Savannah Theis

Since completing my Processwork training last summer, I’ve been developing a Practice Guide to accompany my dissertation, ‘Symptom Scores: Sensing with the Trouble.’ The guide offers an accessible overview of the Symptom Scores workshops I’ve been running since 2019, along with practical tools for anyone curious about multisensory approaches across art, wellbeing, education, and social contexts. A central focus in the project was to make Processwork tools more accessible and open space for experimentation. If you use it as inspiration for your own workshops, I’d love to hear from you! Find the guide on the link in my bio. 📷 @maja.renn 🤸🏻 @nijooyl

Rotterdam Workshops: This Deep, Between Us In May Maike Hemmers and I invite you to two public workshops in Rotterdam exploring our relationship to life and death through movement and spatial drawing. Together we’ll create a space to stay close to what unfolds in ourselves, between us, and in the world — without looking away. A central thread is how we relate to death, shaped by personal loss and questions of presence, and our relationship to the world as it is now. Through scores we will guide movement, spatial positioning, and collective floor drawing, and explore how relational dynamics can become visible and shared. Open to anyone, especially somatic practitioners, artists, educators, and those working with movement or embodied practices. 19.05 | 18:30–20:30 C3 Studios, Rotterdam
20.05 | 11:00–13:00 Studio Gouwstraat, Rotterdam Free of charge • Max. 10 participants Access needs are very welcome — feel free to share in advance or during the workshop. More details are on the link in my bio. Sign-up: [email protected]

In summer 2021, System Surgery began as a seed idea in Tana’s back garden. After several rounds of development and project sharing, we paused for a while. Now, we’re excited to say we’re back - creating new projects and sharing a short overview of what we’ve learned so far. If you’d like to stay updated, watch this space in the new year or sign up for our newsletter. We welcome you to invite friends and colleagues who might be interested, and feel free to share this post with others!  → Find our Project Overview here: /project-overview → Sign up for our Newsletter here: https://mailchi.mp/77448f580a1d/system-surgery-mailing-list

Shuyi Gao & Savannah Theis are presenting ‘between readings’ — a live performance that turns listening itself into a meeting place. Tracing Hoxton Hall’s layered histories, the artists move through light and shadow, stillness and tremor, presence and blur. Their bodies read and re-read gestures, inviting audiences to gather, listen, and sense what exists between balance and imbalance. @tender_228 Shuyi Gao is a Chinese performance artist and researcher working between China and the UK. Through durational and site-responsive works, she approaches performance as a temporal space — a vessel of co-presence where presence and absence, life and death meet. Moving between mourning and celebration, stillness and motion, her practice invites audiences to linger and share vulnerability. @practicing_relationality Of German-Swiss origin, Savannah Theis is a London-based artist and facilitator, trained in Processwork - a somatic and systemic facilitation approach. Currently evolving through workshops, drawing, performance and video, her work invites consideration of how different modes of sensing and relating open up understanding of our habits, potentials for change, and capacities to respond. 🎟 Alternative Roots — a one-day festival of live art, film, and conversation by ESEA artists. 📅 8 November 2025 | Hoxton Hall, London 🔗 Tickets via link in bio #AlternativeRoots #MingStrike #HoxtonHall #ESEAartists #Live

Earlier this year, I collaborated on SOMNARIUM, a public installation inviting passers-by into guided sessions of embodied dreaming and dream drawing. Shown at the Festival der Regionen in Braunau am Inn, Austria, for the 2025 theme Realistische Träume (Realistic Dreams), the installation displayed participants’ drawings on its walls, creating a living archive of collective dreams. Two workshops further activated this archive, exploring the shared and divergent visions of the local community. As voice performer and scriptwriter, I developed a meditation guiding participants into a liminal waking-dream state, encouraging the use of hand movement and drawing to sense and express emerging experiences. Rooted in Processwork principles, this practice reflects on dreams as tools for orientation and guidance - both personal and communal - continuing traditions of collective dream sharing across cultures. In a time when urgent action is needed on so many fronts, slowing down and turning toward dreams can feel counterintuitive. Rather than one or the other - urgency or dreaming - I’m curious about how these quiet, often overlooked states of mind can expand how we see, think, and take action. In the spirit of collective imagination approaches, this project proposes one way of mobilising dreaming as a participatory and cooperative practice. Artistic Direction: Maja Renn @maja.renn Production & Mediation: Hana Kokšalová @hankakoks Architecture: Fabio Don @fabiodon Script, Voice & Processwork: Savannah Theis @practicing_relationality Sound: Zaumne @mina_kiedy_smut Assistance: Misia Żurek @misia.zurek The project was developed with support from @fdr.at , @bewegende.kunstformen , @tschechisches_zentrum , @mickiewicz_institute , and @kultura_gov_pl . 📷 @maja.renn

🅢🅞🅜🅝🅐🅡🅘🅤🅜 Maja Renn (@maja.renn ), Hana Kokšalová (@hankakoks ), Fabio Don (@fabiodon ), Savannah Theis (@practicing_relationality ), Zaumne (@mina_kiedy_smut ), Misia Żurek (@misia.zurek ) Festival der Regionen, Braunau am Inn (@fdr.at ) 〰️ Wovon träumen wir gemeinsam? Wie verweben sich unsere Visionen? Tauche ein in das SOMNARIUM und erlebe, was geschieht, wenn wir in die Stille finden und sowohl unsere individuellen als auch kollektiven Traumlandschaften erkunden. Täglich von Sonnenaufgang bis Sonnenuntergang kannst du eine Lucid Listening Session buchen und deine aufkommenden Visionen durch intuitives Zeichnen Gestalt annehmen lassen. In den geleiteten Embodied Dreaming Workshops bringen wir die entstehende lokale Traumkarte achtsam und spielerisch in Bewegung. 〰️ What do we dream together? How do our visions intertwine? Step into the SOMNARIUM and discover what unfolds when we slow down and tune into both our personal and shared dreamscapes. Daily, from sunrise to sunset, you can book a Lucid Listening Session and let your emerging visions materialise through intuitive drawing. During the guided Embodied Dreaming Workshops, we will gently and playfully set the evolving local dream map into motion. 〰️ 𝘓𝘶𝘤𝘪𝘥 𝘓𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯𝘴 14.–21.06.2025 | 05:30 – 21:30 25-minütige Slots können unter somnarium.info gebucht werden / 25-minute slots can be booked at somnarium.info 𝘌𝘮𝘣𝘰𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘥 𝘋𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘞𝘰𝘳𝘬𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘱𝘴 Sonntag / Sunday, 15.06.2025 | 14:00–15:30 Samstag / Saturday, 21.06.2025 | 16:00–17:30 Dank großzügiger Unterstützung von / Kindly supported by: @fdr.at , @bewegende.kunstformen , @tschechisches_zentrum , @mickiewicz_institute , @kultura_gov_pl 〰️ Bilder / Images: 1. SOMNARIUM © Fabio Don / Maja Renn 2. 3. SYMPTOM SCORES © Savannah Theis / Maja Renn

Excited to share I’ll be teaching Morning Class as part of the Independent Dance programme at @siobhandaviesstudios tomorrow! After years of participating in ID classes, which introduced me to many diverse forms of movement improvisation, it feels special to have the chance to offer my Symptom Scores research in this setting. Thank you to @xan_dye and @_independentdance for the opportunity! Friday 14 March 10am-12pm £8 /event/morning-class-xan-dye-2/2025-03-13/

🗣️ Coming up in 2 weeks time! 🔥 WTF Thursdays: Touching Words 🔥 ~ hosted by Carolyn Roy | @carolynroyplatform & Savannah Theis | @practicing_relationality 🗓️ Thu 13 March 🕒 7-9pm (Doors: 6.30pm) 📍 Chisenhale Dance Space, E3 5QZ 🎟️ FREE, booking required 🔗 LINK IN BIO ➡️ An experimental space for practising divergent ways of writing alone and together. In this experimental session we’ll practise writing in expanded ways. ➖ Touching the materiality of language(s) using guided explorations and scores ~ composing and sharing words and movement ~ with time for open exploration ~ we’ll finish with creating a collaborative zine. ➖ We’ll bring some writing and drawing materials but please bring anything that you would like to use, and any writing or mark-making that you would like to share. 📸: Savannah Theis

Beautiful photos taken by @maja.renn during Symptom Scores in the Autumn sun, at @rotefabrik , Zürich. Thanks to everyone who co-created the experience, and to @maja.renn , @misia.zurek and @bewegende.kunstformen for all your work with organising the session! Looking forward to running more of these in the new year, continuing to explore forms of mutual aid and embodied knowing as we navigate these complex times.

Next Wednesday I’m offering another ‘Symptom Scores - sensing with the trouble’ session as part of Antiuniversity Festival 2024. @antiuniversitynow is a grassroots initiative launched in 2015 to challenge traditional education by making learning more accessible and inclusive. Inspired by the 1968 Antiuniversity of London, it invites anyone to organise and participate in free learning events held in public spaces across the country. The project aims to break down barriers related to academic elitism and the high costs of university degrees, highlighting topics often overlooked by mainstream education. A key aim is to make learning more relevant to people’s lives and to create a space where everyone can be both a teacher and a learner. One of my curiosities with the Symptom Scores project is how it invites different ways of ‘reading through the body’, opening up forms of sense-making and knowledge-sharing, with symptoms as our teachers. What happens when we take our body’s experiences seriously as sources of knowing? What supports and stops us from doing this more? The session is free and hosted by SET Social in Peckham on Wednesday 16th October at 2 - 5:30pm. For more details and to sign up, go to link in bio. /e/antiuniversity-now-october-2024-symptom-scores-sensing-with-the-trouble-tickets-1005210199767?aff=oddtdtcreator #antiuniversity #antiuni2024

🌱 Somatic workshop We invited artist, Processwork facilitator, and trainee therapist Savannah Theis (@practicing_relationality ) to host a movement workshop with our residents titled ‘Symptom Scores’, which explored symptoms as creative ‘dreaming’ material through drawing, imagery, and improvised movement. The workshop is part of a larger research project by @practicing_relationality comprising movement workshops, collective sense-making processes and experiments in participatory performance. Informed by a somatic and political lens, the project explores the possibilities of experientially unfolding information within bodily symptoms and reflecting on the patterns they reveal both individually and collectively. 📸 by @practicing_relationality

new pens to draw new grief, bleeding into grieving that is older