offerings and points of connection
Building Community: Events and Gatherings
The Vital Body: Learning and Healing through Somatic Movement
Artistic Projects: Collective Acts of Imagination
Vital Matters events bring together members of diverse communities to discuss and learn about topics of vital importance, share experiences and pool resources for building a more just and connected world within and beyond Baltimore. Vital Matters events center the arts because they are capable of holding all stories, and of holding joy, love, grief, conflict and contradiction in the same space.
Artistic Projects: Collective Acts of Imagination
The Vital Body: Learning and Healing through Somatic Movement
Artistic Projects: Collective Acts of Imagination
Artistic projects engage artists and non-artists in interdisciplinary process for celebrating beauty, sharing stories, exposing the roots of climate change, environmental injustice, and social inequity. We make performances and public art works to collectively re-envision our past, and imagine a healthier, more equitable future. Our work
Artistic projects engage artists and non-artists in interdisciplinary process for celebrating beauty, sharing stories, exposing the roots of climate change, environmental injustice, and social inequity. We make performances and public art works to collectively re-envision our past, and imagine a healthier, more equitable future. Our work is intentionally intersectional, process oriented, and geared towards transformation. We believe in the fractal: the small is the large; the micro is the macro.
The Vital Body: Learning and Healing through Somatic Movement
The Vital Body: Learning and Healing through Somatic Movement
The Vital Body: Learning and Healing through Somatic Movement
Vital Matters founder Michele Minnick (Dr. M.) provides one-on-one and group educational and therapeutic sessions, coaching, and workshops for all ages. Sessions are aimed at awakening the senses, increasing awareness and vitality, and opening individuals and groups to their own inner resources for creativity, communication, and capacity for collaboration with self, others and environment.
Welcome
A personal message from founder MICHELE MINNICK, PhD, CMA, SMT/E
Welcome, y'all.
Vital Matters is an integration of my 30 years of study, travel, practice, dreaming, conversation, collaboration and art-making, and is the fruit of relationships I have been building in Baltimore over the past 15 years.
The foundation for this work includes my experiences as a theatre artist and educator, a trauma survivor and mental health patient, a researcher and scholar of performance studies, a teaching artist, a somatic movement practitioner and somatic abolitionist, a traveler and translator, an organizer of events and gatherings, a lover of water, animals and plants and a mourner of what we have lost and are losing to the climate crisis, including its many human costs. All of these experiences have built in me the capacity for holding and facilitating growth, transformation, and collaboration, and for building bridges between individuals, cultures and communities.
Vital Matters is grounded in the local, and participates in global networks of people doing related work. What began as an artistic and educational response to the climate crisis in 2019 has shifted from a discrete project to a broad initiative that encompasses our work as an artists, an organizers, educators, and healers. Vital Matters is an opening to the future, an invitation to collaborate with the more than human as well as the human world. It is an organic, emergent invitation for others to shape with me what is most necessary and life-giving for us now, here in Baltimore, and beyond. It is about partnerships, networks, and strategies of co-being.
As the waters rise and the fires spread, both in the natural world and through our deeply fraught political landscapes, we need each other more than ever. It is time to pool our talents and gather our forces. It is time to fortify our inner resources and to reach out and connect with and amplify the work of those who have already been on the paths of environmental and social justice, antiracism, and to practice these things with joy, spaciousness, and as much grace as we can muster. As Vital Matters grows, I look forward to sharing its leadership increasingly with others.
What is Vital Matters? Vital Matters is YOU. Join us!
With love,
Michele