Amalia Garcia-Aboy

At the core of my work is facilitation: shaping embodied, psychologically attuned environments where creative risk, enquiry and artistic development can unfold with care.

As a Senior Lecturer in Dance, I work at the intersection of performance-making, embodied practice and creative health. My teaching, course development and research bring artistic practice into dialogue with relational intelligence, reflective enquiry and socially engaged approaches to performance.

Nearly two decades of teaching, facilitation and ensemble practice inform my approach to curriculum design, course leadership and research supervision. Drawing on improvisation, somatic methodologies, ensemble devising and Internal Family Systems-informed approaches, I am interested in creating learning environments in which body, imagination and critical thought are understood as interconnected ways of knowing.

My work includes the development and delivery of undergraduate and postgraduate courses, supervision of practice-as-research and performance enquiry, and the design of curricula connecting creative practice with health, wellbeing and social engagement. I have been closely involved in the development of the MA Creative Health, with particular interests in embodied practice, practitioner development, creative evaluation and the contribution artistic processes can make within health and community contexts.

My specialist practice sits within dance-theatre, physical performance and ensemble-based creative processes. I am particularly interested in facilitation as an ethical and creative methodology: how structures can be held with enough care to support vulnerability and difference, while remaining porous enough for uncertainty, improvisation and new forms to emerge. This includes an ongoing interest in witness, relational presence and in creating spaces that are safe enough for meaningful artistic risk without becoming overly prescribed.

My research is grounded in practice-as-research and examines an embodied, relational and increasingly Internal Family Systems-informed methodology for creative health through dance-theatre and performance-making. Emerging from a portfolio of performance and collaborative projects, the research explores not-knowing as a generative creative condition, witness as part of the artistic and relational process, and what I describe as held emergence: creating conditions in which vulnerability, uncertainty and difference can remain present without being overridden.

Born in Vigo, Spain and based in the UK since 1997, I bring a cross-cultural perspective to my teaching and creative practice. Across my work, I remain interested in how we create spaces where complexity can be held, difference can be welcomed, and people can become more fully visible to themselves and one another.

• Choreography and Movement Direction
• Dance Technique
• Improvisation;
  • contact improvisation and improvisation in performance
• Physical Theatre
• Dance Theatre
• Creative Health