ARAWANA HAYASHI
PRESENT
Social Presencing Theater & Dharma Art
Unfolding in conscious movement
Teachings
Much of Arawana’s teaching these past twenty years has focused on offering Social Presencing Theater courses. Social Presencing Theater is not exactly a methodology, but more a way of attending, of being, of sensing, that enables groups of people to access fresh insights and actions. The making of visible embodied expressions has invited educators, facilitators, artists, consultants, and communities into a sense of genuine connection and creative potential. Today, she leads introductory and continuing Social Presencing Theater training programs globally, often collaborating with Presencing Institute colleagues, including Social Presencing Theater Co-Director Manish Srivastava.
Performance
The second and less visible face of Social Presencing Theater is performance work. In residencies, Arawana co-creates with small groups of social artists short performances that highlight innovation projects or topical themes. The most recent of these is a work in progress that explores polarization. These short performances are followed by open conversations.
Pedagogies of Togetherness
Her area of application has been primarily in education. Together with Ricardo Dutra, she worked in California with students, teachers, and school leaders to prototype the Being Together Project, introducing embodied social art practices to foster togetherness amid difference and uncertainty. This project laid the foundation for an Erasmus-funded initiative that produced the Crafting Pedagogies of Togetherness arts residency in France (January–April, 2025), engaging a broader network of educators in developing an open, evolving curriculum on togetherness.
SEE TOGETHERNESS IN PRACTICE
Celebrating Everyone
Through embodied social art practices, Arawana explores how diverse individuals and communities can celebrate their richness as well as sense into and respond together to the realities of inequality and injustice that they face.
In Social Presencing Theater and related practices, participants cultivate awareness, dignity, and collective creativity as pathways toward more compassionate ways of being together.
Much of her work in this area has been in collaboration with social artist and activist, Beth Mount.
Arawana’s second area of engagement unfolds in collaboration with Beth Mount, whose work centers on belonging and community life.
Social Presencing Theater
The root of the word “theater” comes from the Greek, thea, meaning “a place for viewing.” In both the practices and in the performance form, Social Presencing Theater invites communities to see and sense themselves within a shared vast space of possibility.
The Social Presencing Theater practices are based on a view that systems, whether it is the body-mind system of the individual or complex social systems, are at their core basically healthy and sane. This may sound naive and out of touch, given the world we live in; however, that is the view of this work. By engaging the body in these practices as a meditation in action, practitioners are invited to sink below habits, fears, and concepts to discover the fundamental creativity that lies in every individual, team, community, or institution.
Stillness, not knowing, and non-doing are emphasized in this work. Awareness of self, others, and the open space of not knowing enables the true move. The body and the social body provide the ground or base for accessing non-conceptual knowing, playfulness, and surprise.
Learning & Courses:
Arawana teaches a two-day Basics of Social Presencing Theater course for the Presencing Institute, Emana, and other partners globally. She also offers an online course with colleagues Manish Srivastava and Angela Baldini called The Art of Making a True Move. These courses introduce the basic practices with personal embodiment, awareness of social body and social field, non-manipulated transformation, collective creativity, and celebration.
Step into the course in Barcelona • November 2026
In addition, a deepening course, The Art of Cultivating the Social Field: A Practitioner Development Program, is offered in Europe, the US, and Latin America. This is a ten month intensive program, designed to support those who want to bring the Social Presencing Theater Practices more fully into work and life.
Practices
With colleagues, Arawana creates, plays with, and wonders about a series of practices inviting four areas of attending: personal grounding in embodied presence, cultivating field awareness, uncovering personal possibilities, celebrating collective possibilities.
Social Presencing Theater Book
In her book, Arawana shares practices that invite individuals and communities into a field of spaciousness where transformation becomes possible. More than techniques, these are ways of being present to the wisdom that arises when we listen deeply to the moment.
Aesthetic Language Cards
Second Edition
Developed by Arawana Hayashi and Ricardo Dutra Gonçalves, this set of cards invites us to notice how we shape, and are shaped by, the social fields we inhabit. Through visual and verbal prompts, the cards invite attention to what is seen, sensed, and felt, and to the inner place from which we respond and act.
Dharma Art
Arawana offers Dharma Art programs based on the book, True Perception: The Path of Dharma Art, by Chögyam Trungpa. The gatherings, both online and in person, invite participants to explore topics of non-aggression, art in everyday life, the process of perception, and the five styles of creative expression through art practices. The ordinary becomes alive in the space of genuine presence.
