, he is a graduate of Stephen Jenkinson’s Orphan Wisdom School and is currently completing a PhD from the University of Edinburgh.