NAPTIME LECTURE

Writings

Naptime Lecture is an ongoing performance lecture series initially created at the Studio ALTA research residency in Prague, Czech Republic. Tea is served, carpets and mats are laid out, Brian Eno’s ‘New Space Music’ is put on the speakers, and the lights are dimmed. What follows is a meditative lecture with content that flows in a stream of consciousness, touching upon subjects such as improvisational dance, the psychology of flow state, ruminations on time, space, and more. It is a spacey, poetic lecture where the audience is invited to doze off, stretch or move around… but most of all, not have to worry about paying direct attention. The audience is invited to learn by osmosis, and practice a more unconscious, or implicit mode of learning. This structure of lecture is meant to emulate the way dance knowledge is often obtained through embodiment rather than a classical cognitive-only approach.

One version of the Naptime Lecture’s content presented at the ELIA Biennale Conference in Milan 2024

Flow state workshops

Flow State Workshops are classes taught by Markéta at DanceLab Studio in Prague, Czech Republic. The classes are inspired Hungarian-American psychologists Mihaly Czikzentmihalyi’s research on Flow State. She utilizes improvisational dance as a tool to help her students enter the psychological state of flow. Flowstate helps one become more attuned to their environment, less self aware, and feel a loss of perception of time and space. To flow is to experience an altered state of consciousness, and come across a deeply gratifying, “cascade of insights.”  (John Vervaeke 2021). 

To be published in 2025 in Dance Context Journal 

Kissing the Cosmos: Entering Flow State Through Improvisational Dance