Philadelphia
Social Presencing Theater
A two-day basics course
Movement-based practices that support an individual’s embodied presence and a team or organization’s ability to sense the social resonance in groups as the ground for collective creativity.
Join us on
October 25 – 26, 2025
Location:
Silvana Cardell Studio
1713 Melon Street
Philadelphia, PA 19130
Schedule:
Oct 25 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM, with coffee and registration starting at 8:30 AM
Oct 26 from 9:00 AM - 4:00 PM with coffee starting at 8:30 AM
Pricing Details
Participation Fee: $450 USD
Scholarships: There are a limited number of scholarships and pay-what-you-can places available for those who cannot pay the full tuition price. Priority will be given to youth. Please send requests and proposed tuition to courses@presencing.org by September 1. Requests will be considered in terms of need.
Social Presencing Theater Basics precedes the Theory U Presencing Foundation Program (Berlin or Philadelphia). There are discounts available for those attending both. Please reach out to us at courses@presencing.org for a discount code.
Social PresencingTheater (SPT)
Social Presencing Theater is a series of embodiment practices that develop capacity for awareness-based engagement in social and organisational transformation (grounded in Theory U framework).
Social Presencing Theater has been co-created over nearly two decades under the leadership of Arawana Hayashi in collaboration with Otto Scharmer, Founding Chair of the Presencing Institute, and others. It began as an unlikely collaboration. Otto is a researcher and Senior Lecturer at MIT Sloan School of Management. Arawana brings her background in creative process, dance and meditation.
Today, Social Presencing Theater is one of the most important and effective awareness-based systems change methods offered by the Presencing Institute. The practices have been used for over fifteen years in business, government, education, the UN, and civil society settings, in Europe, Latin America, Asia, and the United States.
This is not "theater" in the conventional sense, but we use simple body postures, movements, and spatial design to support grounded presence, to loosen limiting concepts, to communicate directly, to access intuition, and to make visible both current realities and leverage points for creating change. It is designed for anyone who is interested in innovative and holistic ways to create a saner, more compassionate world in whatever setting they are.
This course is an introduction and does not require any pre-requisites.
What You Will Take Away
Participants will learn the basic Social Presencing Theater practices which invite:
- Experiencing the wisdom of embodied presence
- Seeing and sensing the larger systems in which we live and work
- Cultivating our social field of relationship in family, teams, organisations and communities
- Building action confidence to create new solutions.
The program is also part of the Presencing Institute's practitioner certification pathway.
The Team
