Dates: Tuesdays in June – 2nd, 9th, 23rd, 30th
Time: 19:00 – 21:30
Where: Rocklands, Constantia

Led by Nico Athene, this four-part entry-level course approaches consent as a relational, embodied, and ecological process—not just as a social agreement, but something that emerges through bodies in contact with each other, and with their environments.

Together we track old patterns of reactivity and open to new possibilities of engagement. Using clear structures, the course breaks down patterns of giving, taking, allowing, and receiving. This makes it possible to see where consent collapses—into compliance, control, habit, or avoidance so we can work more precisely with those moments. The emphasis is on increasing capacity for awareness to be able to differentiate desire from obligation, presence from dissociation, generosity from self-abandonment, and attunement from management.

Out of this, participants develop:
– More precise awareness of how our internal signals shape patterns of relational dynamics.
– More nuanced understanding of pleasure and desire.
– Slowing down to learn how stay present and advocate for what you need in interactions that feel charged
– Greater range in how imagine the possibilities of touch beyond just the sexual
– Clearer articulation of desires and limits, without relying on scripts or performance
– Tools for interrupting patterns like resentment, entitlement, or covert negotiation
– Practical frameworks for professional contexts involving touch or intimacy
– Tools to access relational dynamics that aren’t organised around avoidance or control

Each 2.5-hour session is practice-based, using vagal-informed tools and direct exercises. The work draws on touch-based practices and principles from contact improvisation to explore Wheel of Consent developed by Betty Martin. Toward the end of the series, it opens into a more fluid, less role-bound understanding of consent as something dynamic and situational in dialogue with forces much bigger than us: Who are we in the face of the animate other and world? These questions offer profound insights and possibilities for how we dialogue with the unknown outside of colonial aspirations to ‘leg-over’, defend, and control.

The work is clothed and there is no genital touch. Partners are welcome to attend together, but they will be asked work with different people throughout. The point is to practice consent across diverse relational structures, not to stabilise it within a single dynamic.

30% discount for students repeating the course, using the code TATx2.

Reviews from the previous workshops:
‘Nico facilitated this important work around Betty Martin’s Wheel of Consent with all the embodied clarity and insight of one who has been working actively for years with conscious movement, performance and sexuality. I really feel like I have more practical tools for my engagement with others more meaningfully in the sensual and other arenas.’ – Adam

‘I just finished Touch as Technique, the last weekly series that Nico hosted… It was really really really amazing to realize how much the body is able to consent to things or not consent to things that we think we are okay with. That the brain and the body can sometimes differ with its yeses and its nos. Consent is really about tuning into the body, and letting your body tell you what its yeses and nos are, and Nico gives really wonderful exercises to help you interrogate and investigate those sensations and emotions without being prescriptive of what they should and shouldn’t be. It’s a guided and held space to figure out your own process with these concepts surrounding embodied consent. I REALLY recommend going and seeing where it lands for you. It is deep and was very illuminating for me.’ – Astrid

‘The practical exercises, group reflections and Nico’s skillful facilitation enabled me to develop a far clearer awareness of and sensitivity to the complex dynamics and relational subtext of touch, communication and consent. It also enabled me to be much clearer about my own desires and how my capacity to seek and receive pleasure are often conditioned and constrained by quite murky motives and assumptions. Highly recommended!’ – Flo

‘Yes. YES AND BIG yes. ?? cannot recommend this enough. Attended the last one and it was deeply insightful.’ – Rina

About Nico:
Nico Athene is a visual artist specialising in performance with a specific interest in butoh and post-Jungain, archetypal animisms. She first became interested in understanding consent when working in the film industry, and has developed her knowledge and approach in the fourteen years since. Athene has degrees in Fine Art (MFA University of Witswatersrand), Public Health (MPH Edinburgh University) and Social Anthropology (University of Cape Town). Athene facilitates workshops in contact improvisation, animist movement, consent-through-touch, and eco-intimacy. She has taught at both Wits University under a grant from the Centre for Human Rights and Arts at Baard University, independently as a consent and eco-intimacy educator with 8 entry level Touch as Technique Workshops already complete, and for the Centre for Applied Jungian Studies.