• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Home
  • Contact
  • Donate
  • Classes | Workshops
    • Awareness Through Movement (ATM)
    • Death and Art in Everyday Life
  • pearl ubungen
    • Curatorial Projects
    • Critical Response
    • Trance Dancer
  • Community | Site Work
    • Community-Based Performance
    • No Justice, No Peace!
    • Refugee
    • Take Me to the Tenderloin, Now!
    • I-Hotel | The Fall
    • Where the Waters Meet
  • Videos

Pearl Ubungen

choreographer | cultural activist pearl ubungen | west coast performance works | praxis | interdisciplinarity | site work | embodiment | community | dharma | art

  • FACEBOOK!
  • New Works
    • San Francisco Labor Force
    • Sacred City
    • Red Shift
    • Queen of Broken Hearts
  • Diamante
  • Ensembles
    • Contemplative Labor Pool
    • West Coast Performance Works
    • Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians
  • Collaboration
    • Community Engaged
    • The Power of Place
    • Cultural Flow | Hybridity
  • Interdisciplinarity
    • History | Memory
    • Ritual | Art | Activism
    • Critical Theory | Praxis

Classes | Workshops

classes-workshops1pearl ubungen creates learning environments for a wide range of contexts, most often in conjunction with community-engaged research and performance projects. Ms. ubungen finds the most valuable learning and teaching occurs in gatherings that are supported by elements of formal retreat as well as when the motivation for learning and teaching is rooted in shared community desire and vision.

Ms. ubungen teaches in a variety of settings including: public schools, community centers, universities, arts venues, festivals and dharma centers. For many years she worked in the San Francisco public schools teaching creative movement to elementary school children through Gloria Unti’s Performing Arts Workshop (PAW) and was one of the first choreographer/teachers for SF Arts Education’s “Event of the Year.” Ms. ubungen founded the Tenderloin Dance Project which provided free dance and art classes to low income, at-risk youth living in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood and was a core program of her company Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians.

classes-workshops2

Ms. ubungen designed and implemented a four-year curriculum for an interdisciplinary BFA in Performance at Naropa University. The innovative program included training in meditation and contemplative practices and also integrated teachings in community engagement, social justice, as well as critical theory. Ms. ubungen invited diverse arts practitioner/teacher/thinkers to collaborate in this experimental, radical arts training; amongst them: Feldenkrais practitioner and ballet innovator Augusta Moore, actress and theater director Edris Cooper-Anifowoshe, vocal specialist Jonathan Hart Makwaia, performer/writer Annie Lanzilotto, andpoet, playwright and professor of International Theater Esiaba Irobi.

Ms. ubungen is an authorized meditation instructor in the Shambhala Buddhist lineage and a Director/Teacher of Shambhala Training. She teaches Awareness Through Movement (ATM) classes of the Feldenkrais Method (FM) and has been investigating and articulating how principles in meditation and FM can strengthen and illuminate aspects of each practice.Her current projects intertwine these mind/body forms, providing support for complexity, interdisciplinarity, and intricacy inherent in community-based arts practice.

Connect

new-facebook-logo-50x50Stay connected with pearl on Facebook!

Sacred City: Contemplations on Loss, Betrayal and Death by Gentrification

pearl-as-lady-justiceSacred City | pearl ubungen utilizes an interdisciplinary process that brings activism, the arts and dharma practices into close proximity. Sacred City centers the urban terrain of Occupied Yelamu (San Francisco) and extends to ancestral homelands. Through contemplative practices and community engagement Sacred City cultivates resistance to erasure, displacement and the violence that accompanies hyper gentrification and its root causes.

Awareness Through Movement (ATM)

ATM_sidebarpearl ubungen teaches Awareness Through Movement (ATM) of the Feldenkrais Method in large class and intimate group settings. Created by Moshe Feldenkrais, ATM is a form of  somatic education that encourages deep relaxation as well as embodied learning through  subtle, gentle movements of the body.

Refugee

Refugee (1995) Pearl Ubungen Dancers and Musicians • United Nations Plaza, Civic Center, San Francisco • Watch video at larger size.

Refugee tells the story of universal human rights from the perspective of those who have been displaced from around the world but who continue to form new cross cultural communities as they resist the pressure of dislocation.

© 2013-2023 Pearl Ubungen