The Anxiety Piece
A professional development performance and workshop on generalized anxiety for your conference, residency, or training sessions.
The Anxiety Piece melds physical theater, dance, and comedy, to explore the universality of generalized anxiety in American culture. This one-act production follows the hilarious and moving journey of the Body and the Mind as each experiences and responds to daily life together and apart. Characters grapple with challenging emotions, sensations and thoughts in highly physical and often whimsical ways. Articine’s internationally award-winning artists, in collaborative partnerships with mental health professionals, have infused the work with strategies to support positive mental health and offer touching and healing moments for audiences to discover.
Even pre-COVID, American children and adults alike were reporting incredibly high levels of anxiety. Now with a global pandemic, these numbers have sky-rocketed. Using dance, physical theater and partnerships with mental health professionals in New England, Articine’s internationally award-winning artists will create a dynamic and engaging new touring work to address this health challenge.
The story of the piece is based on the structure of a “day in the life,” be it a therapy session, mindfulness training, a yoga class, down-time with a friend, or a burst of artistic expression. This structure supports vignettes in which Mind and Body grapple with anxiety in deeply physical, often whimsical ways. By the end of the piece, Mind and Body will discover more peaceful responses to their anxiety, using techniques the audience just might be able to bring home with them.
As Body and Mind go about their day, they encounter various stressors, both positive and negative, sometimes from the outside world, and sometimes from within.
