Kirstie Simson and Simon Whitehead.
Dance/ Movement Professional Development and wellbeing workshops.
We have called our work together Practicing Places. This collaboration has been developed as an intensive movement workshop each summer since 2017 in the small village of Abercych in rural Pembrokeshire. Each workshop lasts 4 days and participants are accommodated in the village and surrounding area. Based on the premise that we are always active in processes of making places, the days spent together explore the significance of embodied practice as an approach to unearthing key questions around ways of being with ourselves, each other and belonging to the earth.
Kirstie and Simon offer simple movement & listening scores for indoors and outdoors, interwoven with time to walk, draw, swim and eat together. Time together is blended with solitary time, for reading, writing, walking and drawing. The opportunities to seek support around current preoccupations in our work is balanced with deep physical practice, in the evenings we swim, walk in the dark and talk around the fire.
During the pandemic we migrated online, zoom allowed us to develop practice remotely with an international community of artists. In the summer 2021 we returned to in-person workshops -
Re-turn (2021) and Staying with It (2022).
In the next iteration of Practicing Places, Upstream/i Fyny’r Afon - 10th to 14th July 2023, we will spend time in the local Afon Cych river catchment. Immersing ourselves along the the river’s course and it’s ecosystems, we will learn ways to be in correspondence with it’s ongoing-ness, to respond to it’s life forms and movements. We will enlist Pauline Oliveros’ Deep Listening practices and scores to support our bodied understanding of the river’s language and it’s changing behaviours. This fieldwork will folk back into the studio over the 4 days of the workshop and will deeply inform our movements and creative processes.
This workshop is part of a larger 2-year project AFON, curated by Maynard Abercych. In this active research partnership with artists, ecologists, activists, land owners and the local public, we will listen to the ways that human life is interwoven and deeply co-dependent on our river systems and consider what it is to make ‘kin’ with these watery bodies in these times.
5pm on Monday 10th July to 3pm on Friday 14th July
Cost:£250*, includes supper on the first evening
(*this reduced cost is time limited, bookings after 7th June will be £320)
* There are 3 subsidised workshop places available for Wales based practitioners, please be in touch for details.
*There will also be a 2-day Mentoring Retreat for up to 6 people with Kirstie & Simon after the Practicing Places workshop. Opportunity to further develop ideas emerging from Upstream & your own practice in the company of a small peer group, with one to one time with Kirstie &/or Simon.
To book, for accommodation list & to express interest in the Mentoring Retreat contact Stirling: rstirlingsteward@gmail.com
Thanks to Arts Council Wales & Intercultural Roots for their support