MLE Podcast Season 2 Episode 7

Barbara Bogatin is a cellist with the San Francisco Symphony, chamber music player, and educator in the field of mindfulness training for musicians. In 35 years of practicing insight meditation, she has integrated the embodied knowledge this contemplative work nurtures into effective methods for improving instrumental practice and performance. Along with her husband, neuroscientist Clifford Saron, she has led workshops on meditation and music practice called “The Buddha, the Brain, and Bach,” at Spirit Rock Meditation Center, the Esalen Institute, Stanford Symposium for Music and the Brain, Telluride Compassion Festival, USC Center for Mindfulness Science, South Africa Conference on Mindfulness, the Ecology of Mind and Matter Symposium in Todi, Italy, and the Nirakara Institute in Madrid, Spain. She received Bachelor and Master of Music degrees from The Juilliard School in New York. Here is brief video where she talks about music and meditation: https://youtu.be/8q7ytYZ-Ke8. Website: Barbarabogatin.com

Stephen Scott Brewer is associate professor of teacher education at the Université Paris-Est Créteil. His research interests are in the area of language learning psychology, with a particular focus on self-regulated learning and motivational development. He earned his PhD in education at the Université Paris-Ouest Nanterre in 2006. A native of the US, he trained throughout his teens as a classical pianist and pursued undergraduate degrees in French and German at Columbia University and in piano at the Manhattan School of Music, New York. Upon completing his Master’s degree in piano performance at the University of Southern California, he received a Fulbright scholarship to Austria, where he continued studying piano, chamber music, and vocal accompanying. While in Vienna, he became interested in the Alexander Technique, triggering his “Copernican Revolution” as an artist (“the piano isn’t my instrument, I am, my body is”). Since arriving in France in 1989, he has built a professional life that brings together music and language while drawing inspiration and insights from an enactive approach to subjectivity, autonomy, and the intentionality of being-and-learning-in-the-world. He regularly performs both as chamber musician and soloist, while maintaining a small studio of piano students whom he teaches privately.

Luc Petton is an atypical artist-choreographer. He entered the world of dance first by studying martial arts and then received his dance training in New York and Germany. Starting in 2004 he embarked on an extraordinary adventure wherein he would invite birds and dancers on stage to improvise and engage in a poetic dialogue. This concept gave birth to four different pieces: La confidence des oiseaux with crows, jays, magpies, starlings and parakeets; SWAN with white and black swans; Light Birds with Japanese cranes; and Ainsi la Nuit, with vultures, owls and a wolf. His unusual body of work has received many accolades, including the distinction of Officier des Arts et Lettres from the French Republic. In parallel with his choreography career, Luc Petton has long had an interest in contemplative practice, notably Zen and Vipassana meditation, which he has studied in France, New York, and Japan. From 2015 onward he has collaborated with Dr. Jean-Gérard Bloch in the diploma-granting program at the university of Strasbourg, Médecine-méditation-neurosciences. With such projects, he has been able to practise and enact the idea of letting be, in the sense of restoring each participant, human or non-human, to its own freedom of expression.

Leticia Renault is a psychologist and researcher. Her interests include topics related to enactive approaches, participatory methodologies in mental health and first-person methodologies. Leticia has a PhD in Psychology from the Universidade Federal Fluminense, Brazil, with an internship at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Liège, Belgium. She was a postdoc at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) at the University of Coimbra, Portugal, and also worked in the area of mental health, participating in a research/intervention project to increase the autonomy of psychiatric medication users in the decisions regarding their treatment and health (GAM – Gaining Autonomy with my Medication). Currently, her work seeks to connect some of the concepts from the field of cognitive research and the therapeutic and cultural practices in different social contexts, such as in Brazil (OPOCA, https://opoca.org/) and in the international network of the Clinique de Concertation (https://concertation.net/f-i-c-c/). She is also working in the field of complex thinking as a researcher collaborator at CES.