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) & Upstream 2 (2024).
Our Upstream workshops were 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 listened to the ways that human life is interwoven and deeply co-dependent on our river systems and considered what it is to make ‘kin’ with these watery bodies in these times.
Practicing Places 2025
Shawling: movement and making workshops
With Kirstie Simson and Simon Whitehead
Part 1: (online/zoom) - 18th May 1-6pm
A day to orient to the practices and processes of finding, making and moving with found materials. Introducing ecosomatic scores to ground us where we are, within a wider collective field.
Cost: £70-£50
Part 2: (in person) - 3pm on Monday 21st July to 3pm on Friday 21st July 2025
Cych Valley, west Wales
An in-depth process of finding, playing, stitching, making and moving in a complex forested river valley ecosystem in North Pembrokeshire, with daily studio practice in a local village hall. Making a garment with cloth and found materials, a shawl to move in and with…
Cost:£320*, includes supper on the first evening
* There are 2 lower cost workshop places available for practitioners unable to meet the full cost, please be in touch for details.
Join for one or both workshops
Finding materials - stitching them together - a tangled shawl
Making coverings for the body - concealments, making difference
Moving and making within the studio/and without (a forested valley)
Worlds and body - composites imagined as yet unknown, though recognised, animated, remembered…
To book, for accommodation list & travel information contact Stirling: rstirlingsteward@gmail.com
