Prohabilitation : Doing Movement-based Intervention Through Play

Workshop Presentation
Peilin Liang  

As an ethnographer and practice-based researcher, I am interested in engaging the community through theatre and performance making. For more than a decade I have researched with a group of older Taiwanese women who started to run their own theatre company in 2000. The majority of them suffer from various musculoskeletal injuries due to the occupational and familial demand of being agricultural workers, homemakers, and caregivers. This eventually led me to research into integrating movement-based intervention into the playful process of performance making through my lab-based project ‘Probody Artmaking’. I call this creative process ‘prohabilitation’, a process that seeks to take care of the artmaker as the artmaker makes her art. It seeks to creatively engage as well as to teach quality functional movements. In this workshop, I will take participants through some of the exercises and games that my team has innovated.