Description
This remote audio guided workshop invites you on an outdoor immersive, physical and poetic journey with a tree and with branching worlds. Downloadable audio tracks, movement explorations and embodied imagery will guide you to move, connect and explore with a tree, on the Dartington Estate. Beginning indoors with a video introduction and warmup to tune into different species of branching that are present in ourselves and in natural environments; four audio tracks will then guide you on a walk to meet and move with a tree. Branches are one of the various evolutionary pathways that we share with other creatures and systems. Branching systems are present throughout different organisms, through biological and geological evolution. By attuning to our own branching systems we will explore the possibility of entering into a relational engagement with other branching worlds, noticing what this dialogue might reveal to us about our belonging, our connectivity with the Earth, with other species, and in particular with trees. The workshop offers a somatic lens and entry point towards your own wider ecological investigations, creative and healing practices. Please download and/or access the audio tracks on your device prior to the event and bring your own headphones.
About Vanessa
Vanessa 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, engaging with public spaces and bringing communities together. Her work focuses on site-responsive, ecological, improvisational, participatory, and cross-disciplinary approaches, with an interest in how we inhabit places and coexist with others, acknowledging our relational and entangled nature with environments, and with human and non-human communities. Vanessa’s outdoor works have been commissioned by festivals and institutions including Yorkshire Dance, Dance 4, The Great Exhibition of The North, Dance City and Badischer Kunstverein, amongst others. Her work has toured across the UK, Europe and East Asia and been presented amongst others at outdoor arts festivals such as Gwacheon Festival (South Korea), Freedom Festival (UK), Light Night Leeds (UK), Sanafest (Norway). She has been an artist in residency in several visual art settings including Yorkshire Sculpture Park, The Hepworth Wakefield and 4Bid gallery in Amsterdam. Branching Dialogues is part of her project The Land We Are, which offers somatic experiences of ecology and relationality to re-invigorate our connection with the more-than-human world, revive our curiosity and care for trees, natural ecosystems and our ecological sociality, via choreographic works, workshops and collaborations between artists and environmental experts. Vanessa graduated from the MA Creative Practice at Trinity Laban in London. She teaches for professionals and wider communities, and has been a guest and faculty dance lecturer at York st John’s University, Leeds Beckett University, NSCD, Trinity Laban.