Dr Sarah Abbott, MFA, DSocSci, received an interdisciplinary Doctorate of Social Sciences from Royal Roads University, Canada in 2021 with a research focus on the sentient relationality of trees lensed through ethnography, Indigenous research methodologies, ontological emergence, plant science, interspecies communication, and film. She is an associate professor in the Department of Film at the University of Regina in Treaty 4 territory, Saskatchewan. Her teaching includes a multidisciplinary course in climate change open to all university students. Sarah is a recipient of a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship (2014-2017), the Saskatchewan Lieutenant Governor’s Arts Award for Arts and Learning (2012), and the Regina Mayor’s Arts and Business Awards for Innovation (2009). www.sarahabbott.ca
Dr Beatrice Allegranti is an Italian-Irish transdisciplinary choreographer/director, filmmaker, UKCP trauma-informed psychotherapist, and Reader in Dance Movement Psychotherapy and Choreography at the University of Roehampton, School of Arts. For over 25 years, Beatrice has made work across a variety of media: dance, film, installation and writing that engages diverse audiences and participants (mental health, young onset dementia, refugees, LGBTQ+ communities). Beatrice’s award-winning choreography and film work tours internationally (France, U.S.A, Canada, Norway, Finland, Ireland, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland), and her trauma- informed psychotherapy experience includes private practice and the UK National Health System (adult mental health and dementia services), and consultancy (Arts for Peace, Irish Defense Forces, Wellcome Trust). Across her artistic, clinical, and scholarly work, Beatrice’s transdisciplinary feminist new materialist focus involves an ethical re-visioning of the way we relate within our planet through the lens of our intersectional body politics (gender, race, sexuality, age, class, mental health, in human and more-than-human ways. Beatrice is currently working on her second book (Routledge 2023) about the Arts Council England and Public Health supported Moving Kinship project. http://www.beatriceallegranti.com https://pure.roehampton.ac.uk/portal/en/persons/beatrice-allegranti
Basia Alexander is a catalyst for conscious co-creativity. Visionary culture-shifter. Nature communicator. Author. Workshop leader. Leader in practical spirituality. Publisher. Gardener. Mission: Champion partnership with Nature and show people how to get there. www.PartnerWithNature.org
A poet and film maker, Maria Andrews has been evolving her own voice of embodied filming for twenty years. Always working on herself, her camera work emerges from her body in response to an environment in which she, as a sensual actor, takes space and writes with co-performers, using her camera. She aims for being inside all forms of poetry in motion. She hosts a podcast that explores the nuts and bolts of art practice with poets and dancers.
Dr Vipavinee Artpradid is an independent researcher and completed her PhD in dance, disability, and audiences at the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE), Coventry University in 2020. She was Postdoctoral Research Fellow at C-DaRE from 2020-2021. https://www.theshapeofsound.art
Dr Tamara Ashley co-ordinates the MA Dance Performance and Choreography programme at the University of Bedfordshire. She has served on the University sustainability forum for the past 5 years, and co-organised the Climate Change Collaborations Conference, for which she was a team finalist for a National Collaborative Teaching Award in 2017. She has recently been part of the AHRC Somatic Practice and Chronic Pain Network and recently created a video offering practice for chronic relief. In the pandemic she organised ECITE online in the UK. She has an MFA and PhD from Texas Woman’s University. Her PhD dissertation examined durational dance improvisation practices in the context of environmental change. As an independent artist her work has been supported by Arts Council England and presented nationally and internationally. For five years, she also served as the artistic director of dancedigital and curated a series of site-responsive digital works for public spaces all over the UK. She continues to make site-responsive and durational based environmental work within and without the institution. Recently publications include Developing a Sense Place: The Role of the Arts in Regenerating Community andMapping Lineage: Lineage Maps by Dance Improvisation Artists.
Angus McLean Balbernie has created around 85 pieces, run projects, and taught workshops across the world.
Taught for many years at EDDC and ArtEZ Arnhem, Scottish School of Contemporary Dance, Dartington College of Arts,
Falmouth University and Northern School of Contemporary Dance. Was visiting professor of choreography at KNUA Seoul and LEM Buenos Aires.
Doesn’t teach much now, preferring just creating the odd experimental workshop.
Has spent most of his life walking and being in mountains and wilderness, and still wonders at how this can shape experience into art.
Still improvises, makes the odd commissioned piece, and works with Cologne-based Silke Z on her Metabolists project.
Plays the banjo left-handed and really quite badly. He might still improve… http://angusbalbernie.weebly.com
Sara Jane Bailes is a theatre artist, scholar and writer. She works internationally with artists as dramaturg, mentor, consultant and co-creator. She’s interested in the social, political and ethical modes of friendship and alliance that develop through art practice and its collaborative methodologies. She’s author of Performance Theatre and the Poetics of Failure (2011), co- editor of Beckett and Musicality (2014) and publishes widely on contemporary experimental performance and live art practices in print, live and web-based contexts. She’s Associate Professor and teaches in the Drama, Theatre and Performance programme at the University of Sussex.
Colleen Bartley has Dance and Education degree from Swarthmore College and a diploma in Community Dance from Laban and years of experience with Somatic Education worked directly with most of the founders of Contact Improvisation. She’s been influenced by teachers of contemporary and post-modern dance, experiential anatomy with Gary Carter and Caryn McHose, Authentic Movement with Susan Schell, Improvisation & Composition (Tuning Scores with Lisa Nelson, The Underscore with Nancy Stark Smith, Ensemble Thinking with Nina Martin) and is very active in dancing, organizing, writing about and documenting dance. She has an invisible disability which informs her practice as a teacher and an artist and the communities she engages with. She believes that its everyone’s birth right to move, that people are inherently creative, movement is our first language, and sees dance as a way to empower people, to effect social change and to build community.
Audree Barvé (see SCOBY)
Paul Beaumont is a Registered Somatic Movement Therapist (ISMETA), Supervisor and Teacher with 20 years’ experience of working therapeutically with the body and movement. He is on the faculty of the Institute of Integrative Bodywork & Movement Therapy (ibmt.co.uk) and works with people of all ages in private practice and with adopted children and families. In recent years he has been a visiting lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London on the Dance Movement Psychotherapy MA and at the University of Central Lancashire, MA Dance & Somatic Wellbeing. https://www.paulbeaumont.net/sessions-outdoors-in-nature/
Hannah Beilharz is a multidisciplinary artist currently working with the themes of ecological grief in the context of the climate crisis. My works often take the form of large-scale installations incorporating sound, sculpture, and video. I am interested in how art as a transdisciplinary mode of working can intervene in the world through the combination of visual strategies, critical theory and sharing stories of lived experience. I am currently undertaking a research project on the transformative potential of ecological grief within the climate crisis through a Master of Fine Arts in Lucerne, Switzerland. Previously based in Naarm (Melbourne) Australia, I completed a Bachelor of Fine Art (Honours) at RMIT University in 2017 and have since undertaken several long-term projects exploring diverse themes including feminist perspectives on the body, mourning landscapes after wildfires, and trauma recovery through sculpture and performance. https://www.instagram.com/hannahbeilharz/ https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/501586344 https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/501588671
Ruth Ben-Tovim worked as a cross disciplinary theatre maker collaborating with scientists and writers, before focusing my practice as a socially and ecologically engaged artist, facilitator and designer.From 2003 – 2020 I was the co- founder and Exec Director of Encounters Arts specialising in community involvement and engagement. Working in different sectors and with diverse collaborators, I delivered over 60 intimate participatory interventions that invited people from all backgrounds to explore and express creatively their experiences of the past, responses to the present and hopes and fears about the future.I was part of the team representing the UK at the Venice Biennale of Architecture and delivered projects for Liverpool Capital of Culture. Joanna Macy’s Work that Reconnects and Jem Bendel’s Deep Adaptation guide me. I have been active in Extinction Rebellion as a local and national coordinator and was one of the instigators of the Culture Declares Emergency movement. https://encountersarts.wixsite.com/legacy http://www.walkingforest.co.uk
Olive Bieringa is a dance, performance and visual artist working at the intersection of social and creative practice, pedagogy, and healing.
Born in Aotearoa, she is a first generation New Zealander of European Jewish descent educated in the Netherlands, UK, Germany and the USA. She moved to Oslo in 2017 from USA where she was based for twenty years.
She studied at the European Dance Development Center in the Netherlands and completed her Master in Fine Arts in Performance and New Media from Long Island University in Brooklyn, New York. She is a Registered ISMETA Somatic Movement Therapist, Somatic Movement Educator, Somatic Movement Dance Educator and a Certified Practitioner and Teacher of Body-Mind Centering®, Shiatsu practitioner and certified DanceAbility teacher, working with performers of all abilities. She is the Program Director for Somatic Education Australasia’s Body-Mind Centering® program in Melbourne, Australia. She is currently a Doctoral Candidate in Dance at UniArts, Helsinki.
Her work has been presented by Oslo Kommune, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, Performance Space 122, NYC, the Performance Arcade, Wellington, Lyon Opera Ballet amongst other contexts and lives in the collection of the Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand.
As a dancer, maker and educator her work has been profoundly influenced by teachers and collaborators including Otto Ramstad, Margit Galanter, Lisa Nelson, Jennifer Monson, Emmett Ramstad, Carle Lange, Zeena Parkins, Andrea Parkins, Deborah Hay, Karen Nelson, Benoit Lachambre, Steve Paxton, Eva Karczag, and founder of Body-Mind Centering® Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen.
She is a recipient of Oslo Kommune stipdendium in 2020, a Foundation for Contemporary Art Fellowship in 2015 and a McKnight Foundation Fellowship in 2010.
Olive teaches internationally in Body-Mind Centering® trainings and dance programs such as Moveus, Germany, Leben Nuvoa, Italy, Moving from Within, USA, Sonder, USA, Norwegian Theater Academy, Oslo National Academy of the Arts, Praxis, Oslo, Impulstanz Festival, Vienna, Movement Research, NYC, SEEDS Festival, Earthdance, Massachusetts, Wayne State University, Detroit, Winona State University, Carleton College, Minnesota, and for dance companies Lyon Opera Ballet, Footnote Dance, Touch Compass, New Zealand, Axis Dance Company, California and Young Dance, Minneapolis.
She is currently on the board of PRAXIS Oslo. Curatorial projects include PRAXIS Oslo, Vital Matter Dance Festival and Future Interstates performance series, Minneapolis, Public Art Saint Paul’s City Art Collaboratory, SEEDS Festival at Earthdance in Massachusetts, and the Kinesthetic Kino: International Dance Cinema.
Her writings appear in numerous online publications and the following books: Meandering Methodologies, Deviant Disciplines — Four Years of City Art Collaboratory from Public Art Saint Paul, Saint Paul, Minnesota. Site Dance: Choreographers and the Lure of Alternate Spaces from University of Florida Press. https://bodycartography.org/
Helen Billinghurst is a walking artist who makes drawings, paintings, poems and performance in response to site, exploring place-story as an agent in the landscape. She has been studying the ‘wolf-lines’ through zones of tungsten and china clay quarrying on South Dartmoor since 2013 when she began a series walks across the country for her doctoral research at the University of Plymouth, and has made several collaborative and solo works about the territory. https://www.triarchypress.net/helen-billinghurst.html
Deborah Black is a dancer, theatre maker, writer, and teacher. She has performed in the work of Deborah Hay, Mary Overlie, Susan Rethorst, and Ann Hamilton. While living in Rotterdam (NL) from 2013-16, she created and toured with the Tuning People (BE) and Ymist Company (NO). She is currently researching the space between the body and language with poets Alyson Hallett (UK) and Scott Thurston (UK) and recently completed her first chapbook.
Deborah taught theatre and dance at the Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunsten in Tilburg (NL) for three years. She led guest and master classes at Goldsmith’s University London, NYU’s Experimental Theatre Wing, Drama Studio London, Capilano University, Ohio University, Skidmore College, Rowan University, James Madison University, University of South Florida, as well as private workshops in New York City and all across Europe. She has taught Mary Overlie’s Six Viewpoints on-line since January 2018 and is now co-steward of Mary Overlie’s Legacy Project and co-director of the forthcoming Six Viewpoints Institute. http://www.deborahblack.net
Katya Bloom, PhD, CMA, BC-DMT – I’ve been a movement artist my whole professional life, first as a performer/choreographer, then a teacher in many settings, including 20 years working with actors at RADA and 16 years at Roehampton University teaching Observation in the Movement Psychotherapy training. The work of Rudolf Laban has long been a significant influence, and my appreciation of his work was deepened immensely by encountering Prapto Suryodarmo and Amerta Movement in 1992. My writing includes four books: Moves; The Embodied Self: Movement and Psychoanalysis; Embodied Lives: Reflections on the work of Suprapto Suryodarmo (Ed); and The Laban Workbook for Actors (Ed). After returning to my native USA in 2010, I have continued developing my movement and meditation practices in nature, my creative writing, and the joy of making fun stuff out of clay. www.depthmovement.com
Katya Bloom, PhD, CMA, BC-DMT – I’ve been a movement artist my whole professional life, first as a performer/choreographer, then a teacher in many settings, including 20 years working with actors at RADA and 16 years at Roehampton University teaching Observation in the Movement Psychotherapy training. The work of Rudolf Laban has long been a significant influence, and my appreciation of his work was deepened immensely by encountering Prapto Suryodarmo and Amerta Movement in 1992. My writing includes four books: Moves; The Embodied Self: Movement and Psychoanalysis; Embodied Lives: Reflections on the work of Suprapto Suryodarmo (Ed); and The Laban Workbook for Actors (Ed). After returning to my native USA in 2010, I have continued developing my movement and meditation practices in nature, my creative writing, and the joy of making fun stuff out of clay. www.depthmovement.com
Dr Rich Blundell is an ecologist working at the confluence of art, science, nature and culture. His research examines how transformation happens across the scales of person, place and planet. As a cultural communicator and founder of Oika Research, Blundell tells a scientific story of the universe that includes art and human creativity as natural phenomena. Blundell’s research and work has received numerous grants and awards including, The National Science Foundation grant for Science Out There, the Michael Brinkman Award, The Deep Time Values video award for An Earth Story, The Macquarie University Innovation in Scholarship award for The Cosmosis1 Explorer app, The Oculus Innovators Award for In the Light of the Forest VR, and nomination for the Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival Best New Media for Saving Grey’s Zebra. Blundell’s creative video work has appeared on PBS and National Geographic and his art has hung in numerous galleries. http://www.oika.com
Kristina Bourdillon is an environmental campaigning grandmother with a background in teaching and homeopathy. I have worked with Amerta Movement for 30 years, studying with Suprapto Suryodarma in Java and Britain, and this movement practice permeates every aspect of my life. I have co-hosted movement workshops at Avebury since 2008, as well as groups in my home locality. I work in the environment and investigate and explore layers and aspects of our being present to human with human, human with nature and human with sacred. I am interested in bringing Amerta movement art into teaching and environmental action, and in co-creating with others an atmosphere where all can flourish. https://amertamovers.wordpress.com/album/ https://www.triarchypress.net/amerta.html
Julie Brixey-Williams is a multi-disciplinary artist, sculptor and performer, whose practice engages place-responsively on a variety of scales. She lives and works in London, exhibits internationally and is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors and the Women Who Walk Network. She completed BA in Fine Art Sculpture (2000) and MA Art and Space (2001) at Kingston University, and recently submitted her PhD “A Labour of Attentiveness: the emergent place-responsive praxis of matter and context in R.D Laing’s Archway community” at the University of Reading.
She has worked extensively in collaboration, is a co-founder of the collective point and place, and also has a longstanding creative relationship with performer, Libby Worth. Works are held in collections including The Yale Center of British Art, Tate Gallery Artists’ Publication archive, National Art Library, Birmingham Museum of Art Library and the University of Kent. https://placeingobjects.weebly.com
Katrina Brown is a choreographer working across movement, drawing, writing, and still-and-moving image. Brown’s hybrid practice is concerned with configuring shifting relations between bodies, surfaces, images, sounds and other things, circulating around themes of orientation, horizontality, surface and documentation. She works both solo and in collaboration with other artists, developing work in artist residencies such as Assembling in the Hall CAST Helston 2017, tilt-rhythm-back: dances & drawings at Dance4 Nottingham, presenting in gallery-like situations including And a body turns 2019 at The Drawing Centre Diepenheim, Netherlands and between Sol and sea 2022 at Tate St.Ives, as well as on artist-pages as extensions of live work, including Translucent surface/Quiet body in JAR#18 2019 and in On An/Notations Performance Research 2015.
Andrew Carey has worked most of my life in publishing, for the last 15 years at Triarchy Press (an independent, UK publisher of books on systems thinking, ecology, somatics and movement). I have also worked as a psychotherapist. I am part of the animate ~ in ~ animate movement art collective and have worked with Amerta Movement, to explore movement and writing, since 2005. https://aslightopening.weebly.com https://www.triarchypress.net
Anna Casey is an independent interdisciplinary artist and educator living and working in the South West of England. http://www.annacasey.co.uk
UK-based Lucy Cash in an interdisciplinary artist, curator and educator working within and through choreographic processes, and across form. Her commissioned work often involves social exchange and has taken place in galleries, museums, libraries, housing estates, on water and in the air. Her works have shown in both cinema & installation contexts and in galleries including Sophiensaele and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Hyde Park Art Center; Cultural Center and Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, USA; Tramway, Glasgow; Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern, Siobhan Davies Studios, and the Natural History Museum, London, UK. She was an associate member of Goat Island 2005 – 2009. www.luminous-cloud.com
Shelley Castle is a visual artist with a studio background but have worked for over a decade in South Devon as a community artist, leading collaborative work that researches and celebrates local flora and fauna through textiles, procession, making, song and dance. My interest is in how we are enabled, by making with our hands, to talk about difficult topics such as climate breakdown and extinction. Through the projects I bring together folk that don’t normally meet and have worked with, amongst many others, fishermen, lacemakers, dancers, horologists, mycologists. I often partner with Museums and am continuing to evolve the Museum of Now, created and delivered twice through Encounters Arts. All my work revolves around the natural world and our relationships within it, and my most recent projects have involved the sea, seagrass and seahorses as well as fungi and mycelium in particular. I also work with Extinction Rebellion and and was one of the instigators of the Culture Declares Emergency movement. www.shelleycastle.org.uk
Dr Pavel Cenkl has worked for more than two decades in higher education in America and has always been drawn to colleges and universities whose curriculum fully integrates learning with practice and thinking with embodiment. He is Director of Learning at Dartington Trust.
Having taught and served as Dean for nearly 15 years at Vermont’s Sterling College, Pavel brings a depth of experience to Schumacher College’s unique approach to experiential learning. While pursuing research in ecologically-minded curriculum design and teaching courses in environmental philosophy, Pavel is also a passionate endurance and adventure runner. Over the past five years through a project called Climate Run, Pavel has covered hundreds of miles in the Arctic and subarctic on foot in order to bring attention to the connections between our bodies and the more-than-human world in the face of a rapidly changing climate.
Pavel holds a Ph.D. in English and is the author of many articles, chapters, and two books: Nature and Culture in the Northern Forest: Region, Heritage, and Environment in the Rural Northeast. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010; and This Vast Book of Nature: Writing the Landscape of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, 1784-1911. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006. He is currently working on a book titled Resilience in the North: Adventure, Endurance, and the Limits of the Human, which threads together personal narrative and observation with environmental philosophy and reflections on what it means to be human.
Nic Chalmers is an interdisciplinary artist, writer and educator working with performance, collage and moving image. Her work addresses the impulse to make, the act of making and the materiality of subject matter; she is interested in the collapse of practiced behaviours, particularly those associated with trauma, and in the application of choreographic strategies to non-dance practices. Teaching includes the MA Performance Design & Practice at Central Saint Martins and the BA Performance Arts at Central School of Speech & Drama. http://www.nicchalmers.co.uk/
Chalmers · May · de Grey is a collective of 3 artists, educators, gardeners and performers whose shared practice embodies the interconnectedness of human, plant and animal narratives. Drawing on the works of Mary Oliver, Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Abram, Lygia Clark, Sharon Blackie and Carl Jung, their performative offerings involve a multi-channel, symbiotic mode of delivery through which the somatic, sonic, visual, mystical, material, animate and inanimate create meaning through their startling and often profound reciprocity.
Izabella Finch is a theatre maker, dancer and musician and Rosalind Holgate Smith: a dancer, choreographer and interdisciplinary artist. Clear as Mud builds on our previous collaboration in 2013 that investigated embodied relationships to soil and water. This research resulted in a performance called ‘Mud’, shown at Exeter Northcott Theatre alongside a series of educational workshops and resources for schools and an article published in Contact Quarterly. Since then, our individual somatic practices have deepened into the fields of Voice Movement Integration, Contact Improvisation in Water, continued somatic training and teaching, two MA’s, and a PhD. We have recently received some funding from the Dance Research Society to create a podcast publication and journal contribution on our Clear as Mud. Further, we await confirmation of a 3 week artist residency at Cove Park in Scotland in which we hope to have extended time for our practical and durational performance research and to develop further our questions concerning our sense of being in the world in relation to digital technologies and organic life.
Isabelle Chowree: On this small part of Land – Mauritius – there could have been lots of ecological disasters if sensible parties had not been courageous enough to confront “some powerful men” in quest of excessive harm to nature and environment to increase their financial and political gains.
These luxurious vegetations, these rare forests, these natural Landslides would have already disappeared if we didn’t keep “protestations and manifestations” through different actions.
I dropped the “glamorous entertainment” to get engaged in contemporary dance art form, by passion for my work but also to “voice out” and stand as advocate for societal issues.
Since 2000, back from dance studies from Montpellier France, I was aware of the “non- considération” of nature and environment in Mauritius, which were continuously being neglected or possesed by rich societies for tourism development.
My dance work, in specific research, stands as “question and awareness”.
I could feel some sort of rejection from some part of mauritian society in the form of boycott or not being part of my audience.
But i kept my position, position of my dance to denonciate.
My latest dance creation “Tresspass” is the most precise “speech”.
-Jean Renat Anamah https://youtu.be/XdigyPR0kB0
Natasha Clarke: I’m an artist, I’m a drum maker, I’m a herbalist, I’m a teacher, I’m a healer.
I’ve lived in many places and many worlds and most of the time I’ve been lost. I can only give thanks to my friends and family, teachers, guides and angels, all who have loved me and supported me and stood by me while I’ve found my way through. Home is a little earth house on Camano Island with my teenage son, cat and partner.
Deeply concerned about how humans stand in relationship with this earth, each other and ultimately ourselves I strive to help myself and others know the beauty, abundance and love when in connection with our mother Earth so that we may all know our own way home.
Born and raised in England I was an early traveller with my diplomatic parents which I continued when I completed school, in lue of a university education. After many adventures involving art technology with Alexei Blinov (RayLab) and Steven Roberts (Nomadic Research Laboratories) I settled in the United States where I became a herbalist studying under Mathew Wood and Scott Kloos (School of Forest Medicine,) running my own clinical practice as well as teaching Plant Spirit Wisdom at various herbal conferences including The Northwest Herbal symposium, The Pacific Women’s Herbal Conference, Good Medicine Confluence and the Green Gathering which I co created and ran for 6 years. Right now I am deep in the dreaming of creating community on 80 acres in Klickitat WA, learning from the wilderness to un-domesticate ourselves so that we can understand the ways of becoming good earth custodians. https://www.natashaclarke.com/
Alice Clough is an independent artist-researcher working across the fields of art, archaeology and anthropology. Her research interests focus on the body, constructions of place and meaning, posthumanism and enchantment. Her most recent publication is an anthology titled Catalogue of Failures (2021), part of a socially-engaged project exploring the role of vulnerability and radical softness in effecting social change. She has also published on practice-led research and ways of learning, street art and materiality. Alice’s creative practice includes ceramic sculpture and installation, photography and collaborative workshops. In 2022 Alice is beginning a doctoral research project exploring creative ways of telling different, radical, and more inclusive stories with and about the archaeological record. http://www.aliceclough.com
Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art, Nottingham Trent University. Cocker’s practice unfolds restlessly along the threshold between writing/art, including diverse process-oriented and dialogic-collaborative approaches to working with and through language. She often works with other artist-researchers on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context becomes a live ‘laboratory’ for collaborative exploration. Her writing is published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; Reading/Feeling, 2013; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User’s Manual, 2023, and the solo collection, The Yes of the No, 2016.
Katye Coe is a dancer, performer, curator, teacher and mentor. Her professional practice spans 20 years and she now works freelance, in association with key institutions including Sadlers Wells, London Contemporary Dance School, University of the Arts Stockholm, Siobhan Davies Dance, Dance4 and Culture Hub Birmingham.
Workshop co-facilitator, Katye Coe has been supporting Kinship Workshops since 2016. Katye is a dancer, performer and teacher working collaboratively in the UK and internationally . Katye is a certified Skinner Releasing Technique teacher and has completed 4 years of site and movement work in Helen Poynor’s Walk of Life Programme. She is currently studying to become a Somatic Experiencing Practitioner (Peter Levine)
Katye grew up on a farm and later worked extensively alongside horses. Her intention in the context of Kinship Workshops relates to the importance of negotiating our place among other animals in these current times. www.katyecoe.org https://kinshipworkshop.info/about/
Judy Cole: As a dancer, movement artist and teacher, choreographer and garden designer, my practice is to do what is necessary to help wake things up – myself, others and the place we a find ourselves in.
Taking inspiration from witnessing and experiencing the vitality of nature, I go outside to wake up to life and connection through ‘movement conversation’. I literally incorporate the experience of, for example, blossoming, rotting, colour, texture, sound – all qualities of natural life. These conversations I bring into my daily life, they widen my view, I see new possibilities and engage with whatever arises.
As a result, I can start to move beyond habitual, unthought-through attitudes that tend to lock me into preconceptions and restrict possibilities. https://www.triarchypress.net/judy-cole.html
Gemma Collard-Stokes is an interdisciplinary performance artist, researcher and educator situated within the Digital and Material Artistic Research Centre at the University of Derby. Gemma’s work explores dance in its therapeutic capacity and her research interests align with prominent subjects within women’s studies, such as motherhood, birth trauma, body image disturbances, ageing and invisibility. This work is embedded in enquiry that seeks to explore the ways in which human-nature relationships support recovery, connectedness and orient us in the world. http://www.gemmacollardstokes.com
Rachel Elizabeth Coleman (see SCOBY)
Dr Jim Conroy, The Tree Whisperer®. PhD in Plant Pathology from Purdue University. Refugee from 30+ year career in ag-chemicals. Author of 7 books. Speaker and Teacher. Innovator in holistic and ecological healing approaches. Mission: Save trees by healing trees. www.TheTreeWhisperer.com http://www.PartnerWithNature.org
Laura Cooper is a British visual artist and filmaker. Her practice embraces live performance, video installation and drawing. She received her undergraduate degree from Glasgow School of Art in 2006 and her MFA in Fine Art Media at the Slade School of Art London 2012. Group exhibitions include Play, Game, Place, State, Collyer Bristow Gallery London UK, Voice and The Lens, IKON Gallery Birmingham [2012] touring to Rich Mix Cinema London [2014]. VideoGud program Stockholm Sweden [2015] EyesAs Sieves, Global Committee Space Brooklyn NY, Third House Titanik Gallery Finland [2017]. Solo exhibitions include Softening The Grid at Milton Keynes Arts Center [2017], Nomadic Glow, Centro ADM Mexico City [2015], Soft Revolutions at Space In Between Gallery London [2013]. Residencies include In 108 NY USA and PRAKSIS Oslo [2016], IPark in CT, USA [2012]. SAP Seoksu Market International residency in Anyang City, South Korea [2010]. She was awarded the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance [2012/13] and an International Artist Development Fund by the Arts Council England for her project at the 3rd Land Art Mongolia Biennale, Mongolia [2014]. She co-directed the artist run project space Global Committee with artist and collaborator Ian Giles in Brooklyn NY from 2014-16. She also is engaged in various collaborative projects with artist Hermione Spriggs and the group ‘The Anthropology of Other Animals’. http://www.lauracooper.co.uk
Marlene Creates is an environmental artist and poet who works with photography, video, scientific and vernacular knowledge, walking and collaborative site-specific performance in the 6-acre (2.4-hectare) patch of old-growth boreal forest where she lives at the edge of the Blast Hole Pond Conservation Area — which she helped establish — in Portugal Cove, Newfoundland, Canada.
Her work has been presented in over 350 exhibitions and screenings across Canada and internationally. In 2019 she received a Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts for “Lifetime Artistic Achievement” and in 2021 she was invested into the Order of Newfoundland and Labrador — the province’s highest honour — for her contribution as an environmental artist and her years of volunteer work for the arts community. http://www.marlenecreates.ca
Anne-Marie Culhane creates events, performances and long-term projects that invite people into active and enquiring relationships with each other, the land and earth’s natural systems framed within the context of a global climate and ecological emergency. I am an artist, activist, project manager and collaborator working across a range of disciplines.
My work takes place in outdoor spaces, community centres, parks, the street and sometimes in galleries and museums. I am constantly learning the arts of collaboration and co-production. I draw inspiration from the cycles of nature and seasons; environmental and ecological concerns or questions and listening and responding to people, landscapes and particular sites. Much of my work focuses on our relationship to trees and orchards including performance such as Running with Tree and planting, harvesting and celebrating trees in common spaces such as FLOW, Fruit Routes and Abundance. www.amculhane.co.uk
Alice Cummins MA is an Australian dance artist, somatic practitioner and educator with a 40-year history of contemporary performance making. Her enquiry into the lived body has led to a body of work that is a distillation of the experienced feeling body engaging with the materiality of contemporary life. This has involved collaboration across artforms ¬– with musicians, writers, visual artists, philosophers and filmmakers. Recent work includes: A Walking Dance/A Moving Lecture, Melbourne (2021); The Mountains Are a Dream That Call to Me, directed by Cedric Cheung-lau, Sundance (2020); Alice With Black Object, film project with Siobhan Murphy (2017-19); Coventry University UK, Dance and Somatic Practices Conference, being and becoming animal: how might we become more human? (2017); PAF Residency with Montreal based philosopher Ana Ramos (2017); SenseLab residency, Concordia University, Montreal, being and becoming animal (2016); In Memory of the Last Sunset, collaboration with LA/Mumbai artist Neha Choksi, 20th Biennale of Sydney (2016).
Alice’s practice involves creating environments where sources of intelligence, organization and creativity emerge from and engage with the somatic. Her work is informed by improvisation practices, feminist philosophy and Body-Mind Centering® and her writing has been published in the United States and Australia. Alice has been a teacher and mentor to a generation of Australian dance and theatre artists. www.alicecummins.com
Dr Anna Dako is a Registered Somatic Movement Educator and Therapist with nearly 20 years of experience working with dance, movement and creative arts. Anna’s experience stretches from dance research, dramaturgy and on-screen productions. She collaborates internationally and has lived and worked in Poland, the Netherlands, and now in Scotland, UK.
Anna is the founder and director of Dunami – Movement, Arts, Wellbeing, a platform for ecologically mindful growth, psycho-somatic health and artistic development.
As a writer, she specialises in practice-based research, ecopsychology and environmental philosophy perspectives. In her doctoral research in art-based therapeutic education she has been developing movement-based approaches toward more embodied ways for ‘being well’ with the natural environment guided by processes of somatic felt thinking. As a grounding methodology of reflexive and expressive self-inquiry, felt thinking opens up a whole new realm of philosophical contemplation on what it means to be human and on experiential movement as the basic ontology of relating to the living world, and it is now offered as an online, two-year practical course in SME (Somatic Movement Education) by Dunami.
Following her interests in building bridges between movement arts practice and environmental psychologies of personal development, inspired by embodied reflection upon life experience in all-inclusive ways, Anna is now developing her movement productions with In The Open – Outdoor Arts Theatre, and has delivered many workshops throughout UK including University of Oxford, Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Edge Hill. She is also a winner of Images of Research Competition 2019 at the Un. of Aberdeen.
In her private practice Anna specializes in supporting and working through versatile psycho-somatic imbalances. She also loves guiding experiential walks in Aberdeenshire, and working with children, both in therapy and creative education.
She is also a board member of Somatic Moving and Dancing Therapies Association UK.
For more information, visit: www.dunami-somatics.com
Fabrizio Dalle Piane is a somatic practices teacher, bodyworker and eclectic performer, inspired by Zen martial arts and nature. European Karate Champion in 1984. He has co-written two books on Watsu and Tantsu. With his partner Tania Haberland, he has been collaborating for 10 years on the development of The Technology of Tenderness and the CreatiVita project. His approach to health and personal growth is a ‘holistic rebellion’ : We learn by unlearning and we do by not doing. Our life is movement. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCquSsvaZKfr5iG5sMMg7ggg
Livia Daza-Paris’ investigative artworks draw from her background with Skinner Releasing, a dance technique immersed in poetic imagery and entanglements of self and world. Supported by attunement methods, decolonizing methodologies and intersectional ecology, poetic testimonies emerge in her art-led practice, through her performative interventions—that are captured in video—about political disappearances during Cold War-era Venezuela in a context of systemic coloniality and US interventionism. https://www.poetic-forensics.org/
Laura Denning is a transdisciplinary artist, often using mark-making and walking as experimental methodologies. Current work is being made in response to the River Erme, South Devon. Laura has engaged in practice-research at this site since 2018, initiating a number of artist’s walks and hosting two Full Moon artists’ camps. Monthly zines focus on different aspects of this practice research. Walking the wooded valley on the middle stretch of the Erme returns her to Harford, encircling polytemporal entanglements across species and ecotones. Throughout Winter 2020 Laura is focused on the after-dark lives of the river. https://lauradenning.com
Mia DiChiaro (she/her) is a Dublin-based contemporary dancer, teacher, creative producer, and artivist whose ideas often circulate around participatory art and climate justice. Originally from New York, she trained at the Ailey School and developed an interdisciplinary B.A. in ‘Performance and Arts Activism’ from New York University while also becoming a RYS 200hr certified yoga teacher. After relocating to Ireland, she received a First-class Honours M.A. in ‘Contemporary Dance Performance’ from University of Limerick and has performed choreography by artists including David Bolger, Liz Roche, Lucyna Zwolinska, Jack Webb, Ursula Robb, Paul White, Dina Abu Hamdan, and her own site-specific work around embodied climate activism.
She has recently trained to teach Dance for PD (Parkinsons) with Mark Morris Dance Group and regularly teaches at Dance House (Dublin), Dance Limerick, Firkin Crane, and Fatima Groups United (FGU). In 2020 she received Dance Ireland’s HATCH Award for collaborative eco-dance research and is diving further in 2021-22 with support from the Irish Arts Council’s Dance Bursary and Agility Awards. She is currently facilitating ‘Dance Til Dán’, an intergenerational project fusing dance and poetry at FGU commissioned by TikTok and Ireland’s St. Patrick’s Day
Joanna Dobson is a fully funded, third-year PhD researcher in English and Creative Writing at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research investigates the role of the more-than-human world in narratives of trauma and she is writing a memoir about childhood trauma and nature connection. She has published academically on birdwatching in popular culture, the role of the egg collector in twentieth-century fiction, and, with Julia Schauerman, on storytelling in the Anthropocene.
Stella Duffy OBE was born in London and grew up in New Zealand. She has lived and worked in London since the mid-1980s. She has written seventeen novels, over seventy short stories, and devised and/or written fourteen plays. The Room of Lost Things and State of Happiness were both longlisted for the Orange Prize, and she has twice won Stonewall Writer of the Year. She has twice won the CWA Short Story Dagger. Stella is the co-founder of the Fun Palaces campaign for cultural democracy. Her latest novel is Lullaby Beach (Virago).
She is also a yoga teacher, teaching workshops in yoga for writing, and a trainee Existential Psychotherapist, her ongoing doctoral research is in the embodied experience of being postmenopausal.
Kathryn Edwards is a ritualist, funeral celebrant and editor who has been privileged to travel with West African elder, Dr Malidoma Somé, to his village in Burkina Faso to learn about the Dagara people’s indigenous worldview. She has facilitated rituals with Malidoma for people living in modernity in Europe and in North America.
I am Meri Erkkila, a special needs primary and secondary school teacher, dance movement therapist and semi-professional dancer. I was born in Helsinki, Finland but spent fourteen years abroad in Newcastle NE of England, Argyll in West Coast Scotland and Rotterdam, The Netherlands. My love for the arts and movement led me to studying theatre, dance and finally a masters in dance movement therapy. I wrote my thesis research on the importance of Safe Space in dance therapy. My longing to feel rooted and settled brought me back to live in Finland in 2020 where I have recently started a private dance movement therapy practice.
I’ve lived in rural and urban environments and become acutely aware of the effect that living in different environments has on my somatic and emotional well being. With concern, I witness and observe clients I work with suffer from disconnection with their bodies which contributes to mental and physical health problems. I have worked with people of all ages with autism spectrum disorder and eating disorders (the two are often interlinked). Hypersensitivity is central with both client groups and a chaotic sensory environment can cause internally felt chaos and disorder as well. Also people without a particular diagnosis often suffer in an unsuitable environment without realising the effect it has on their bodies.
Mental health cannot be separated from the body. Dance movement therapy addresses the complete wellbeing of a person. We function on three levels: somatic, emotional, cognitive, and all of these need to be taken into consideration to foster change in an individual but also in the collective. Once we become more compassionate towards ourselves, we can become more compassionate towards each other and the natural world. This can also work the other way round. Dance movement therapeutic methods and principles can be applied more in general to bring us new or forgotten information about ourselves as individuals and as part of the collective and the nature.
Coming from Finland, nature has been an inherent part of my life and a source of health and calm. It has nurtured me when I have lost connection with myself. In my work, I try to utilise this experience to help bring people back into connection with themselves and in this way feel more healthy and resilient. https://www.tunnekehomieli.fi/en/
Ann-Marie Fairbrother is an artist making temporal and site-specific installations, objects, encounters, and interventions to kindle connectivity and creative flow. Artworkings are fed by practices in Craniosacral Therapy, Tai Chi and Plant Medicine bringing us back to our senses nurturing felt and imaginal insight, embracing wild nature, a coming aliveness. https://www.ann-mariefairbrother-artist.com
Izabella Finch is a multi-disciplinary theatre maker, singer and dancer currently based in London. Bringing together a natural flair for humor with her dedication to transformative learning and enquiry, Izabella’s style is both profound and witty. Physical, sensitive and movement oriented, her work is multi-faceted, ranging from immersive dance-theatre, stand-up comedy, song, collage and film. She has performed and collaborated extensively with Director Daniel Hernandez within the immersive theatre collective and mystery clown school, Divine Ridiculous, touring festivals such as The Vaults, Wilderness, Buddhafield and Colourfest; thoroughly influencing her artivist productions with Gastivists and Je Moeder in Holland. As an embodied stand-up comedienne, her one-woman show ‘The Pussy Tutorials’ toured Europe including Brighton Fringe, EYE-Museum, Utrecht School of Art, Artez University, Paradiso, FOAM photography Museum and a variety of comedy venues and festivals. During her two-year apprenticeship with 2022 Venice Biennale Dutch representative, Melanie Bonajo, she performed at TATE Modern, Incubate Festival, and various prestigious galleries across Holland. Building on her BA Choreography with Textual Practices from Dartington College of Arts and Falmouth University, Izabella took a mentorship with Rosalyn Maynard of the School of Embodied Learning in Devon for 2 years, and later trained in Voice Movement Integration Somatic Practice for 4 years with Patricia Bardi at the VMI Centre, Amsterdam. In a sabbatical year from MA Creative Education at Plymouth College of Arts, Izabella is devising a children’s Theatre in Education dance-theatre show and nature-connection workshops with Kay Michael of ‘Letters to the Earth’, generously supported by Stanley Arts. http://www.izafinch.com (also see Clear as Mud).
Harriet and Rob Fraser collaborate as somewhere-nowhere, an environmental art and research practice. Their work focuses on sensitive environments and cultures, and advocating for a greater sense of connection between humans and others through creativity. Walking is always a central element of projects, alongside working with scientists, farmers and public organisations concerned with environmental work, landscape care and rural policies. Recent long-distance walks include ‘Sense of Here : Long Walk Through a Poem’ (2019-2020); ‘The Light Walk’ and ‘The Dark Walks’ (2016); ‘Connecting Treefolds’ (2018), ‘Artful Ways’ (2021) and ‘Moonwalks’ (2021). Harriet and Rob have recently established the PLACE collective at the UK https://www.somewhere-nowhere.com
Lindsey French (she/they) is an artist, educator and writer whose work engages in multi-sensory signaling within ecological and technological systems. She has shared her work nationally in museums, galleries, screenings, and diy art spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art (Chicago) and the International Museum of Surgical Science (Chicago), Pratt Manhattan Gallery (New York), the Miller Gallery for Contemporary Art (Pittsburgh), and Lease Agreement (Lubbock). Recent publications include chapters for Olfactory Art and The Political in an Age of Resistance (Routledge), Why Look at Plants (Brill), and poetry for the journal Forty-Five.
They earned a BA through an interdisciplinary course of study – Environment, Interaction, and Design – at Hampshire College, and an MFA in Art and Technology Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Newly based in the prairie landscape of Treaty 4 territory in Regina, Saskatchewan, french teaches as an Assistant Professor in Creative Technologies in the Faculty of Media, Art, and Performance at the University of Regina. https://lindseyfrench.com/
Judith-Kate Friedman inhabits and creates places where art, activism, ritual and oral tradition dance. She sings, composes, writes, performs, curates spaces, produces events, tends hearth- fires and makes records. Born in New York City, she now calls Washington State’s rural north Olympic Peninsula–traditional Coast Salish lands–home. An innovator of intergenerational community-based arts programing in public and healthcare settings, Judith-Kate founded Songwriting WorksTM Educational Foundation, an accredited US charitable organization dedicated to restoring joy, hope, vitality and community across generations diverse in culture and physical, cognitive and emotional realities. A student and practitioner of somatic approaches to art-making for more than 20 years, she studied extensively with Life/Arts process originator Anna Halprin and is currently training with Daria Halprin and faculty of Tamalpa Institute. Judith-Kate holds a Master’s Degree in Poetics of Imagination from Dartington Arts School.
Caroline Frizell (PhD, UKCP, ADMP, Dip Sup SAP) is a senior lecturer and researcher on the MA Dance Movement Psychotherapy at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she was the programme convenor from 2010 to 2019. Caroline also has a private practice that includes therapy and supervision in South Devon, working indoors and on the wilds of Dartmoor. Caroline commits to posthuman, eco-feminist research and practice. Her extensive publications intersect DMP, ecopsychotherapy, supervision and critical disability studies. Her most recent publication is an edited anthology, see: Frizell, C. & Rova, M. (2022) Research and Practice that Brings Us Home. The Creative Body as Catalyst. London: Routledge.
Grace Gelder is a photographer, facilitator and doctoral candidate in Art and Design at Sheffield Hallam University. Her work explores the use of photography as a method of exploring performance, place and memory and she loves to collaborate with practitioners from different disciplines and backgrounds. Her photographic work has been published and exhibited internationally and in the UK. www.gracegelder.com
Jools Gilson is an artist, writer and educator. She is Professor of Creative Practice at University College Cork. http://www.joolsgilson.com https://joolsgilson.com/portfolio-2/tempestries/
Tom Goodwin has a background in various movement practices and somatic trainings including dance, martial arts and more recently wild swimming, and has extensive experience in teaching and facilitation. He works with companies and learning institutions including Scottish Dance Theatre, Stopgap Dance Company, London Contemporary Dance School and Codarts. Kinship Workshop draws from his experiences of spending time with other animals both in sanctuaries and through wild and domestic encounters. He completed an internship at The Kerulos Center in 2014 studying trans-species psychology and self-determination, from which developed the material included in Kinship Workshop. tomgoodwin.info https://kinshipworkshop.info/about/
Fiona completed Metropolis Master program at Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya in Barcelona. She is currently immersed in a creative practice PhD exploring ways of being, knowing and making landscape, moving between the garden and the forest. This research extends somatic studies (Body Mind Centering undertaken with Alice Cummins since 2012 and current training with Somatic Education Australia) in relation to landscape. In 2019, her work was part of an exhibition ‘Conversations with Weather’ (group show with Deila Salter and Susan Kruse) at art.earth, Dartington Space Gallery, Devon and in 2019 was part of Workaround: Women in Design Action ‘The Jane Approach: Onomatopoeia-Play-Day, The Design Hub, Melbourne.
Doctora in Neuroethology from the Universidad Veracruzana and photographer who investigates human languages in the Los Tuxtlas jungle and the montain cloud forest,
Eréndira Gómez is interested in integrating art, science, technology and the ancestral knowledge of curatorship in interdisciplinary pieces. Winner of the second prize for the acquisition of the V Bienal de Arte Veracruz. Course in the Photographic Production Seminar of the Image Center and the support of the Fonca’s Program to Encourage Creation and Artistic Development. It has individual and collective exhibitions in Xalapa, Mexico and France. He won the Dior Prize for Photography and Visual Arts for Young Talents in Arles, France and his work was selected for the Blurring the Lines competition sponsored by FOTODOK, European Cultural Center, Fujifilm and Paris College of Art. The following themes: the effect of disturbances anthropogenic studies on the physiology and behavior of the mantled monkey (Alouatta palliata), environmental and imaginary perceptions of the human-natural relationship from the field of anthropology and philosophy, and the learning of socio-ecological events that take place from the schoolyard. She colaborates all the time with her colective MUTANTE interlab.
Vanessa Grasse is a dance and multidisciplinary artist from Sicily, based in Leeds,UK. She explores the crossover between choreography, walking-art and installation, as a vehicle for somatic experiencing and engaging with public spaces, through site-responsive, improvisational, participatory, and cross-disciplinary practices. Her work is rooted in somatic and ecological approaches that acknowledge our entangled nature with environments, with human and non-human communities. Her current project The Land We Are offers embodied experiences of ecology and relationality to re-invigorate our connection with the more-than-human world, revive our curiosity and care for trees, the land, natural ecosystems and our ecological sociality. With The Land We Are she was the recipient of Leeds Dance Partnership and Leeds Beckett University fellowship, Yorkshire Dance’s Dance Partner Project, Arts Council England funding. Her choreographic work has been commissioned by festivals and institutions including Dance4,The Great Exhibition of The North, Dance City, Badischer Kunstverein, Hull Freedom Festival, The University of Leeds, amongst many others; and it has toured across the UK, Europe and East Asia.
Elisa de Grey is an East London based yoga and meditation teacher, performer and gardener. Her multidisciplinary practice continues to be a richly rewarding experience for her, with each element lending itself to, and enhancing, the other. Theatre credits include: The Wolves In The Walls (Little Angel Theatre); Pinocchio, A Christmas Carol (Citizens Theatre); Peter Pan (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre); Running Wild (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre/UK Tour); Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons: A Reimagining (Shakespeare’s Globe); Goodnight Mr Tom (Chichester Festival Theatre/West End and UK Tour); Little Universe, Brilliant (Fevered Sleep); These Associations (Tino Sehgal); No Way Out (Southwark Playhouse); The Juniper Tree (Goat and Monkey Theatre Company); The Water Babies (Northern Broadsides); Gormenghast (David Glass Ensemble); Beyond Midnight (Trestle Theatre Company); Binari (Obviam Est); Macbeth (Conspirators of Pleasure); Cinderella, Robin Hood and The Lottie Project (Polka Theatre). She is currently rehearsing Animal Farm (Birmingham Rep). http://www.elisadegrey.com/
Sarah Gray is an artist, producer, and teacher founding Sound Site Somatics in 2016 as a vehicle to explore movement training, site-based performance making, and sound art practices grounded in somatic awareness. Sarah supports holistic, embodied learning and uses somatics to facilitate others to connect with the more than human world. Inspired by a listening, radio, and sound art practice she creates sound walks, journeys, and poems, to offer immersive, ‘in-ear’ experiences as sensory invitations for participants to relate to their environment, particularly with a focus on becoming more aware of their perception of animal and plant beings. Her research interests include the conscious experience of mind, body, and place in the context of ecological place- making, community coherence, and the wellbeing of the individual. Sarah studied Theatre and Choreographic Practices at Dartington College of Arts and has been training in Body-Mind Centering for five years and is a certified Scaravelli-inspired yoga teacher. She has taught on projects and programmes including SOEL’s Holistic Studies in Human Anatomy, Schumacher College’s MA in Movement, Mind and Ecology, and the annual international art project Sound Camp founded by Reveil with a partner organisation, Soundart Radio. https://www.soundsitesomatics.com/about
Having previously worked as a marine microbiologist Emma Hambly has a long-standing interest in the physical world and our interactions therein. Currently in the late stages of an MFA, her work has been evolving into deeper investigations into materiality and the specificity of our engagement in the physical world, with thoughts about loss, impermanence, failure and fragility playing central roles. Having and antipathetic relationship with the digital world, Emma has been seeking a (self- defined) purity within physical engagement and the specificity of materiality used in response to such engagements, for example using analogue photography and site-specific stitching, with no digital version made.
Artist and researcher, Marina Guzzo concentrates her creations at the interface of the body and the landscape, mixing dance, performance and circus when tensioning the limits of subjectivity in cities and in nature. Since 2011, the climate crisis and the role of the artist in the production of imagery for crossing a ruined world on the Plantationoceno have been at the center of her research. She works in partnership with health, culture and social assistance equipment, thinking of art as a political action that weaves a complex network of people, institutions, objects and nature. The artist has a post-doctorate from the Department of Performing Arts at ECA-USP and a master’s and doctorate in Social Psychology from PUC-SP. She is an Adjunct Professor at Unifesp at the Baixada Santista Campus, a researcher at the Corpo e Arte Laboratory in the Society and Health Institute. http://cargocollective.com/marinaguzzo
Tania Haberland, PhD candidate in ecopoetics at ULB, is a poet, bodyworder and biophilic artivist, born in South Africa to a Mauritian mother and a German father. She has presented her intercultural work in festivals and performances around the world. She currently lives in Italy with her partner Fabrizio Dalle Piane, where she works on developing The Technology of Tenderness and their CreatiVita project. Her first poetry collection, Hyphen, won the Ingrid Jonker Prize in 2010. Her first bilingual book Water Flame / Fiamma d’acqua was published by Mille Gru Editions in 2019. Tania found her life motto on an eco-friendly shopping bag in San Francisco: “Shit Happens. Make Compost!” https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCquSsvaZKfr5iG5sMMg7ggg https://www.facebook.com/bodyheartmindculturenature/ https://www.instagram.com/thetechnologyoftenderness/
Katherine Hall is a dancer, choreographer and independent producer based in Bristol. Inspired by established and evolving improvisation, sensory and outdoor practices, Katherine’s dancing is currently curious with the material of the body, attention, gesture, presence, imagination, relational and sculptural movement, assembling new dances by improvising, growing food, the action of hope and community building.
Most notable in her process to date has been her work that led to Movements of Care, a book that invites the reader to think about their idea of care, to notice the shifting of power in caring relations and to notice how they choreograph care in their daily life. The book was created alongside the making of a solo dance performance, You sit there which has been performed at afon Festival, Exeter Phoenix, Chisenhale Dance Space, Attenborough Arts Centre and Dance4.
Since graduating in 2014 from De Montfort University with a BA Hons Dance and Masters in Performance Practices in 2015, Katherine has been creating choreographic works that explore connections between the movement of people in different forms of live performance, workshops and writing. Katherine has worked as a dance performer with various choreographers including Jo Fong, Linzy Nanakorn, Jo Bannon, Priya Mistry and Rosemary Lee. Alongside Laila Diallo and Laura Dannequin, Katherine is co-leading GATHER UP, an artist-led programme for professional dancers in Bristol.
At the beginning of 2021, Katherine began living as a Community Builder volunteer at Hope Rise, a new zero-carbon eco-social housing project in Bristol. She was a recipient of the 2019 fellowship with Action Hero, and is a proud associate of INTERVAL, an artist-led support network in Bristol.
Dr Alyson Hallett is a prize-winning poet and writer who lives in Somerset and is the current EarthArt Fellow at Bristol University in the Earth Sciences Department. Her publications include sole-authored and co-authored books of poetry, collections of short stories as well as drama, an audio diary and an essay commissioned for BBC radio. She frequently collaborates with sculptors, dancers, glass makers, visual artists, musicians, and has received Arts Council funding for her poetry and public art project, The Migration Habits of Stones. Alyson is a Hawthornden Fellow, visiting lecturer at the University of the West of England and Falmouth University’s M.A. in Authorial Illustration and offers mentoring through the Poetry Society. She has held many prestigious residencies including being the U.K.’s first poet in residence in a university geography department supported by a Leverhulme Award, poet in residence in Charles Causley’s house and also at the Small School in Hartland. She has an ongoing schedule of national and international poetry readings and love to walk, play the piano and swim in the sea. https://alysonhallett.com/
Ali Hannon (they/them) is an improvised comedy performer and much loved improv teacher. They nurture cultures of belonging in improv spaces and their diversity and inclusion work ensuring they’re held with humour and care.
Laura Harrington is an artist, researcher and creative producer living and working in the North East of England, UK. Her work explores the complex relations between humans and unstable/overlooked landscapes, often through cross-disciplinary research and co-production. Situated between art, science and philosophy her practice of film-making, installation, drawing, fieldwork and listening seeks to create works that centre on an idea of ‘upstream consciousness’, an ethos for engaging with the source as opposed to the results, that draws on upland ecologies to think about various relations and connections. She has been supported through a range of international residencies and commissions funded by arts councils, foundations, cultural and academic institutions, regional arts organisation and environmental agencies. Recent exhibitions and residencies include EKO8 (Slovenia), MIMA (Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, UK), Projections (Tyneside Cinema, UK), UNIDEE/Cittadellarte, (Biella, Italy), Hangmen Projects (Stockholm), HIAP (Helsinki International Arts Programme, Finland), Durham University (Leverhulme), Invisible Dust, UK, Woodhorn Museum, UK, BALTIC 39, UK, VARC, UK and AV Festival 12, UK. She is a current practice-based PhD candidate with BxNU at Northumbria University.
Fiona Harrisson is a practicing landscape architect and design consultant, a contemplative teacher and passionate gardener who loves to dance. She is exploring a combination of these things in her role as an academic at RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Creative collaboration is integral to her teaching, research and design including the design of gardens and public spaces (with Simon Ellis Landscape Architects and Kerstin Thompson Architects) several projects were awarded by Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture. Practices of drawing and time have been explored with Marian Macken; ‘Marking Time’ (2019) Representing Landscapes: Analogue Routledge, ‘Performing Drawing in Time’ (2018) LA+ TIME Interdisciplinary Journal of Landscape Architecture, University of Pennsylvania. She co-edited Live Projects: Designing with People, (2012) RMIT University Press (with Melanie Dodd and Esther Charlesworth). She guest edited an issue of Landscape Review ‘Garden as Urban Laboratories’ (Vol 16, No 2, 2016) and authored ‘Growing Gardens Growing Dialogue’ Melbourne Books, which explores gardens as spaces of learning.
Lily Hayward-Smith is a movement practitioner and Research Assistant at the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, an editor for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and events curator. Lily completed a Masters in Dance Making and Performance in 2009 at Coventry University. https://www.theshapeofsound.art
Hiraezh (Sonia Zaidi, Ninan Luostrainen and Grace Gelder) is a collective of three artists and researchers, from the UK, Pakistan and Finland who met during an artist residency in Brittany, France. Our collective explores connections to place through play, performance and photography; we use artistic practice and research to explore ways of engaging with places. We have named ourselves after the Breton word Hiraezh, defined as an abstract longing … for a place, imagined or real to which one cannot easily return, but without which one is incomplete. See detailed bios elsewhere on this page.
Mira Hirtz – Movement Artist, Art Mediator, Art Theorist
What if dancing is the answer to all questions? After all, it’s just an assumption, a presumption, an imagination.
As a performance artist, mediator and art theorist Mira imagines often, and in different media and contexts, what dance is and what the value of creativity is – for people, the ecology, and for the mediation of knowledge. Contexts include performing for her own pieces and those of others, curating events at the Badischer Kunstverein (“How do we care?), walking at the documenta14 (Chorist), and facilitating workshops for La Loge in Bussels, in the Floating University and for ZKM Karlsruhe, where the museum turns into a rehearsal space in analogue and virtual ways (“Critical Zones”), performing at Badischer
Kunstverein Karlsruhe (“suspicious body”) and at Laurie Grove Studios London (“being part of nature, somehow”). The fact that she completed the MFA Creative Practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and Independent Dance London in 2019 and the Master’s degree in Art History and Media Philosophy at the HfG Karlsruhe in 2016, where she sometimes teaches performative research, certainly played a crucial role in her progress, along with her co-editing the online platform “reciprocal turn”. Currently, her collective “Initiative for Applied Melancholy” is trying to provide a stage for non-human beings. https://www.mirahirtz.de/
Sam Hodge is an artist working with paint and print to explore material transformations. Born in Kent, UK and now based in London, she studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University and Painting Conservation at The Courtauld Institute of Art and then worked as a painting conservator including at Tate before becoming a visual artist. Since then she has exhibited widely in the UK, Europe and Canada, including recent solo show Vital Matter (2019, Muse Gallery, London); recent group exhibitions: Ground Work (2021 APT Gallery, London); Radical Residency VI, (2021, Unit 1 Gallery, London); Doom and Bloom (2019, Contemporary Art Society, London); As the Crow Flies (2019, Bo.Lee Gallery, London): In Residence (2017, Griffin Gallery). Opens and prize shortlists include: RA Summer Exhibition (2019, 2015); Wells Art Contemporary (2018); International Print Biennale (2016) and Creekside Open (2015). Artist’s residencies include: Merchant House Residency, (2019 Symi, Greece); Griffin Residency (2017, Colart, London) A Series of Unfortunate Events, (2013 Hack the Barbican, Barbican Centre); Repetition and Difference (2013 Chisenhale Art Place, London). Her artist’s book A Catalogue of Misfortune (published 2015) has been acquired by several public collections including The Met and MoMA in New York. Her paintings and prints are held in private collections across the UK and Europe and in the USA, Canada, Malaysia, India and Australia. http://www.samhodge.co.uk
Rosalind Holgate Smith (UK/DE) is Dance Artist and Choreographer currently based in Berlin. She creates performances, installations, visual art and poetry that explore intimate experiences between people, place and the environment. Through her engagement with Contact Improvisation and somatic practices including Body-Mind Centering®, she has developed a vocabulary for moving with others, in the environment, underwater and with raw materials, such as soil and trees. She has received site specific commissions in Wales, Australia, India and Berlin. She has also exhibited at Newlyn Gallery, GlogauAIR, Exeter Northcott Theatre and Acker Stadt Palast and performed for Artists including Emma Smith, Melanie Bonajo as well as Kate Lawrence Vertical Dance and Seven Sisters Company. Her training in Authentic Movement, Axis Syllabus and Skinner Release also informs her extensive teaching practice that has included work with dancers of diverse backgrounds, ages & abilities, at international festivals, at UK Universities and in her local communities. Rosalind completed a Foundation Diploma in Art & Design at DeMontfort University. She holds a BA(hons) in Fine Art and Choreography from Dartington College of Arts and Falmouth University and an MA in Dance from Trinity Laban. She is currently a PhD student at Kingston University in London, with a scholarship from Techne, where she is investigating Touch as encounter with Otherness. https://rosalindholgate-smith.com (also see Clear as Mud)
Prof Victoria Hunter is a Practitioner-Researcher and Professor in Site Dance at the University of Chichester. Her research explores site-based dance and performance and examines the body’s phenomenological engagement with space and place through a consideration of corporeal, spatial and kinetic engagements with lived environments. She is co-author of (Re) Positioning Site Dance: Local Acts, Global Themes (2019) with Melanie Kloetzel and Karen Barbour and her edited volume entitled Moving Sites: Investigating Site-Specific Dance Performance (2015) is available through Routledge. Her monograph Site, Dance and Body: Movement, Materials and Corporeal Engagement was published by Routledge in February 2021. https://vickyhunter.weebly.com/
Mumta Ito is the founder and president of the charity Nature’s Rights and sees law as a vehicle for social transformation in a paradigm of restoration, reparation and healing. She is one of Europe’s leading experts and advocates for the rights of Nature, European co-ordinator for the UN Harmony with Nature Knowledge Network, lead author of a Draft EU Directive for the rights of Nature, initiator of a European Citizens Initiative to include the rights of nature on the EU legislative agenda and co-author of the EESC proposal for an EU Charter for the Fundamental Rights of Nature. Mumta holds a degree in Zoology, is an award-winning public speaker and a systemic constellations practitioner who has facilitated healing workshops around the world. Her multi- cultural background, spiritual training and practice of yoga and meditation from childhood stands her in good stead to understand the complexity of our inner and outer relationship with Nature from various perspectives. Her focus is on realigning law – living and written – with the universal laws that govern all life and facilitating inner and outer transformation.
Katsura Isobe is a dance movement artist, whose interests lie on the flux of sensory experience, felt sense and imagination. My current practice is influenced by Authentic Movement and therapeutic work I offer as a Somatic Movement and Craniosacral Therapist. https://linktr.ee/katsuraisobe
Eva Jack is an artist based in Scotland. Having graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven with a Masters in Social Design, she now works on her own creative practice and teaches at Edinburgh College of Art on the Design for Change programme. Her interests centre around the strange connections between humans and other species. Her work does not necessarily focus on animals themself but instead on their representation, cultural meaning and shared social history with humans. Ultimately, she is led by the question ‘Why Look at Animals?’ (borrowing the title of John Berger’s 2009 book), grappling with the power the human gaze has in turning animals into objects. She gives form to her research through immersive installations and written works. Using tactics like subversion she attempts to question the position of the human, de- stabilising the notion of anthropocentrism. http://evatjack.com
Dr. Beatrice Jarvis is a creative facilitator, choreographer and researcher, and founder of the Urban Research Forum and The Living Collective. She is currently a senior lecturer in Dance at Kingston School of Art, London, as well as training to be a certified TRE © practitioner. She holds a practice-based Ph.D. from The University of Ulster ( NI) exploring somatic movement as a medium to explore spatial and social conflict. Beatrice undertook her BA (Hons) at Dartington College of Arts in Choreography and Visual Arts practices and was then awarded AHRC funding to undertake an MA in Research Architecture at CUCR Goldsmiths. Interdisciplinary practices remain the root of her evolving art practice and consultancy work.
As a dance artist, she works in Romania, Berlin, Germany, and Ireland to generate large-scale and site-specific choreographic works to explore the social power and potential of embodied movement practices. Her socio-choreographic research has been profiled within Pina Bausch Symposium, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, dOCUMENTA (13), The National School of Art Bucharest, Galway Dance Festival, Goldsmiths CUCR Tate, and the American Association of Geographers Annual Meeting 2013. Her commissions include Steven Lawrence Center, Schiume Festival (Venice), and EGFK Berlin. Beatrice has two current projects: Damhsa / rince: moving earth. A PaR project exploring the study of the Gaelic language in applied embodied movement workshops and We move; a collective movement lab to explore the application of democratic choreography. Her most recent commissions have been to make collaborative site- specific choreography for Stanley Picker Gallery as part of Ben Judd’s; The Origin, which examines themes of belonging and identity.
Through her teaching practice both in HE and community practice; Beatrice explores PaR, embodied ecology, choreography as medium for reflective democratic practice and somatics as a communicative tool. ( FHEA 2020)
For more information see https://www.kingston.ac.uk/staff/profile/dr-beatrice-jarvis-463/ http://ulster.academia.edu/beatricejarvis http://beatricejarvis.net/
Ellen Jeffrey is a dance artist and researcher based in Lancashire, UK. She works with time- specific and site-specific choreographic practices that explore the entanglement of human and other-than-human relatedness through movement. She works collaboratively with local artists and communities to generate performances, films, workshops, and writings that explore the capacity of dance and movement to attune to more-than-human timescales. Her most recent works include Underlie (2021, funded by Ensemble Projects), a durational site-specific dance work exploring changes in soil composition; Waders (2021, in collaboration with About Time Dance Company, funded by Deco-Publique) a coastal performance exploring rising tides and wading birds; and On the Traces we Carry (2021, funded by AHRC), a solo performance exploring the place-specific darkening of nightfall. She studied at Trinity Laban Conservatoire and University of the Arts Helsinki, and recently completed her PhD at Lancaster University. Her work has been funded by the AHRC and Heritage Lottery Fund, amongst others, and supported by Cumbria Wildlife Trust, Lancashire Wildlife Trust, and Morecambe Bay Partnership. Alongside her artistic research, Ellen is a qigong practitioner and teacher. http://www.nwcdtp.ac.uk/current-students-2/student-profiles-2/ellen-jeffrey/
Mark Jeffery is a Chicago-based queer performance/installation artist, curator and Associate Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mark co-founded ATOM-r in 2012 a performance/technology group where he is a choreographer and performer in the company. He is the organizer of IN>TIME, a Tri-Annual performance festival hosted by multiple venues in Chicago. Mark was a former member of the internationally renowned Goat Island Performance Group from 1996 – 2009. http://www.markjefferyartist.org/
Dr Petra Johnson is an artist-researcher. She was Lead Artist at the Lijiang Studio Residency Program in the Naxi village Jixiang, Yunnan, China from 2018 – 2020. She has exhibited at the German Pavilion, Shanghai EXPO; Shanghai Biennial and Art Berlin a.o. https://www.theshapeofsound.art
Regina Kadauane graduated in Social Work from Universidade Federal de São Paulo in Brazil, she worked as a social educator at Instituto Camará Calunga in São Vicente, São Paulo – Brazil, promoting territorial care and transformation actions with children, adolescents, young people and communities in peripheral contexts; Master’s student at the Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Program in Health Sciences (Universidade Federal de São Paulo); performer linked to the Interdisciplinary Dance Center of the Body and Art Laboratory (Universidade Federal de São Paulo) and to the Territórios Comuns platform, articulation between the aforementioned Center, the Instituto Procomum de Santos, São Paulo – Brazil and the Meander International Platform (Norway), an international network of artists dedicated to the discussion on sustainability, art, climate crisis and related topics. https://kidauaneregina.tumblr.com/
Hugh Kelly’s work in ‘retirement’ is focused on building resilient communities; locally as Board President and lead organizer of Mesa Harmony Garden, a volunteer-led non-profit maintaining a food forest to supply the local Food Bank; and globally as founder and director of permEzone, a pilot programme developing a permaculture training and support service for communities of smallholder farmers in East Africa. I also volunteer as a Master Gardener with the University of California Cooperative Extension Service.
Before migrating to California from London, my work experience encompassed workshop facilitation, project management, and the design, development and management of IT systems. I directed a small charity supporting people at the end of life, worked for Friends of the Earth, and delivered an innovative service for the HSE advising on workplace health. I contributed ten hikes to the first Time Out Book of Country Walks.
I have an MSc in Development Management from the Open University, am a Chartered IT Professional, and a Certified Permaculture Designer. http://www.permezone.org
Simone Kenyon is a Scottish based trans-disciplinary artist, choreographer, dancer and Feldenkrais practitioner. For over 20 years she has worked across dance and performance that embraces the complex interrelationships of movement, people and place.
Her approach and practice engages with expanded choreographies; encompassing dance, ecologies, cultural geographies and walking arts to create experiences across urban and rural contexts. Working with modes of attention, embodied knowledge and somatic sensitivity to frame audience experiences, is a key aspect within her multi-lensed approach to site-relational performance making. Her acclaimed project Into the Mountain, explored over 6 years the physical, cultural, social and more-than-human entanglements to mountainous environments. With a year- long programme of curated events, workshops and culminating in a place-relational performance experience within the Cairngorms Mountains in North East Scotland in May 2019.
She is currently developing a new body of work exploring dry stone walls as a choreographic, conservation and social practice. She is currently artist in residence with Dance North/AIM in the highlands on a socially engaged project that explores our relationships to mushrooms, our cellular selves, cultivation and collaboration.
She is currently a PhD student at The University of Leeds. Her Practice as Research study critically engages with themes of embodiment, dancing and mountaineering culture across the departments of Performance and Cultural Industries (PCI) and School of Geography. http://www.intothemountain.co.uk http://www.neilandsimone.co.uk
Hilary Kneale is an independent, interdisciplinary artist, somatic practitioner, published writer, educator, guardian of Vision Fast and healer, living within her own quest to remember the true nature of interrelatedness. Her work emerges through body within the natural landscape and includes writing, drawing, performance and ritual, supported by a deep listening amongst the ancient stories held deep within the earth.
With a background in education, fine art and movement, and in particular training over many years to embody and develop practices with support of the work of Helen Poynor www.walkoflife.co.uk and working with Northern Drum Shamanic Centre www.northerndrum.com, Hilary Kneale both inhabits and teaches ways of opening the body, heart, mind and spirit, calling in healing and balancing of human and other realms. Hilary Kneale is based in the UK. http://www.hilarykneale.com
Eleni Kolliopoulou (1980, Athens) is a mixed-media visual/ performance artist and researcher particularly interested in the intersection between performance and philosophy.
She studied at the University Kapodistriaka of Athens in the Department of Methodology, History and Theory of Science (1998 -2003, BA). She moved to Italy in September 2007 to attend the ‘Philip Radice School of Physical Theater’. Between 2008 and 2013 she accomplished her BA and MA degree by the Academy of Fine Arts of Turin; She was in Germany (Hochscuele Burg Gibiechestein Halle an der Saale) as an Erasmus student for the academic year 2011/2012. Eleni was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for her practice-based PhD research at Ulster University (Northern Ireland, UK) in March 2020. Her research concerned the use of Butoh body notion in immersive Performative Installations. Eleni is currently pursuing a post-doctoral research project hosted by Ionian University, Department of Audio-visual arts (GR). She is an adjunct lecturer at Performing and Digital arts University of Peloponnese (Nauplio, GR). http://www.elenivisualart.eu
Dr Paula Kramer is an artist-researcher and movement artist based in Berlin. She completed an artistic PhD in Dance at Coventry University (UK) in 2015, followed by three years as a post- doctoral researcher at the Centre for Artistic Research (CfAR) at Uniarts Helsinki (FI). As a dancer she has worked extensively with Helen Poynor, Bettina Mainz and Suprapto Suryodarmo. Her work explores intermateriality through site-specific movement, dance and choreography. In her working practice she collaborates with materials and organisms of many different orders – as active agents in the making of movement, performance and choreography, and as partners in the creation of daily life and sense-making. She publishes widely in the field of artistic research through bodily practices and is a board member of the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices as well as a founding member of AREAL – Artistic Research Lab Berlin. Her artist book Suomenlinna // Gropius – two Contemplations on Body, Movement and Intermateriality came out in 2021 (Triarchy Press, UK). http://www.paulakramer.de https://www.triarchypress.net/boje.html
Alena Kudera (CZ/UK) is a garment and accessory designer/maker. Creating uniquely expressive pieces.
Instinctively and deliberately going against the grain of quick fix disposable fashion. Drawn to the beauty in the beast and the beast in beauty. Striving for perfection in imperfection. Graduated with First class honours degree in fashion design at John Moores University. Exhibited at London Fashion Week. Selected by Arts Thread to showcase collection inspired by migraine in Paris at Who’s Next Pret-a-Porter trade show where her ‘Migraine’ was sold to Kuwaiti retailer.
Received Top Ten Designer award at China Fashion Week. Currently concentrating on the world of costume and collaboration, as well as a planet and body friendly contemporary ready-to-wear collection. https://www.mpearsonater.com/anthropo-screen-by-products
KUDERA + MPEARSONATER are an ongoing collaboration between garment designer Alena Kudera and dancer and performance maker Mary Pearson (see elsewhere).
We create from an intersection between garment design and movement research. Specifically, garments that give immersive, sensory experiences to dancers who improvise. Particularly, dancers who move from, and are moved by the experience of touch and sensation. https://www.mpearsonater.com/anthropo-screen-by-products
Petra Kuppers (she/her) is a disability culture activist, a writer, and a community performance artist. Petra uses ecosomatics, performance, and speculative writing to engage audiences toward more socially just and enjoyable futures. She is the Anita Gonzalez Collegiate Professor in Performance Studies and Disability Culture at the University of Michigan, and an advisor on the low-residency MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts at Goddard College.
She has been engaged in community dance and disability culture production since the late 80s, and she continues to lead workshops internationally, in these forms as well as in disability- culture. http://www.petrakuppers.com
Anna Kushnerova is a Russian/Belgian Performance & Video Artist, born in 1984, Siberia. based in Dartington, South Devon (UK) .
Her performances are a blend of dance, ceremony, sculpture and sound. The encounter often takes place within the elemental where intimacy, gesture of receptivity, are often explored through the body.
As body based practitioner, Anna gives attention to her kinetic and physical research skills. Developing ways of learning and building inquiry through movement research: a crossover of experiential anatomy, movement training and improvisation. Her costumes and sculptural works are an extension of embodied and fascia-driven research into materiality, multiplicity, emergence and dependent arising. Her practice is developing and confronting notions somaesthetics and its application to art therapy and somatic education.
Within her performance practice Anna seeks a deeper, enchanted experience of being-in the world. Drawing from Butoh methods, Anna often explores ‘becoming’ animal and plant by
leaning into liquid intelligence of the body and its inner multidimensional Dance, accessing its memory of perpetually morphing, evolving and enfolding organisms and the all sentient matter.
Live acts explore play and improvisation and attach a great importance to the instinctual response.
In performances/videos Anna K. often collaborates with sound artists to create a depth of psychosomatic dimension. At times poetry is voiced, at times howls escape. Breath and sounds of rubbing and touching are accentuated to evoke somatic emersion.
Having been trained in ceramics and textile, in her performances, Anna K often incorporates costumes and sculptural works as body augmentations, metamorphic limbs, masks and set like installations.
Surrealistic elements generate tension of otherworldliness.
Her ongoing interest in indigenous rituals, and phenomenological anthropology often lead to encounters with the elemental matrix (earth, water, landscape) where the body can actively participate with the unfolding reality. Body, as complex amplifier of sensation then becomes both a catalyst for change and the dative for movement and meaning. The landscape is often a gateway, an entrance into the perceptual field that encodes knowing. www.annakushnerova.com
Sabine Kussmaul is a visual artist with a background in Fashion Design and Illustration. Her creative practice is based on the experiential dimensions of the drawing process and the human body’s potential to engage with the materialities of artmaking. She has exhibited her work internationally and currently studies on a practice-based PhD route at the University of Chester, researching how embodied drawing and installation practices can negotiate the relationships between self and natural outdoor environments. She teaches drawing in Further Education.
Rita Leduc is an interdisciplinary artist based in New York’s Hudson Valley region. Her work in chosen outdoor locations chronicles an intimate transition from temporal experience to abiding relationship with the living world. Leduc’s work has been shown throughout the greater New York City area and beyond, including recent exhibitions at Mount Saint Mary College (NY), Mohonk Arts (NY), and Terrain Biennial (NY). She has attended several residencies and has received support from NYFA, the Jerome Foundation, Atlas Obscura, Oika, Broto Art-Climate- Science, Wells College, and Rutgers University, among others. Leduc received her MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, Post-Baccalaureate Certificate from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and BA from the University of Pennsylvania. She currently teaches at William Paterson University, Ramapo College, and Rutgers University and is creator and director of GROUNDWORK, an interdisciplinary creative research platform. http://www.oika.com
Laurane Le Goff is an ecologically engaged textile artist and costume maker. She is interested in investigating the other-than-human world and find ways to tell their stories through performance and collaborative works. This interest has led her to interdisciplinary practices that she is currently developing in the MA Art and Science at Central Saint Martins.
Le Goff’s meticulous work in costume making, textile crafts, drawings, and prints, emerge from the observation of natural processes, especially by the comprehension of biology and microbiology. Because of her strong sense of ecological activism, her work is often collaborative and linked to social issues. The participative dance project Dance the Amazon that emerged from her participation in Labverde Residency in the Amazon Rainforest in 2018 has been featured in the Carnival of Crisis: UAL response to the COP 26. Since last year, she is co- curating “Entangled Futures”, a series of lectures and workshops to promote an interdisciplinary and intersectional education on the ecological change. http://lauranelegoff.net
Dancer, choreographer and researcher Dani Lima lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. She was the founder of Intrépida Trupe, a Novo Circo group that she was part of for 13 years. Graduated in Journalism, Master in Theater, and PhD student in Literature, Culture and Contemporaneity, her body training includes classical ballet, contemporary dance, circus arts, theater, performance, contact-improvisation, somatic education, Gyrokinesis®, Body-Mind Centering® . In 1997 he created his company with which he has performed several shows, residencies and workshops in theaters, artistic institutions and festivals throughout Brazil and Europe, such as: Panorama de Dança RJ; Europalia Basil; Kunstencentrum BUDDHA Kortrijk; Kunstenfestivaldesarts Brussels; SESC Dance Biennial/Santos; Theater der Welt – Halle/Germany; Play! Leipzig; Alkantara – Lisbon, Four days in motion – Prague; HAU II – Move Berlin; FIAC Salvador; FIL RJ; SESC National Revolving Stage; Exhibition of Arts SESC SP; Porto Alegre on Stage; London Festival. His most recent works – 100 gestures (2012) and Little Collection of all things (2013), Emoticon (2016) were highlighted by specialized critics among the best of the year. He published the books “Body, politics and discourse in the dance of Lia Rodrigues” (2007) and “Gesto: Practices and Discourses” (2013). She was a Body/Dance teacher at UniverCidade (2001-2009) and since 2016 she has been a teacher at the Performing Arts Course at PUC-RJ. He gives lectures, debates and workshops throughout the country and writes articles for publications specializing in performing arts, dance, body and education. Dani collaborates with artists from different areas and works as a body trainer / choreographer in dozens of plays and TV shows, including the show Amor & Sexo, on TV Globo, from 2012 to 2108.
As an artist and researcher, Dani is especially interested in the forms of expression of a body confronted with itself and with otherness. His research is centered on the processes of production of meaning from the sensations, perceptions and gestures of the body, through an archival poetics and transdisciplinary experiences. http://lattes.cnpq.br/1211639296762258 site: https://www.ciadanilima.com.br/
Emma Linford is an explorer, of ideas and adventures. Seeking more authentic and meaningful interactions than as a Creative in the Design Industry, she took a dramatic swerve away from being part of the capitalist machine to refocus her energy on facilitating transformational change for people and organisations in wilder environments. Continuing her journey to reframe the ego- performance narrative, she is now exploring and cultivating an eco movement practice that brings human and non human together. She is an International Mountain Leader and RGS Fellow.
Nita Little is a dance activist for relational intelligence, a purpose which began with her participation in the emergence and development of Contact Improvisation (CI). Specializing in dance improvisation as a choreographic, performance, and research form, Little shapes dancer’s physical attention in order to investigate the technical and creative potentials of embodiment. As one of the founders of CI (1972), she worked and toured with Steve Paxton. She continues to be significant in its development worldwide. A performer, teacher, choreographer, scholar and theorist, Little is based in Seattle, USA and is invited to teach and lecture on five continents worldwide. With a PhD in Performance Studies, her writing investigates ecological actions of tactile attention and the creative potentials present in entangled relations. In 2016 she initiated a global project, The Institute for the Study of Somatic Communication (ISSC) populated by dance researchers working collaboratively in ensembles together with researchers from a wide variety of science and humanity based disciplines. Their collective purpose is to investigate actions of physical attention, extended cognition, and the concurrence of presence toward developing expertise in non-verbal communication.
Claire Loussouarn is a movement artist, anthropologist, filmmaker and intuitive herbalist. Her movement practice explores screen technology, eco-somatics, the feral body and the more-than- human world, especially plants. Claire has been working in collaboration with filmmaker Dominique Rivoal in Hackney Marshes for the last three years where they meet each month. The project explores embodied filmmaking, awareness, ecological movement, our relationship to the non-human, the feral body and the cycle of life and death. Claire has written an article in the International Journal of Screendance reflecting on embodiment and screen technology called Moving with the screen on Zoom: reconnecting with bodily and environmental awareness and is currently writing a movement book about the feral body. She is co-founder and co-organiser of Kinesthesia, a moving image festival which approaches the moving image from the perspective of the body and its kinesthetic abilities. Claire is co-curator and teacher for Frame: connecting, moving, making online, a series of online classes for Independent Dance. She also practices intuitive herbalism and foraging on a regular basis and creatively combines her herbalist training with her movement art practice in many different ways. She is currently developing a series of drawings inspired by the plants she works with. http://www.claireloussouarn.com
Nina Luostarinen has a background in puppetry and animation. She works at Humak University of Applied Sciences (Finland) in the department of Cultural Management with projects that combine art with different industries. She is also a doctoral candidate at University of Lapland (Finland) at the Faculty of Arts and Design. Both her artistic work and research topic are dealing with adult playfulness, serendipity and place attachment. https://ninaluostarinen.myportfolio.com/me
Becky Lyon is an art-ecologist of mixed English x Jamaican heritage from London. Her work explores how art practice can draw attention to our lively and animate ecology, illuminate the connections and interdependencies between matter and re-enchant our relationships with the living world. She’s interested in what it means for an artist to be a researcher and do the work of ecology. Her work takes multiple forms from spatial objects, ritual, participatory events, material experimentation, scent, digital image-making and words. She has delivered events and walks for London National Park City, London Interdisciplinary School, Phytology, Soil Nexus and the DeGrowth Conference; is a member of the Bioart Coven where she convenes monthly New Moon Gatherings and hosts EARTHSHAPES a series of offerings following the wheel of the year in the British Isles through art-inspired practice. She has an MA Art & Science from Central Saint Martins and is currently studying MA Art & Ecology at Goldsmiths University where she is re- bodying with London’s forest ecologies. https://www.elasticfiction.co/
Hayley Marshall is an ecological Transactional Analysis psychotherapist, trainer, and writer with over 25 years clinical experience, and have worked outside for much of that time. I have written and presented extensively on ecological clinical practice and am director of the Centre for Natural Reflection based in the Peak District, UK where I help western practitioners to re-vision their work through embedding themselves within the natural world.
In the past 15 years I have been instrumental in some pioneering developments in the ecological therapeutic field both in the UK and internationally. Currently, in partnership with educationalist Giles Barrow, I am supporting the development of a new multi-field ecological approach within Transactional Analysis.
Over the past few years, I have also developed a style of writing that I hope will support more productive ecological conversations. This work is based on my original training as a musician, Amerta movement practice, and my love for our more-than-human kin.
My whole approach has arisen from the lands of Derbyshire and reflects the voices of eco-
philosopher David Abram, child developmentalist Daniel Stern, storyteller Martin Shaw, cognitive scientist Wilma Bucci, Amerta movement teacher Sandra Reeve, and writers Richard Powers and Barry Lopez.
www.centrefornaturalreflection.co.uk www.hayleymarshallcounselling.co.uk http://www.centrefornaturalreflection.co.uk
Sophie Mason is a visual artist who makes objects shaped by and from her local landscape. For over a decade her work has explored different approaches to the natural world, and in particular our response to environmental breakdown.
As well as making objects, she co-produces participatory events and projects with landscape architects, academics, musicians, and historians. www.sophiemason.co
Movement artist Jessy Mackay recently completed MA Movement Mind Ecology at Schumacher College, in Dartington, Devon. This exhibition sees early iterations of her emerging ecological movement practice, Draping. This work is tied implicitly to a childhood which unfolded in close relation with land, and now illustrates an expression of love and entanglement with places surrounding her home here in Devon. Her drive is to explore eco centric lenses of art making and movement work, and to question and advocate for the place of the body, and embodied knowledge, in environmental conversations.
Sarah May is an interdisciplinary visual artist with a background in commercial & editorial set design & styling in fashion. She has self-published two photographic books: ‘Cuttings’, in collaboration with photographer Annie Collinge, and ‘Ideas for Other Pictures’, in collaboration with photographer Leandro Farina; both books were launched alongside site specific exhibitions. Sarah is a lecturer & tutor at The London College of Fashion, UAL, teaching on the BA (Hons) Fashion Styling & Production. She is concerned with the intimate relationship of material to the body, and gesture, performance and choreographic instruction as a means of investigating the space/body/object connection. Her current creative endeavours place strong emphasis on movement-led making, landscape and fashion ecology. http://www.sarahmaystudio.com/
Rosalyn Maynard has been teaching and researching through workshop and creative art labs our relationship to self, other, and place through direct experience in the body for over 20 years. Projects have led to collaborations with artists, farmers, teachers, therapists, ponies, sheep, river, moorland, bird, tree & plant. All her work as a facilitator, performance artist, shepherd, and organic Biodynamic grower is informed by a somatics movement education. She is a certified Practitioner and Somatic Movement Education in Body-Mind Centering and founder of SOEL. She has an invisible disability and has dedicated her work to WoK and practice-based inquiry whilst honouring the intellect and the mind. Her most recent research was presented at the French school for BMC: “Are we intelligent enough to know how intelligent animals really are?”. https://www.tsoel.org.uk
Jamie McHugh, MA, RSMT is a somatic movement specialist and an interdisciplinary artist living in the Hudson River Valley. He is the creator of Somatic Expression® – Body Wisdom for Modern Minds, an accessible and inclusive approach to somatic-expressive practices for daily life; and NatureBeingArt, abstract contemplative nature photography and video stream online collections: 7 Days of Beauty Project and The Breathing Room Series. He has studied with various master teachers (artistic, spiritual, and therapeutic) over many years, including Anna Halprin, Emilie Conrad, Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen and Thich Nhat Hanh, with the greatest teacher of body and art being the natural world.
After teaching somatic movement arts internationally in various capacities for diverse audiences for over four decades, McHugh is currently focused on creative relational resources for befriending one’s self – Embodied Mindfulness (Explorations in the Inner Landscape), and for attuning outwardly to the natural environment – Embodying Nature (Explorations in the Outer Landscape).
His teaching is currently offered online for ease, efficiency, accessibility, and economic and ecological equity. http://somaticexpression.com/ http://www.naturebeingart.org/
Rachael Mellors studied Fine Art at Portsmouth and Ceramics at the Royal College of Art. I first exhibited during the 1980/90’s and have work in public collections. I took a break from making when I had children and had a career teaching art in adult education leading the Arts programme in community education Lewisham, in London.
Since 2010 I re-emerged as an artist, having made a radical change in my artistic practice through tending an olive grove in Greece and developing an immersive and embodied relationship with the natural world and developing ecological and sustainable practices.
In 2021 I exhibited in ‘Beuys Future’, Group Global 3000, Gallery for Sustainable Art in Berlin and in ‘Reconnecting’, Bermondsey Project Space, London. In 2020 I exhibited in Photo Fringe OPEN20, Brighton, and a solo exhibition ‘Embodied Earth’ at The Poly, Falmouth.
In 2019 my new work was published in ‘WHAT’s NEXT? Eco Materialism and Contemporary Art’, Intellect Books. Linda Weintraub and in 2017 ‘An exotic Journey into the Commonplace’. Linda Weintraub. Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal, Vol 2 issue 2.
Currently I am working on 2 installations over several years which are time and place specific and embody sustainability and the circular economy process through materiality. The Time and Place installation explores my immersive and embodied relationship with the natural world. Artistic practice is rooted in Earth’s cycles and processes, in synchronicity with the seasons, the rising of the sun and the geological and ecological processes of erosion and regeneration. The elemental forces, expanded awareness and appreciation of the natural world are integral to my creative processes. The Remembrance installation explores my maternal grandmother’s life and my mother’s childhood and generational relationships are echoed through the materiality. The installations unfold over time exploring changing generational relationships and my embodied relationship with the natural world. Intuition, circular economics and sustainability underpin all my work through the underlying principle of recycling, reusing materials. It is raw, spontaneous expression that fires my creative energy. Allowing chance and imagination into my artistic process, the unexpected happens.
I work in collaboration with Pete Hudson who captures a moving image record of the artistic process.
Marie Méténier comes from a background in law and geography. She completed an LLB in French private law and went on to broaden her expertise by gaining two Master’s in environmental law and geography (sustainable environmental management) at the University of Limoges. Her PhD thesis focused on social change in protected areas of England and paved the way for her move from France to England to further her research and academic career. She has collaborated on a range of interdisciplinary research projects (art and environment) and was part of an international research team (iRGENT), funded by ESRC, NSF and ANR, studying international rural gentrification in the UK, USA and France. As a human geographer and environmental lawyer, Marie’s research interests focus on people and their relationships to place across a range of contexts (specifically in protected areas) and the interweaving of social and ecological landscapes.
Including being head of year for a foundation degree, Marie has taught a range of modules at undergraduate and master’s levels (ecology, environmental philosophy, conservation; and a range of qualitative methods). Her teaching explores how places are transformed by contemporary processes of (im)mobilities, entanglements between humans and more-than-humans, as well as understanding how places, nature and societies are (re)shaped. She has a deep interest in transformative learning and how embodied practices can lead to a deeper understanding of our world.
Keith Miller is an archaeologist, landscape historian, artist, musician and Amerta Movement practitioner with a special interest in our relationships with nature, ancestor, story and place. I have worked for many years for English Heritage and other bodies on the investigation, conservation and interpretation of historic sites and landscapes in North and South-West England. My movement research, developed since the 1990s on historic sites in the UK and Indonesia (and described in ‘Excavation without digging’ in Embodied Lives, Triarchy Press), explores movement- archaeology, art and song as ways for investigating and connecting with places and communities past and present, and for fostering empathic ways of being-with and caring for ourselves and the environment.
I am UK co-facilitator of Web Art Garden (www.webartgarden.com) and since 2008 I have been a co-organiser of movement workshops at Avebury stone circle, working with personal and cultural relationships with place, nature and the sacred. https://www.triarchypress.net/keith-miller.html
Judd Morrissey is a writer and code artist who creates poetic systems across a range of platforms incorporating electronic writing, internet art, live performance, and augmented reality. He teaches at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and co-founded the performance collective Anatomical Theatres of Mixed Reality (ATOM-r). https://judisdaid.org/
Paula Murphy has worked as a lecturer in Drama Education at Dublin City University (formerly St. Patrick’s College) for over twenty years. She previously worked as a primary school teacher and as Education Officer for TEAM Educational Theatre Company, Dublin. She is co-author of Discovering Drama: Theory and Practice for the Primary School (Gill & MacMillan, 2006), and was one of the founding members of ADEI (Association for Drama in Education in Ireland). Between 2012 and 2017 Paula embarked on an accreditation in Somatic Movement Education and Therapy (ISMETA) with pioneering dance artist and psychotherapist, Joan Davis. She is currently completing a PhD on the role of embodiment in teacher education at University College Cork.
Lucy Neal is a theatre maker and writer exploring celebratory events that act as catalysts for change: from the gifting of a small seed in a six-minute ritual to the staging of a theatre of fire for 20,000 in a London Park. Co-founder Director of the London International Festival of Theatre (1981-2005), I am active in the grassroots Transition movement in Tooting, South London where I live. My handbook Playing for Time – Making Art As If the World Mattered, (Oberon Books 2015) maps collaborative arts practices emerging in response to planetary challenges. I tutor on The Arvon Writing Course Fierce Words and am a Trustee of the Aluna Foundation. I am author of The Great Imagining – how the arts spark cultural change in Zero Carbon Britain’s Making It Happen, and is a founder ‘declarer’ of Culture Declares, a global movement of artists and cultural organisations declaring a climate and ecological emergency. www.lucyneal.co.uk
Sinéad O’Connor is a lecturer (Open University) and independent researcher in environmental management, sustainable trails (including walking practice) and transdisciplinary methodologies. As a facilitator, she has trained as an artist, Sufi-whirler and Kunda-dancer. Her intervention work creates space for communities to re-imagine and re-engage in sustainable decision-making processes. This ranges from visioning and behavioral change dialogue with UNFCCC staff, environmental designers in Schumacher College and professional Commonwealth Students in Kenya and Uganda, through to serving as national development officer in the launch of the Countryside Recreation Council in Ireland – for sustainable use of the Irish trail landscape, amid a legacy of conflicting land access rights and user responsibilities.
Presently, she is bringing her experience into a specific body-landscape collective experience, as a gardener and accredited facilitator of social and therapeutic horticulture in a Victorian walled garden. Qualifications and relevant training Environmental Management and Sustainable Development. PhD Sustainable Trail Management: A Transdisciplinary Approach, Dublin Institute of Technology, Ireland , BSc Joint Honours in Biology and Geography, University of Bristol, UK, Arts, Dance and Therapy. Qualified in Foundation Studies (Art and Design) with the Interactive Design Institute, UK (Diploma) and as a Personal and Professional Life coach (Coaching Institute of Ireland). Holds somatic experience as a qualified Yoga practitioner (Crown Yoga Ireland), with certified training as a Whirling Dervish (The Study Society, UK) and Kunda dancer (Maya Fiennes), and Site-Specific Dance Performance (with Stephan Koplowitz). Practices authentic movement with Joan Davis, a dance pioneer, choreographer and therapist in Ireland.
As a dance advocate, she has made conference presentations across a range of somatic communities of practice, including the first ever all-island Co-Motion dance conference in Belfast (2020), as well as Dance Ireland residencies on mind-body-landscape trajectories. Her initiation into Laban, came recently, via participation in the Labanarium’ s first ever short course (2019).
Dr Eleni-Ira Panourgia is a Teaching and Research Fellow (ATER) at Gustave Eiffel University (former Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallée). Her work focuses on responsive and interactive intersections of visual-spatial and temporal dimensions and the ways they relate to materials, their processes, and technologies. Dr. Panourgia has a PhD in Art from the University of Edinburgh where she was a Scholar of the Onassis Foundation. She holds an integrated Master’s degree in Sculpture and Visual Arts (2014) from Athens School of Art and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts de Paris, where she also studied as an exchange student (2012-13).
Liz Pavey, dance artist/researcher (improviser, choreographer and teacher), has lectured in performance at Northumbria University since 2004. Her practice research focuses on the relationship of the moving body to its environment interconnected with questions concerning somatic awareness and wellbeing. She enjoys working with Theatre & Performance and Fine Art students from Foundation to Postgraduate levels. Her teaching in movement, contemporary dance, performance and the body is informed by her practice research and her work as a Shiatsu (Japanese bodywork) practitioner. Liz is currently Programme Leader for Drama and Fine Art Foundation Years. She is qualified in business coaching and works as part of the university’s Internal Coaching Network. Liz is a Senior Fellow of the HEA. She is External Examiner for BA Dance Performance & Teaching at UCLan and for MA Dance Performance & Choreography at University of Bedfordshire. She was previously External Examiner for Dance at Chester University and at MMU. Liz is a founding member and coordinator of d.i.n.e. (dance improvisation north east) a collective of professional artists whose innovative creative dance practice is informed by somatic practices and philosophy. Before joining Northumbria University, Liz was Senior Lecturer in Dance at Wolverhampton University. She holds an MA The Body & Representation from Reading University and a BA(Hons) Dance in Society from Surrey University. During her undergraduate studies she spent a year at Ohio State University taking courses in dance, LMA and advanced Labanotation. http://www.northumbria.ac.uk/about-us/our-staff/p/liz-pavey/ http://danceimprovnortheast.wordpress.com/
Kate Paxman is an artist, educator and postgraduate practice researcher in Art & Media at the University of Plymouth. Kate works with film and sound, paying close attention to geologies, entities and systems and building speculative narratives which explore our era of unavoidable climate catastrophe. She has received a number of commissions and awards, most recently from Aeolus Online, BEAST FEaST 2021 and Arts Council England. Her published work is included in ‘The Ecological Citizen’, and THEOREM 2018, Ruskin Arts. Kate is also co-director of More Just, More Sustainable Futures: Artistic Research PhD Symposium; 2021 Theme: Multiple Ecologies/Diverse Ontologies. http://www.katepaxman.net
Mary Pearson (US/UK) is a performance maker and dancer/researcher. Multi-disciplinary practice rooted in improvisation. Shapeshifter moving in altered body states, disguises, and personae. Internationally toured solos FAILURE, The Sand Dog Cometh, and FoMO, mofos! and duet How to Be Afraid? with mayfield brooks. Fascinated by collaboration as a complex and coordinated practice in survival. Loves to design frames as much as their contents. A co-curator and organiser of Con|VERGE, REMIX collaborative performance residencies at Ponderosa Dance (DE), and If only…! performance series at the Bluecoat (UK). Teaching improvisation as a FAILURE Lab. Facilitating release of trauma held in the body and nervous system (Somatic Experiencing®). Bringing this into action via performance research on collectively embodied trauma. https://www.mpearsonater.com/anthropo-screen-by-products
Louisa Petts is a postgraduate researcher studying a PhD in dance and health and wellbeing at the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University. She is the recipient of the Arts and Humanities Research Council studentship award offered by Midlands4Cities Doctoral Training Partnership. https://www.theshapeofsound.art
Clare Plumley (she/her) is a neurodivergent participatory artist who brings forth her particular flavour of sensory experience to both her art practice and work as an arts for health professional. Because she can’t help it. ttps://www.instagram.com/touchhunger
Marko Pogačnik
Marko Pogačnik (1944) UNESCO Artist for Peace lives with his wife and collaborator Marika in Šempas, Slovenia. During the years 1965-71 he worked in Conceptual Art and Land Art as member of OHO group. After 1971 he works in the field of art combined with integral ecology (geomancy). He has developed a method of Earth healing called “lithopuncture” with stones standing on specific points and complemented with carved cosmograms. He developed “Gaia Touch” body exercises to tune to the essence of the Earth. In 2006 he started the world-wide project of Geopuncture Circles. His books among other: Gaia’s Quantum Leap, Universe of the Human Body, Christ Power and the Earth Wisdom, Dancing with the Earth Changes, Creating Gaia Culture.
www.markopogacnik.com
Elaine Quinn was admitted as a solicitor in the Republic of Ireland in 2007, as an attorney-at- law in California in 2008, and to the Law Society of England and Wales in 2015. After practising law, mainly in the field of litigation and dispute resolution, she felt drawn to explore how the practice of meditation and mindfulness could be integrated into law practice and legal education. In 2015, she qualified as a meditation teacher in the UK, and in 2016 started The Conscious Lawyer online magazine. https://natures-rights.org https://www.theconsciouslawyer.co.uk/rights-for-nature-why-do-we-need-them
Peter Reason is a writer who aims to link the tradition of nature writing with the ecological crisis of our times. He is currently engaged in a series of experiential and co-operative inquiries exploring living cosmos panpsychism: What would it be like to live in a world of sentient beings rather than inert objects? How would we relate to such a world? His most recent publications are (with Jacqueline Kurio) Voicing Rivers Through Ontopoetics (2022); and (with artist Sarah Gillespie) On Sentience: Essays | Drawings (2021), and On Presence: Essays | Drawings (2019) in which words and images offer complementary reflections on the living presence of the world. His two books, Spindrift: A wilderness pilgrimage at sea (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2014) and In Search of Grace: An ecological pilgrimage (Earth Books 2017) weave explorations of the human place in the ecology of the planet into the stories of sailing voyages. He has contributed to Resurgence & Ecologist, EarthLines, GreenSpirit, Zoomorphic, LossLit, The Island Review, and The Clearing. Prior to retirement from academia, Peter contributed to the theory and practice of action research in writing, teaching and research. Professor Emeritus at the University of Bath, his on-line presence is through https://peterreason.net/ and on Twitter @peterreason. http://peterreason.net
Dr. Sandra Reeve is an Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter, UK, where she completed her doctoral thesis on the Ecological Body in 2009. ‘Move into Life’ is her cyclical programme of autobiographical and environmental movement workshops in West Dorset. Her movement research is influenced by walking, climate change and the ecological emergency, Buddhism, gardening and performance. She both facilitates and creates small-scale ecological events, as well as mentoring individual movement-based creative projects. www.moveintolife.com
Meredith Root-Bernstein is an ethnobiologist, translational ecologist and conservationist, with an interest in degradation and restoration ecology, ethnography of human-environment relationships, governance and policy. Her research focuses on anthropogenic and marginal habitats, mediterranean-climate and semi-arid areas. She is the co-founder of the Chilean rewilding NGO Kintu which works to reestablish a connected socio-ecological system through reintroducing guanacos and other species in central Chile. In addition she has a diploma in experimentation and research in art from ENDA, and teaches embodied cognition for the Thinking About Thinking diploma at the Free University of Brussels, and nonhuman design for the GEO-Design masters course at Eindhoven Design Academy. https://tsoeg.org/associates/meredith-root-bernstein/
Yzabelaah Samahra-Rose is a Mother, a Performance Artist, Writer, Bodywork Practitioner and a Facilitator of women’s transformational space. She sings and drums with the ancient call of the Earth, awakening and stirring the memory of our ancient, wild roots. Bringing the depth of her journey as a woman, alongside a wealth of experience and knowledge in somatic movement, bodywork and creativity, she is passionate about the intelligence of the moving body through performance practice to speak deeply to women of their own lived experience.
Yzabelaah studied Choreography with Community Practices at Dartington College of Arts, has a wealth of trainings in creativity, women’s journey work, facilitation and bodywork and more recently completed her certificate in Holistic Anatomy (Levels 1 & 2) with The School of Experiential Learning (Soel). She serve’s reconnection to self, other and Earth so that we can listen and bring through our gifts at this crucial time for life on Earth. http://www.ancientfuturedreaming.co.uk
Cherie Sampson has worked for thirty years as an interdisciplinary artist in environmental performance, sculpture and video art. She has exhibited internationally in art-in-nature symposia, video/film screenings and exhibitions in the U.S., Chile, France,Finland,Germany,India,Mexico,Spain,SouthKorea,theUKandothercountries. Hersoloperformancesinthe environment have taken place in the U.S., Finland, Norway, Cuba, Spain, Netherlands (in a performance attended by the Dutch Queen) and South Korea. In 2018, the Pori Museum of Art in Finland acquired photographic and video documentationofhersite- basedinstallationsandperformancesfortheirpermanentcollection. Sampson’scurrent performance work depicts an experience with hereditary breast cancer exploring topics of science, genetics and integrative healing from a patient’s perspective of modern medicine. Sampson is the recipient of many grants including two Fulbright Fellowships, a Finnish Cultural Foundation Grant and multiple university research grants. She is a Professor in the School of Visual Studies at the University of Missouri, USA, dividing her time between her academic and artistic life and the organic farm where she lives – a site for many of her works. She received her MFA degree in Intermedia & Video Art from the University of Iowa in 1997.
Dr Lisa Sandlos is on faculty at York University in Toronto, Canada where she earned a PhD in Gender, Feminist and Women’s Studies and an MA in Dance. Sandlos’ doctoral research focused on sexualization in competitive dance and its effects on young dancers and public perceptions of dance. A keen interdisciplinary collaborator, Sandlos has worked on dozens of community projects with actors, musicians, puppeteers, and visual artists and she is co-founder with landscape architect Rennie Tang of a research/teaching group called Soma-City. As a dance artist, choreographer, Certified Movement Analyst (CMA) through the Laban Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS) and Bartenieff Fundamentals practitioner, Sandlos has worked through organizations including the National Ballet of Canada, the Ontario Arts Council, Global Water Dances, and the Royal Conservatory of Music, sharing her expertise in contemporary dance, somatics, and improvisation with all ages/levels for over three decades. https://1drv.ms/u/s!AhPKyJn-TJGruB2RYvAYqAnwoh55
Julia Schauerman is an electroacoustic composer, saxophonist, improviser and community musician. She recently graduated with distinction from an MA Composition (electroacoustics) at The University of Sheffield. Since early 2020, Schauerman has been engaged with field recording which has led to an interest in acoustic ecology, soundscape composition and ecological sound art. Her work has been presented internationally, including at Encuentro Internacional de Ecología Acústica México and at Sørlandets Kunstmuseum Norway.
Julia Schauerman and Joanna Dobson have been collaborating creatively and academically for two years and their work has so far included several compositions as well as conference presentations, contributions to radio programmes, a blog, and an ongoing, ecologically focused creative practice. https://acousticallotment.wordpress.com/
Lars Schmidt is a multidisciplinary artist, natural thinker, facilitator/curator.
His work explores a wide range of cultural and spiritual matters, often opening inter- and transdisciplinary spaces, in order to support the emergence of a new narrative.
He also creates gardens.
Formative years in New York City and Berlin.
Background and studies in music and the performing arts, somatics, photography and film, anthropology and ecology.
Later life and work on organic farms in France and Italy, and studies of applied ecological design (Diploma of Applied Permaculture Design).
Regular periods of retreated life in mountain regions of France and Norway.
Besides exploring the creative process in various artforms, he has curated interdisciplinary projects linking the arts and improvisation with ecological and spiritual understanding, and has facilitated workshops in the US, Latin America and Europe. https://www.larsschmidt.org
SCOBY is artist duo Audree Barvé (she/they) and Rachel Elizabeth Coleman (she/her). We are dancers, choreographers and free movers, our work dissolving into the thresholds between these forms. Working collaboratively at the various intersections of our interests, we make with a focus on the body as we consider ecologies, materials, and the need for planetary healing.
Audree is infatuated with everything wet. She uses water in its various states as physical and emotional material that connects with the body. When making, she aims to heal her inner ecosystem with the hopes of affecting the outer. She is currently studying a Masters in Dance Movement Psychotherapy.
Rachel’s passion is sinking into landscape. She uses her practice to think playfully and critically about the body, about place, and about the future. She likes to dance in the in-betweens of forms and fields, finding places to grow in otherwise overlooked places. She is currently studying a Masters in Movement, Mind and Ecology.
SCOBY have performed at Calm Down Dear Festival at Camden People’s Theatre and at Platform Southwark. They also produce ASSTROLOGY: The Amateur Astrologer’s Podcast. https://www.instagram.com/p/B8eCmG_nj2PqIdp7XWliBEerKfLYVUZyZoBsA80/
Dr Luciane Ramos Silva is an anthropologist, performing artist and independent curator.
She is a co-editor of O Menelick2Ato an independent platform/printed magazine focused on the art of black diaspora. She holds an MA in Social Anthropology and a doctorate in Performing Arts, both from University of Campinas, where she is currently a visiting professor at the Arts Institute. Dr Ramos Silva is also a project manager at Acervo África, a research center focused on African culture.
Doutora em Artes da Cena – Unicamp – http://www.unicamp.br/unicamp/
Conselho editorial http://omenelick2ato.com/
Antropóloga http://acervoafrica.org.br/
Lattes:http://lattes.cnpq.br/3534330448982587
Sarah Scaife (she/her) is an artist-scholar who tunes in to the overlaps between being-in-a-body, listening and mutual space. Sarah is one year into a practice-based PhD enquiry in the Department of Drama at the University of Exeter together with the University of Bristol. Her research is AHRC funded by the South, West & Wales Doctoral Training Partnership. https://thepolyphony.org/2021/10/29/fluxambol-prototyping-a-medicine-of-uncertainty/ https://cargocollective.com/berrybrowngown/Medicines-of-Uncertainty-slow-radio-for-wellbeing https://soundcloud.com/sarahscaifeart
Dr Matt Smith currently works as Senior Lecturer in Applied Theatre at The University of Portsmouth, UK. Matt’s work is always eclectic, working across disciplines such as drama, puppetry, masks, and music.
Since 1993 he worked as a workshop leader delivering puppet workshops in the community in a variety of settings with diverse groups including schools, youth groups, children in care, special needs groups, prisons, hospitals, with environmental agencies, and with the homeless. Through this practice, he adopted a relational non-therapeutic approach to workshops in which sensitive respect for the individual’s autonomy was tantamount.
As part of his scholarship Matt has produced articles about applied puppetry and looked at the problems of puppetry in community settings and its limitations, for example in the article Puppetry as Community Arts Practice (2009). A few years after this article he wrote a short polemical paper The Politics of Applied Puppetry (2012) in which he suggested that the radical potential of applied puppetry was found in the workshop as opposed to the performance. In one of his latest articles The Practice of Applied Puppetry: Antecedents and Tropes (2015) he describes three problematic antecedent tropes of applied puppetry as puppetry as a ‘straitjacket’ in the way it can promote docility in groups, secondly a ‘weapon’ used to impart ideology and thirdly delivered through the role of the ‘missionary’ as puppeteer. Avoiding these negative tropes he presents as one of the aims of applied puppetry. Matt is concerned with how a critical view of applied puppetry and ecology could explore power, both in the puppets themselves and in the networks of participatory practices. This scholarship will be in his monograph in 2023 Applied Puppetry: The Theory and Practice of Puppet Ecologies.
Tyler Freeman Smith is an Australian documentary filmmaker currently finishing his MA in Engaged Ecology at Schumacher College. His research interests include: invasive species and queer phenomenology; walking art practices, trespass and political ecology; and the intersection of urban wildlife, disgust and ‘nature connection’. http://www.tylerfreemansmith.com
Marta Soares is a dancer and choreographer. Completed the One Year Course at the Laban Center for Movement and Dance in London. In New York, he completed a Bachelor of Arts (BA) at Empire State College at State University of New York (SUNY), a Certificate in Laban Movement Analysis (CMA) at the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies (LIMS), studied and worked with director and playwright Lee Nagrin (founder of the group “The House” directed by Meredith Monk and winner of the OBIE Award in dramaturgy) and at Movement Research , Susan Klein , Alwin Nickolais schools, among others. He has presented his work in show cases in several downtown New York theaters, including: PS 122, DIA Arts Foundation and The Knitting Factory. He received the Japan Foundation Artist Scholarship through which he studied Butoh dance with Kazuo Ohno in Tokyo.
His works have been presented at several national and international festivals, including: International Dance Forum in Belo Horizonte (FID), Panorama Rio Arte de Dança Festival, Porto Alegre Em Cena Festival, Recife International Dance Festival, Bienal Ceará International Dance Festival and Joinville Dance Festival. Festival Temps d’Images at CentQuatre in Paris, France, Festival Queer Zagreb in Zagreb, Croatia, Festival Europalia at The Single in Antwerp, Belgium and Festival In Transit at Haus der Culturen der Welt in Berlin, Germany.
She holds a master’s degree in Communication and Semiotics and a PhD in Clinical Psychology/Arts (Nucleus of Subjectivity) from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, where she also taught at the Faculty of Arts of the Body between 1999 and 2012. https://mitsp.org/2019/entrevista-com-marta-soares/
Mita Solanky(aka Saintly Amok) is a UK based artist whose art seeks to reconnect the human experience with nature. Her work encompasses live performance, installation, participatory and visual art. Mita undertakes artist residences in rural locations that allow her to experience the natural environment to direct her practice. Her work has an ongoing concern around the loss of knowledge that the body acquires by being in nature and using natural materials and processes. Her artworks range from those created through a recording of the body, to live performance and participatory installations. Her influence comes from ancient traditional and aboriginal nature- based practices and are critical of the contemporary synthetic environments of the contemporary human condition. She has a personal yoga and meditation practice that informs her performative works. Mita is based at the Leicester Print Workshop, Leicestershire where she lives and works, She studied Art foundation at City Lit, UAL, and has a previous background in Physics, having carried out research at CERN’s LHC. She was recently selected for the Flourish printmaking award 2022, and has exhibited work across the UK, including in galleries, museums and festivals.
Sophie Strand is a writer based in the Hudson Valley who focuses on the intersection of spirituality, storytelling, and ecology. But it would probably be more authentic to call her a neo- troubadour animist with a propensity to spin yarns that inevitably turn into love stories. Give her a salamander and a stone and she’ll write you a love story. Her first book of essays The Flowering Wand: Rewilding the Sacred Masculine is forthcoming in Fall 2022 from Inner Traditions. Her eco- feminist historical fiction reimagining of the gospels The Madonna Secret will also be published by Inner Traditions in Spring 2023. Follow her work on Instagram: @cosmogyny and at www.sophiestrand.com
Grace Surman is an artist who dallies around the terms performance (art), live art, theatre and choreography. She works with the theatrics of performance in the context of visual art. Materials, objects and ideas are mined fervently; they run through the body of her work. Surman is interested in how we live and experience the world through constraints and conditions around us – be it work, gender or age. The drive of the work is to explore and excavate these conditions, drawing on theatrical devices, process-based performance actions, feminist theories and contemporary culture.
Since graduating with a degree in Visual Performance and Theatre from Dartington College of Arts, one of the only specialised courses in the UK, she has shown nationally and internationally, solo and collaborative work in performance, installation and video.
Past work has been commissioned by and seen at ICA London, CCA Glasgow, Bluecoat Arts Gallery, Tramway, National Review of Live Art, British Dance Edition, Chisenhale Dance, Hull Time Based Arts, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki, Halles de Schaerbeek, Brussels and more recently at Bradford Theatre in the Mill, Chelsea Theatre, Compass Live Art Festival and Juncture Festival, Leeds. Surman lectured on the Contemporary Performance Practice programme at the Royal Scottish Conservatoire until 2007 and was Associate Curator for performance at CCA Glasgow.
Dr Rachel Sweeney is a practicing movement artist whose research actively seeks our transdisciplinary approaches to decolonizing body-place relationships, engaging creatively and imaginatively with cultural heritage and sustainability discourses. Rachel is a graduate of the BA Theatre Degree at Dartington College of Arts and holds an AHRC funded PhD from Middlesex University exploring site based approaches to movement training.
Rachel has worked as Head of Dance Studies at Liverpool Hope University (2010-2021), as a Visiting Fellow for the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University, and as Centre Fellow for the Centre for Sustainable Futures at the University of Plymouth. She is a current member of the European experimental heritage project Karum Creevagh and her research has been supported internationally through the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, Creative Ireland and CSIRO Australia, and locally through Dartmoor National Park Authorities, Teignmouth County Council and Dance in Devon.
Lizzie Sykes is a screen artist, participatory filmmaker, senior lecturer and researcher. My own projects combine dance and the moving image, with a focus on site, and how, through devising in location, somatic- digital approaches reveal themselves, in particular, a sense of temporality that’s distinctive to that site. I’m interested in how a location born sense of time passing shapes the work and how that sense of time extends into choreography and installation. For me, site is not simply a backdrop but something far more pivotal: it is both driver and anchor.
Rennie Tang is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at California State Polytechnic State University Pomona where she coordinates and teaches the Design Foundations curriculum. Her research interests include intergenerational landscapes, kinesthetic engagement and sensory-driven design. Tang’s projects are often fueled by transdisciplinary collaborations with visual artists, choreographers, sound artists and healthcare researchers. Her work draws from her background in architecture, urban design, landscape architecture and dance. She holds a Master of Science in Architecture and Urban Design from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from McGill University.
Foluke Taylor *therapist / writer
*therapist; where the asterisk (following the work of Christina Sharpe In The Wake (2016)) functions before the word as both wildcard and placeholder
the *therapist is interested in therapeutic practices that hold open space for thinking from and into the position of blackness, which has predominantly in the development of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, occupied the position of the unthought
the *therapist practices without a prefix to signal both the excess and a black feminist mode that holds open a space for the emergence of the yet-to-be
the *therapist’s mission is the development of therapeutics that are unruly and capacious enough for uncertainty (not-knowing being a necessary ingredient for the imagining, and ushering in, of the possibility of other ways of being)
the *therapist acknowledges therapeutic relationships as sites of sacred exchange and ancestral commune/ity
the *therapist works a Creatique (critical creative writing as a practice of therapeutic enquiry) with poetics as connection ground linking material and ethereal (seen and unseen) worlds
the *therapist holds BACP accreditation (since 2001), registration with Social Work England, an MSc from the Metanoia Institute, among other qualifying characteristics
the *therapist’s ‘UNRULY THERAPEUTIC; BLACK FEMINIST WRITINGS & PRACTICES IN LIVING ROOM’ will be published by W.W. Norton in January 2023. In the meantime, a memoir/bio-mythography ‘HOW THE HIDING SEEK’ is available to buy online – click on the image below
Lisa May Thomas is a Studio Wayne McGregor QuestLab Network Artist, and Pervasive Media Studio Resident. Her research is focused on exploring how digital technologies mediate interactions between human and non-human bodies and environments, and the ways in which digital tools (e.g. VR) can be used to develop performance experiences which challenge expectations and habituations of technology and the body. She brings a social and sensory understanding to researching the body and its technological re-mediation and use somatic-dance research methods to qualitatively describe and explore the complex relationships between the body, technology, environment, and society. Lisa is a lead-artistic researcher for UCL & Studio Wayne McGregor project ‘Unlocking Touch’ (2022) which uses binaural sound technology to interrogate the relationship between touch and sound. She also leads The Soma Project which includes online programme In-Body, sound and avatar development in VR, and live performances at Bloomsbury Theatre (2022). Lisa was awarded her doctorate in 2021. Her thesis developed a series of artistic-research installations and workshops to explore the complexity of virtual bodies and environments using a multi-person VR framework. She has presented her work at numerous academic events, most recently a Panel on children, VR & embodiment for ‘Bodies, Movement and AI in VR’ at Goldsmiths University (2021), and for C-Dare’s ‘Somatic Practices and Chronic Pain’ research network at Coventry University (2020). https://soma-project.co.uk
Scott Thurston has published sixteen books and chapbooks of poetry, most recently Phrases towards a Kinepoetics (Contraband, 2020). He is co-editor of the Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and Reader in English and Creative Writing at the University of Salford. Since 2004, he has been developing a poetics integrating dance and poetry which has seen him studying and collaborating with dancers in the UK and internationally.
Verena van den Berg has a BA in choreography (Dartington College of Arts) and an MA in fine art (Lincoln University). As an activity leader and community art practitioner she has worked with people of all ages. Her work explores how feeling kinship with non human species can emerge, be experienced and deepened. She currently works in nature education. http://www.verenauvori.com
Pete Ward is an interdisciplinary artist based in Southwest England. Since 2008 his environmentally focused practice and research have focused almost exclusively around the geology, history and creative applications of earth pigments gathered and processed by hand in Devon and Cornwall. He was a major contributor to Soil Culture (CCANW 2013-16) and lead researcher for The Story of Bideford Black with the Burton Art Gallery & Museum (2013). Pete’s work has made a major contribution to the revival of earth pigment painting in the UK, his research being shared through workshops, paintings and presentations with people of all ages, interests and abilities and included in international publications and exhibitions. He is presently in collaboration with the Exeter University Politics Department at the Environment and Sustainability Institute exploring the potential of ecological art and materials within local political process. Pete’s work hopefully investigates and reveals ideas of indigenous identity through the use of local materials within the contemporary context. He received an MA (Art & Environment) at Falmouth University in 2012. www.peterward-artist-illustrator.co.uk Instagram: @peteward.artist
Carran Waterfield is aTheatre and Performance Maker, Facilitator, Teacher,
Experienced practitioner with a body of international professional work spanning over thirty years. Founded independent touring company Triangle Theatre UK (est. Coventry 1988) Award- winning performance and education work, documented in several international journals and national newspapers with chapters in several books authored by international academics. Published writer of poetry, augmented play scripts, creative writing and a children’s chapter book. Elected Labour Councillor for Sefton Metropolitan Borough Council (2019-).
Key Projects:
• Follow the Stone, Just Walk, Disrupted Meadow (trilogy) (2019-) Move into Life, University of Salford.
• Birnam Wood (2010-2018) RSC (Stratford), Melton College, University of Salford, University of Manchester, Arts Council England.
• Beautiful End (Artist’s Residency) (2014-2017) Heron Corn Mill, Cumbria.
• The House (2014-2017) AHRC, University of Manchester, University of Salford, Heron Mill, Cumbria.
• Little Blue Man (2011-2015) Arts Council England, Move into Life Collaboration.
• National Trust Projects (2007-2009) Charlecote Park and West Midlands
• The Last Women (2006-2009) Wellcome Trust, Belgrade Theatre, Herbert Museum Coventry, Centre for the History of Medicine, University of Warwick, Arts Council England
• The Pollard Trail (2006) AHRC, Leverhulme Trust, Arts Council England, Herbert Museum Coventry
• Whissell and Williams (2001-2005) Heritage Lottery Fund, Renaissance in the Regions West Midlands, Herbert Museum Coventry, Screen West Midlands, Arts Council England. UK, Australia.
• Nina and Frederick (1998-2005) Arts Council England. UK, France, Japan, Denmark
• The Solo Works (1989-1996) Arts Council England, Coventry City Council, Warwickshire County Council
Co-curators Emma Welton and Tony Whitehead were drawn together by their shared love of quiet listening both within and outside concert halls. We conceived A QUIET NIGHT IN in 2014 to perform concerts of quiet contemporary music otherwise neither performed nor widely-known in Devon. An antidote to musical performances in noisy bars and club-type settings, A QUIET NIGHT IN provides a context for the exploration of the creative possibilities in quiet/silence.
We consider carefully the quality of our listening experiences.
We use different venues across Exeter and beyond and curate the programmes to best fit the space. We allow each venue its own moment of quiet, partly to help our audience settle into a state of attentiveness, but also because each venue has its own audible character and this is worth hearing.
We strike a balance between some of the more challenging quiet music of, for example, James Saunders and Wandelweiser composers, and the calm directness of, for example, Howard Skempton.
We are also interested in music that contains a certain attitude toward discovering, revealing and permitting sounds such as Joanna Bailie’s Artificial Environments – with its recordings of everyday sounds combined with live instruments – and Alvin Lucier’s exploration of the acoustic properties of objects, rooms and materials.
We invite people to compose new quiet pieces for our concerts. Programmes have included playfulness and humour alongside intense introspection. Performers number between three and ten per concert. https://quietnightsin.wordpress.com
Lin Westmoreland is a somatic-based dance and movement practitioner who has been dancing and moving, using an improvisational, somatic approach, since 1989. I have worked with many teachers and practitioners since then, most extensively with Sandra Reeve. I currently have a private practice as a somatic movement educator and therapist. I completed the MA in Dance and Somatic Wellbeing at the University of Central Lancashire in 2019 and I recently started a PhD with the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, investigating how somatic dance and movement practice could transform experiences of fear. This area of research was informed by my work for many years as a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist and particularly working with clients with fear-based disorders. In my own personal practice, I always work outdoors in nature, and it is this coupled with my interest in experiences of anxiety and fear, particularly fear of death, and a training in naturopathic and nutritional therapy in 2007, that forms the basis of my fascination with, and recognition of the importance of, the topic of this presentation.
Miranda Whall has lived and worked and works in Aberystwyth, Wales, UK since 2006.
She is an artist, degree scheme leader in Creative Arts and full – time lecturer at Aberystwyth University. She is currently writing a new MA course in Art, Landscape & Ecology. Her practice interests include other species, living landscapes and ecologies, exploring the relationship between human and non-human through interdisciplinary practices such as performance, film, gentle activism and installation. Miranda studied her undergraduate in fine art at UWIC, Cardiff and the Emily Carr School, Vancouver, Canada, her postgraduate in sculpture at The Royal Academy Schools, London, and was an associate student at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Most recently Whall has been included in a forthcoming publication becoming – Feral by Object – a, member of the Visualising Landscape Futures: Art-Science Collaborations in an Era of Change, Festival of Research (FoR) Aberystwyth University, a presenter in the Climate Action Berwick’s Elemental environmental festival 2021, included in the official selection in the 2021 Adventure Uncovered Film Festival, presenter in the Ecoart, Artists working with Trees 2021 event and this coming weekend Whall will be performing and presenting in the UK Universities Network, COP26 performance and exhibition 2021. She has exhibited internationally since 1997. She was recipient of an Arts Council Wales Major Creative Wales Award in 2012 and an Arts Council Wales Large Production Grant in 2017/18. Whall had a solo show Crossed Paths – Sheep in Oriel Davies Newtown, Wales in 2018, a solo show Passage in Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Art, Bath in 2015. Whall has undergone 18 international residencies, has been the recipient of numerous Arts Council England grants and has curated and organised a multitude of artists and student exhibitions. She has commissioned artists, musicians, writers, poets, actors, photographers, filmmakers and dancers to collaborate in her projects and also makes a wide range of work with no budget and small to no audiences in order to develop her deeply engaged embodied practice. http://www.mirandawhall.space
Simon Whitehead is a movement artist and craniosacral therapist living in rural west Wales. Simon has hosted the Locator series for 28 years, an ongoing experimental workshop researching ecological ideas through movement practice, situated in Tycanol, an ancient sessile oak woodland in west Wales. He is a member of Maynard, an interdisciplinary artist collective that collaborate on a programme of engaged dance activity in the village of Abercych, working through on-going residencies, the village dance, workshops, local and international partnerships. As part of an AHRC-funded PhD(PaR) based at the University of Glasgow, he is currently exploring what posthuman ecology means with reference to an expanded choreography of touch and will make a book detailing this practice in 2022. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19443927.2021.1915623
Dr Karen Wood is a dance practitioner/ researcher/ educator. She works at the Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University, as Assistant Professor and Associate Director of Birmingham Dance Network. https://www.theshapeofsound.art
Nikki Wyrd has no text available as yet
Sobia Zaidi is a performance artist, playwright and theater maker. She explores spatiality in relation to her own body. Her research and practice deals with poetics and politics of the body in space, temporal geographies, homes and addresses. She received her Masters in Performance Art and artistic research from Utrecht School of the Arts, Netherlands and is presently teaching at Forman Christian College, Lahore.
https://zaidisobia.wixsite.com/artist
Crystal Zillwood’s passions are creating work in a collaborative nature as well as expanding her understanding and practice of the body on deeper level. Crystal is inspired by all things interconnected and interbeing and is inspired to create work that reflect these themes. Crystal passionate about facilitating in variety of spaces and communities to support the collective healing using movement a way to connect and heal. “Crystal Zillwood conjures worlds out of thin air” The Times Crystal has been making her own work since 2014 and touring internationally with her triple bill solos Spirals and has been supported by Dance City, Yorkshire Dance ,Activate Arts and Pavilion dance southwest and Carn to Cove Rural Touring. Crystal had a tour of Spirals and has received support from Arts Council England, Spin Arts Production, Pavilion Dance , Kalam Sangham, Dance studio Leeds and has performed her work at Bristol Old Vic, The Lowry, Rise Festival in Findhorn, Sadlers Wells,The Riley Theatre in Leeds and Agitart Dance Festival in Figueres in Spain. Crystal has also been developing her teaching practice and leading dance workshops at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance ,The Place in London and Galway Dance in Ireland and also expanding her practice in Somatic Movement practices which lead and inspire the way crystal facilitates her classes and collaborations.