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), Staying with It (2022), Upstream (2023).
In this next iteration of Practicing Places - Upstream 2 - alongside collective studio practice we will spend time in the local Afon Cych and Dulais river catchment. Journeying upriver this time to explore the wider ecology of the valley and its mythical landscapes, we will immerse ourselves with the river’s course and its ecosystems. Learning ways to be in correspondence with its ongoing-ness, responding to its life forms and movements, we will lead practices and scores to support our bodied understanding of the river’s language and it’s changing behaviours. This fieldwork will fold back into the studio over the days of the workshop and will deeply inform our movements and creative processes. One afternoon an ecologist from west Wales Rivers Trust will lead an upstream walk-over of the river. We will encourage and support participants to develop their own creative responses to the river in small groups, with possibilities to share these explorations back in the the studio.
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.
3pm on Tuesday 9th July to 4pm on Saturday 13th July 2024
Cost:£320*, includes supper on the first evening
* There are 3 subsidised workshop places available for Wales based practitioners, please be in touch for details.
*There will also be a short Mentoring Retreat for up to 6 people with Kirstie & Simon after the Practicing Places workshop (evening of 13th & daytime of 14th July). 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
3pm ddydd Mawrth 9 Gorffennaf tan 4pm ddydd Sadwrn 13 Gorffennaf 2024
Cost: £320*, yn cynnwys swper ar y noson gyntaf
* Mae 3 lle gweithdy â chymhorthdal ar gael i ymarferwyr yng Nghymru, cysylltwch â ni am fanylion.
*Bydd Encil Mentora fer hefyd ar gyfer hyd at 6 o bobl gyda Kirstie a Simon ar ôl y gweithdy Lleoedd Ymarfer (nos 13eg a dydd 14eg Gorffennaf). Cyfle i ddatblygu ymhellach syniadau sy'n dod i'r amlwg o Upstream a'ch ymarfer eich hun yng nghwmni grŵp cyfoedion bach, gydag amser un i un gyda Kirstie a/neu Simon.
I archebu, ar gyfer rhestr llety ac i fynegi diddordeb yn yr Encil Mentora cysylltwch â Stirling: rstirlingsteward@gmail.com
Many thanks to Arts Council Wales for their support
