.jpg)
Embodied Devising
Original theater-making as a vehicle for creative aliveness, expression, and embodiment.
Embodied Devising is my method for collaborative theater-making — building original work from scratch, in community, using the body, the voice, expressive writing, and the principles of devised theater. It draws on the rigor of professional devised theater training and adds a somatic and clinical layer to make the work genuinely safe, deeply embodied, and creatively alive.
The same method serves three different purposes, depending on who's in the room.
For Actors, Directors, and the "Theatre-Curious"
Multi-week classes and workshops in Lawrence, KS. For actors, performers, and theater-curious people who want to build skills in devising, acting, movement, and stage composition.
Devised theater is one of the most generative and creatively expansive forms in contemporary performance. It asks performers to be makers — to generate material from the body, the voice, and the collective imagination of the ensemble, rather than serving a pre-existing script. My classes teach the skills of that work: ensemble building, image and movement generation, devising structure, working with text and source material, composition, and performance.
Classes are taught with my full somatic and clinically-informed approach — meaning the work is technically rigorous and embodied, with attention to nervous system safety and the body's actual experience. You leave a stronger devising artist and a more embodied performer.
Multi-week classes offered regularly, plus occasional intensives and workshops. I am based in Lawrence, KS and typically teach in the surrounding area. However, if you'd like to bring me to your city, please inquire below.
Email me to inquire about current and upcoming offers.
THERAPEUTIC THEATER RETREATS
Immersive retreats and workshops that use devising techniques as a vehicle for embodied experience, presence, and personal processing. No theater background required.
When you take the same techniques that artists use to generate original theater and apply them with the goal of experience rather than performance, something remarkable happens. People come into deeper presence than meditation alone often produces. They process through their bodies in ways that verbal therapy can't reach. They access creativity, play, and expressive aliveness that has often been buried for decades.
These retreats are not therapy — there's no verbal processing, no trauma reenactment, no clinical intervention. They are experiential practice drawing on devising techniques: collaborative making, embodied improvisation, image and movement work, voice and breath, ensemble presence, expressive writing. Participants leave having had an experience that often surprises them with its depth.
Past participants have described leaving with "more processing in one day than I'd done in ten therapy sessions" — without any therapeutic intervention. The work happens through the body, through the making, through the collective.
Retreats offered periodically, in-person.
→ Inquire about upcoming retreats or about bringing me to your retreat center
For Organizations
Embodied Devising as a workshop, intensive, or program element for companies, retreat hosts, arts organizations, and gatherings.
The same method can be brought to organizational settings — corporate retreats, leadership intensives, arts and wellness conferences, team-building work that's actually meaningful rather than performative. Devising techniques applied in organizational contexts build collaboration, creative thinking, presence, and embodied trust in ways that conventional team-building can't.
Available as single workshops (half-day or full-day), multi-day intensives, or as elements within larger retreats and programs.
→ Inquire about organizational work
Future: A Devised Theatre Company
Original ensemble work created using the Embodied Devising method, with the eventual goal of producing original theater for audiences.
This is the long-term vision: a small ensemble of artists creating original devised work in the Embodied Devising tradition — work that's somatically grounded, intellectually serious, and made in the kind of slow, careful, embodied process that produces theater that lands in audiences' actual nervous systems.
If you're an artist interested in being part of this ensemble eventually, or a producer/venue interested in supporting original devised work, I'd love to hear from you.
→ Inquire
Words from Past Participants
“One word--Inspiring!” -Spring 2025 Participant
“Step by step a beautiful representation of our individual and collective consciousness emerged from this practice--creating something truly unique.” -Spring 2025 Participant
“Abby provides us with the permission to see the unspeakable unfold. Deep reflection woven with imaginative, playful and empowering energy, this workshop helped a lifetime of movement make a little more sense. Five stars.” -Zorrae (Spring 2025 Participant)
"Through this workshop, Abby holds space for the participants to explore, experience and bear witness to both our individual and collective embodiment of unity and unique expression." - Spring 2025 Participant
"A grand experiment! Highly recommend!" -Spring 2025 Participant
"As a theater kid grown up into a musician--this day was grounding, introspective, safe and so refreshing. We dug deep together as a group and tapped into authentic connection and free movement. Devised theater is not just for theater kids, it's for anyone who feels things. Come play!" - Rachel (Spring 2025 and Spring 2026 Participant)
"I found Abby Ilardi to be a thoughtful and sensitive guide throughout our day together, exploring theatrical movement. Her experience and knowledge in facilitating is deep, providing a safe environment for experimentation or just plain goofiness. I came to play and was not disappointed." -JLC (Fall 2025 Participant)
"Abby's Devised Theater sessions have been a highlight of this season of my life as a caregiver who moved to KS abruptly, and whose partner still commutes in from a far-away state. Fun, flexible, and a chance to connect deeply with my partner, with a group, and with myself." -Summer2025/Fall 2025/Spring 2026 Participant
How I created this method
Embodied Devising came together slowly, over years, through trial and error — built from many traditions I've loved.
I've been performing in theater since I was five years old. I grew up around theater games and exercises, the rhythms and rituals of rehearsal rooms, the strange alchemy of making something together with other people. Theater was my first home.
In college, I trained as a yoga instructor and started studying mindfulness and embodiment seriously. I went on to study psychology, eventually becoming a Licensed Professional Counselor. After that came years of specialty training in trauma, stress, the nervous system, and somatic practice.
In some of those trainings, I learned something that surprised me: theater can be a profoundly effective complementary modality for trauma and nervous system healing. The body knows things in performance that talk therapy can't always reach.
I started experimenting. I combined somatic practices, yoga techniques, and theater games. I remembered how deeply I'd fallen in love with devised theater while studying in London years earlier, and as I built this method, I went back to it with new eyes. Devised theater — collaborative, body-based, ensemble-driven, generative rather than interpretive — turned out to be an ideal foundation for the kind of embodied work I was trying to create. I fell in love with it all over again.
I studied with Pig Iron Theatre Company in Philadelphia and was deeply influenced by their approach to ensemble-driven creation and devised making.
From there, the method continued to develop through practice — through running classes, leading retreats, working with individual artists and groups, and watching what actually happened in the room.
Embodied Devising as it exists now is a hybrid: theater training, devised practice, somatic technique, yoga and mindfulness traditions, trauma-informed clinical understanding, and my own performing life. It's the practice I built because nothing I could find quite did what I knew was possible.