The Seedling | Dunami

a workshop series in dance, movement and somatics

with focus on intercultural and environmental contexts of practice

Join us in movement to explore interconnections between

culture, nature & soma!

The Seedling is a workshop exchange series that connects the fields of dance and somatics with intercultural dialogue and environmental contexts of practice, and which is based around a given theme.

This 2024 year's theme is:

Fostering Resilience and Wellbeing in Connection to the Living Matter

We will seek to explore different ways in which we can utilise somatic movement practices to foster resilience and wellbeing in connection to living within the coastal landscapes around us.

We will focus on finding new paths of 'letting go' through exploration of our own vulnerability and courage. We will consider how we can begin to dig in to our 'stone' bodies, while connecting to aspects of the natural environment as an opening to access our inner selves, as well as examining our own relationship to self and others.

The workshops will explore how we can trust our embodied experiences to build our own resilience and promote wellbeing as well as how to adjust our mindsets and grow a toolkit of support strategies to use in daily life. Throughout the course of the day, we will seek to find new entry points into this year’s theme, always opening ourselves to emerging possibilities, perspectives and opportunities presented by the workshop facilitators, as well as the participants themselves. We will explore sensations, imaginings, visit the stored residue of memories, and individual ways of belonging and relating.

The participants will be able to explore their own qualities of movement and learn how they too can use movement for support. From using dance and movement to support yourself, to helping others to provide support for themselves in a range of contexts of self-care, growth and wellbeing. The focus on our inner connection to the landscapes will highlight how it can also help to explore ourselves, as well as our relationships to each other and the living world.

We will move and share in an open and inviting atmosphere, aided and enriched by the sounds of live music accompaniment inspired by the local landscapes of coasts, shores and bays.

At the core of the event are three overarching aims:

Firstly, to promote and facilitate intercultural dialogue by moving together and exchanging different professional perspectives on somatic experience of selfhood, while emphasising both inclusivity and diversity welcomed and supported by the practices.

Secondly, to promote the links between more traditional, largely indoor-based, somatic practices with eco-somatic practices, which are more outdoor focused and which open our understanding of the self to larger contexts of being in the world.

And finally, The Seedling is meant to explore all possible interconnections between culture, ecology and the living soma, to further somatic education practices and to create an open space for exchange, new knowledge and personal growth within the field of creative and inclusive wellbeing.

How can we better relate to the world and develop a more symbiotic relationship with it that can support our own wellbeing?

The event is designed to be fully inclusive and sessions are held in a welcoming and open environment, approached first and foremost with a sense of curiosity and exploration. It is an event open to everyone, whether you are familiar with somatic practice or not.

The Seedling offers both indoor and outdoor movement explorations inspired by the location where the event is taking place.

The indoor explorations focus on sharing and offering support tools arising from somatic movement explorations that can be utilised in daily life to support wellbeing across a range of personalised contexts.

The outdoor explorations focus on aspects of environmentally-mindful practices that help to explore the value of the natural world in supporting our ongoing wellbeing, expand of healthy sense of belonging in the living world around and reflect on moving towards healthier and more sustainable lives.

...

The event is designed to be fully inclusive and sessions are held in a welcoming and open environment, approached first and foremost with a sense of curiosity and exploration.

We move and share in an open and inviting atmosphere, aided and enriched by the sounds of live music accompaniment inspired by the local landscapes.

Treat yourself to this wonderful opportunity to

recharge

learn

share &

open up

to new ways of supporting yourself

in movement and

creative wellbeing practices

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GET YOUR TICKETS HERE

2024 Workshops:

Flow - The Call and Response of the Landscape

by Francis Angol

In today’s global matrix where imagery to some extent shapes our reality, the social and economic structures that we are forced to live by, can impact our life in such a way that forces us to unknowingly define who and what we are by the values and norms that it boldly placed before us. In doing so, we slowly gradually move away from a centred and balanced existence with the natural environment and create more of a destructive flow to our presence.

To address this issue, Francis Angol through his therapeutic practice – ‘Body in Rhythm’, draws from the philosophical teachings and practices of Western, and African Diasporic embodied movement traditions, to offer individuals an opportunity to explore the healing presence of the natural environment through his immersive workshop - ‘Flow - the call and response of the landscape’.

Bringing a focus on the life cycle of the costal landscape as a metaphor for renewal and change, the workshop takes individuals through a widening field of possibilities to explore ways in which we as human beings, can bring greater balance and flow to our life cycle. An opportunity to reflect, explore and experience the meeting of presence with existence, to curate a deeper awareness and understanding of the benefits of the unseen properties of our natural landscapes.

From an ecological perspective the workshop makes a parallel between the living body and what Angol calls the ‘landscape body,’ to infuse, inform and dissect indigenous knowledge of our environment. The workshop will allow participants to discover through a journey of play and exploration, ways of unearthing knowledge of unexplored ways of being that can further underpin our way of living, being and becoming.

Through exploring the relationship with the living matter of our environment, the workshop primarily focuses on creating pathways into the body, inviting participants to play and take pleasure in the art of self-discovery to unlock barriers to self-knowledge. An experience that aims to allow the self to unfold within a more mental, physical, and spiritually centred and attuned body, adding to the enrichment and support of our health and wellbeing.

Embedding Change - Negotiating Health through Life Cycles of Living Matter

by Anna Dako

The Earth's solar system is nearly 5 billion years old, and our sun is just one of over 200 billions of other stars in the galaxy, scattered trillions of miles away from one another. The Earth, alongside the presence of its water-rich corporeality, is dated as being 4.6 billion years of age, and the oldest rocks on our planet are as old as 3.8 billion years or older.

How can one comprehend change when tuning into the time scales of the Earth’s life cycles? And how can one meet the life cycle of the rock, so present in the landscapes of coastal life, which has been shaped by geological processes over millennia. Slowness of erosion versus abruptness of eruptions. Ice versus magma. Rocks change, break and move over time.

From igneous to sedimentary to metamorphic, rocks are the part of a cycle of creation, distraction and re-creation. Just like our human body, the body of earth is influenced by changes in temperature, pressure, humidity, weather exposure, etc. Minerals mix with organic material to form the soil on which plants and animals rely. Yet the rock is also the most reliable matter, that provides us with solid ground under our feet, and home-building blocks of granite, sandstone and marble.

In our explorations of the theme we will pay attention to what it means to live and understand our own body as a geological site, connecting through historicity of experience while negotiating best paths for health and inner developments for positive change. Somewhere between movement and stillness lie our answers to what we are made of, and how we can best support the ongoing constitution of wellbeing.

Inner sensing, movement contemplations and playful shifts in perspectives of response will be our guides on this self-exploratory journey. Learning about qualities of change is a life-long adventure.

UK Schedule 2024/25:

- Stroud, UK

16th March 2024, 10.00 - 17.00 (with a lunch break)

Venue: The Centre for Science & Arts, 13 Lansdown, Stroud GL5 1BB, UK

Hosted by: UKSMDT

- Aberdeen, UK

18th May 2024, 10.00 - 17.00 (with a lunch break) TBC

Venue: Schoolhill Studio, Citymoves, The Triplekirks, AB10 1JS, Aberdeen, UK

- Ormskirk, UK

March 2025 (TBC)

Venue: Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, UK

Ticket Prices: