Description
Facilitators: Mia DiChiaro BA, MA, Euphorbia Hyberna (Irish Spurge)*, Katherine Hall BA,MA, Dr. Sinéad O’Connor PhD, FHEA
With plants as our primary companions and allies, in this corner of the plant playground we offer a time to reground with plants in an open space where care, love, and play are the pre-amble plains. Alongside plant co-presenters, Sinead, Katherine and Mia share dormant earth play-lines in an hour of eco-body-activities and interdependent movements, that dynamically explore the promise of reconciliative edges for human-plant intra-action. I
n the workshop we will journey towards co-building an interconnecting installation.
By inviting space for plant being and thinking, we hope to challenge relational hierarchies that continue to permeate, and center plant and body-led garden approaches, as we rekindle our connection with nature.
The plant playgrounds aim to challenge conventions of creativity in the arts and academics as well as binaries of indoor and outdoor, serious and fun, basic and complex.
*Coupled with Euphorbia hyberna as pan-seasonal collaborator
**There are unnamable plant co-presenters who will naturally share interests at the point of summer play.
About the artists
Mia DiChiaro is a Dublin-based contemporary dancer, teacher, and artivist whose ideas often circulate around participatory art and climate justice. Currently delivers dance projects that encourage community exploration, imagination and empathy through dance. In 2022 she choreographed ‘Dance Til Dán’, an intergenerational dance and poetry project at Fatima Groups United commissioned by St. Patrick’s Day Festival/TikTok. Since 2019 she has collaborated with Dr. Sinéad O’Connor and Katherine Hall on embodied eco-dance research with Dance Ireland and Irish Arts Council support.
Katherine Hall – Katherine is a dancer, choreographer and independent producer based in Bristol, curious with the material of the body, touch, attention, gesture, care, presence, imagination, the action of hope, growing food, and community building. They create choreographic works that attend to and celebrate the movements and relations between non- human beings, people, and things. They performatively collaborate with various artists and recently with Jo Fong, Linzy Na Nakorn, Jo Bannon and Rosemary Lee. They are co-leading GATHER UP, an artist-led programme for dancers and are a member of INTERVAL, an artist-led support network. Katherine lives as a Community Builder Volunteer at Hope Rise, an eco-social housing project in Bristol.
Dr Sinéad O’Connor (FHEA) is Head of Horticulture, Sustainability Services and a Gardens Manager in a public walled garden in Ireland, providing horticultural and equestrian services to people experiencing difficulties in Life, to reach their potential. Lectures, consults and researches worldwide with spheres of dance and walking landscapes, environmental management, social and therapeutic horticulture and nature access.