By Annalise Prodor

You might notice your urban environment offering layers of texture: rough brick and hard concrete, greasy signposts and soft greenspace, the hoppy smell of breweries and staccato overheard conversations.

In Kjipuktuk/Halifax, you are lucky to sit within a delicate balance of hustling, blinking lights and neighbourhoods of wide-reaching, rustling tree canopies. Cities aren’t just built environments; they are lived, felt, and contested spaces. How, then, do you meaningfully relate to the city you inhabit? And how do you do that here, where population growth and housing precarity are reshaping public life, making it harder to locate oneself in the urban fabric?

Halifax faces real urban pressures: income disparity, rapid development during a housing crisis, and rising costs of goods and services. Between 2021 and 2024, Halifax grew by 54,000 people and crossed the half-million mark (1). Without proper planned investment in infrastructure, social services, and employment, this has only added to that pressure. These pressures erode a sense of community, pulling people inward.

Where can you turn to when you are looking for community? In many North American cities, “third places” (community centres, parks, cafés, libraries) are disappearing (2). These low-barrier spaces have long been where collaboration happens and ideas are born, and they are vital to social life, mental health, and overall wellbeing (3).

In the midst of all of this, it is easy to feel untethered and disconnected from the place you live. Let’s pause. To question what it means to be embodied in urban environments can offer relief from these pressures and create opportunities to engage with lived experiences in a more direct and meaningful way. Looking at your city from an embodied perspective can spark creation, connection, and change.

Embodiment is the way our physical bodies and sensory experiences shape our perceptions, thoughts, and actions (4) . It’s also living life informed through the sense experience of the body (5). And also a malleable state of being in which you feel connected and attuned to your body and senses (6). It is about recognizing that the mind and body are deeply interconnected to one another and greatly affected by the space around you.

There is a throughline to somatic practices—tuning into the body’s internal sensations. Used in mental health practices, it can reduce stress and improve mental well-being. An example of this is mindfulness, meditation, and breathing exercises.

To begin to pay attention can be electrifying. Once you find yourself focused on your breath while walking in a park, or screaming a chorus in a busy bar, or completely engulfed yet alive in the impassioned conversation with a friend, that zing of recognition and oneness…is everything. It holds potential to create; alter the fabric; affect the future. How might you begin to address your city in this embodied way?

The art of it all

Take an embodied outlook towards art making. With artworks there is a difference between looking at, being with, or even deeper: being of. Pay special attention to the difference between being with and being of. Social change, ideas, collectivity and creativity are built from the transition between being with and being of. Turning toward research and shared practices in a more embodied sense can make space for collective expression, healing, joy, suffering and confusion. Most importantly it asserts your ontology amongst this changing, growing city. You exist.

Site-specific artistic practice is a form of spatial reclamation. By centering the body—its physical presence, movement, and spatial awareness—artists can open up new ways of experiencing the urban environment. Public interventions rooted in embodied practice can assert the right to occupy space and these practices can scale individual experience into meaningful social dialogue. In art, being in touch with the somatic can also break down the divide between the work and the audience, making the experience more profound.

How can you use creative practice to take back a city going through major change and development? In what ways can the human experience be centered, celebrated, and elevated through embodied approaches? How can artists look inward to find embodied expressions of a collective humanity? Site-specific artistic interventions have the power to disrupt deteriorating public spaces and reimagine them as places of community connection.

1. https://halifaxpartnership.com/research-strategy/halifax-index/people/
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_place
3. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6934089/
4. https://meridianuniversity.edu/content/embodiment-a-conceptual-deep-dive
5. https://traumaresearchfoundation.org/defining-embodiment/
6. https://www.mindandlife.org/insight/embodiment/

Annalise Prodor is an accomplished multi-disciplinary artist, creative facilitator, and producer with over a decade of experience in arts facilitation. Her work bridges the gap between creative vision and execution, bringing ideas to life through thoughtful production. She specializes in live art performance and arts programming, collaborating locally with artists and cultural organizations to strengthen the professional capacity of the arts community.

Since 2017, Annalise has worked as a producer in the live art and performance field. She has toured internationally as a Senior Producer, writer, co-director, and associate artist with Toronto's renowned socially engaged performance company, Mammalian Diving Reflex, co-producing 10 performances for international festivals in five countries and four languages between 2020 and 2023. In 2023, she helped produce the 30th Festival der Regionen in Linz, Austria, a site-specific, multi-disciplinary arts festival. In 2024, she was part of the production team for the Cannonball Festival in Philadelphia, US, a fast-growing incubator of daring and original performance.

Here in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, Annalise is the Visiting Artist coordinator at the Anna Leonowens Gallery and NSCAD University while still maintaining an active practice of producing and facilitating local projects. Annalise is dedicated to fostering meaningful interactions with artists who contribute to the contemporary arts dialogue in interdisciplinary, innovative, and boundary-pushing ways. Her aim is to contribute to the growth of Atlantic Canada’s artistic landscape.

Annalise maintains a multi-disciplinary art practice, exploring themes deeply rooted in the complexities of the human experience, including femininity, complacency, mediocrity, mental health, and environmental responsibility.