Desire Lab for FLINTA (femme/sapphic/female, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans, and agender) folks led by Hana van der Kolk
What do you desire? How can you tell?
What forces, stories, people, politics influence your desires?
Are your desires difficult to locate? Scary or seemingly too powerful? Elusive or feel impossible to verbalize?
How does your erotic and sexual desires entwine with your mundane, professional, political, ecological, and spiritual desires?
Do you worry that being honest about your desires could rupture connections or threaten responsibilities in your life?
Are you curious about expanding or shifting how sex and/or eros manifest in your life?
Desire is neither inherently good nor bad, but it is a very very big feature of being a human. In Desire Lab, we study desire so that we can cultivate more intimacy with ourselves, others, and the whole heartbreaking/heartbreakingly beautiful world. In doing so, we hone our capacity to trust our desires and discern how/when/if to harness their power. Together and on our own, we listen for, feel, experience, analyze, and articulate our desires—as well as our pleasures, curiosities, boundaries, needs, fears, and blocks—as FLINTA (female/femme/sapphic, lesbian, intersex, non-binary, trans, and agender) folks in a FLINTA exclusive space. Our tools include meditations, movement, breath work, touch, writing, creative exploration with the Internal Family Systems model, show and tells, witnessing/being witnessed, reading, and discussion. Erotic and sexual desire are core gateways/foci for our work here, however we always meet these arenas inseparably from other “categories” of desire including political, ecological, mundane, creative, professional, spiritual etc. We engage texts (particularly in the online version of the class) by Andre Lorde, Thanissara, Julian of Norwich, and/or others entwined with other kinds of activities. All practices are adaptable to individual needs. More info: https://www.hanavanderkolk.com/desire-lab.
Hana van der Kolk
Hana van der Kolk is a queer dancer, artist, educator, writer, Internal Family Systems guide, sex and gender expansion worker, and facilitator of events and spaces based on unceded Mohican, Mohawk, and Haudenosaunee lands in the Hudson Valley, New York. Hana is made by these lands and by the lands of Massachusetts, Vermont, Southern California, and the Netherlands, where their parents and grandparents are from. Hana’s work is collaborative, body-centered, and emerges from curiosity about care, contradiction, multiplicity, reckoning and reparations, eros, form, the sacred, sound, and attention to humans’ porous and weblike natures. This work straddles art and performance, socio-political inquiry, pedagogy, celebration, and personal and collective restoration and transformation, and manifests as performances, workshops, one-on-one counseling, sex and gender expansion work, events/curation, writing, videos, and gifts, sites, and costumes. Hana sees creative, body-based work/play in these many forms as conduits for knowing/unknowing what is here and now, for re-membering intimacy at many proximities.
Hana has worked internationally as a teacher and facilitator, performer, and artist since 2001, and currently collaborates/has collaborated with Erica Dawn Lyle, Tomislav Feller, Lea Keiffer, Eli Nixon, Adam Tinkle, Erin Sickler, Angela Beallor, Elizabeth Press, Senem Pirler, Lailye Weidman, taisha paggett, Sean Desiree, Jason Martin, Asher Woodworth, Ellen Foster, and many others. They hold an MFA in Dance from UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures and a PhD from the Art Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, are a longtime student of Buddhist philosophy and practice, and are trained in the Internal Family Systems and Urban Tantra. More at www.hanavanderkolk.com.