POP IN / POP OUT 

ENSEMBLE THINKING™

creating community practice

with Margaret Sunghe Paek

Sunday, August 15, 2026

10am - 1pm

Optional Community Potluck: 1 - 1:30pm

at 1100 Kettner Blvd. San Diego, CA 92101

DISCO RIOT's POP IN/POP OUT series offers community workshops from trusted teaching artists to promote a culture of sharing, exploration, diversity, expanding perspectives, and building community. We learn more from one another. We grow together. Join us!

All proceeds from this workshop will support DISCO RIOT's Education & Outreach programming. No one is turned away for lack of funds. Please reach out to Nicole at education@discoriot.org for a waiver code.

This event is ADA accessible. In alignment with the values of DISCO RIOT, this class centers access, bodily autonomy, consent, and the cultivation of safe(r) community space. During the RSVP process, there will be a chance to share any access needs you may have. Please reach out to education@discoriot.org for accommodation inquiries or requests.

ENSEMBLE THINKING™: creating community practice

How can perspective change your experience? How do your individual habits affect the whole? How can our physical choices create dynamic group shifts? How do we build community through practice and play?

In this three-hour lab, we will dive into Ensemble Thinking™ to explore how our perspective and choices affect our connections and creativity. Using small group and large ensemble dance improvisations, we’ll compose, question, and play with possibilities.

Ensemble Thinking™ is a system of group, improvisational, compositional practices that refine individual capacity to perceive, initiate, and support collective action. Ensemble Thinking™ scores research collaboration, attunement, awareness, power, and choice and build artistic and social community. Through experimenting with foundational scores, we explore relational space and creative power. The conceptual nature of Ensemble Thinking™ allows for a wide range of access across multiple backgrounds, aesthetics, and physical capabilities. No experience or prior knowledge required.

Let’s dance, investigate, and create together!

Learn more here: Ensemble Thinking™

Margaret Sunghe Paek (she/her)

Margaret Sunghe Paek (she/her) is a mixed-race, collaborative dance artist, maker, and mother practicing deep listening and rigorous play as methodologies of connection, community-building, and art-making. Margaret has been irreparably influenced by her relationships with contact improvisation, Ensemble Thinking™, Alexander Technique, Barbara Dilley, and the collectives- Lower Left, the Resident Artists/Dancing Mamas, Street Dance Activism, Uh Oh Trio, and her family trio. Her dance works have been presented in Mexico, Europe, and across the U.S. at venues including the Whitney Museum Biennial. Margaret began teaching almost thirty years ago in San Diego, and in 2015, she moved from NYC to the ancestral homelands of the Menominee and Ho-Chunk people (Appleton, Wisconsin) to teach dance at Lawrence University. Recent investigations include co-creating a documentary archiving Resident Artists/Dancing Mamas’ fifteen years of performance improvisations with their children, piloting Lower Left’s Ensemble Thinking™ Certification program, and starring in Len Borruso’s award-winning short film, EMBODIED.