Movement Ritual 2013

16th - 18th Feb
Movement Ritual workshop with Helen Poynor
South coast of Devon

This was a fantastic experience for me that I still find hard to articulate a week later. At the time of the workshop I described it as a sort of questioning conflict, altering between serenity and turmoil, structure and freedom, overwhelming and calming...

Travelling down to the little coastal town of Beer with one of my best friends, Oana, was a great experience. It had been so long since I had seen an open, wild landscape and even longer since I had seen the sea! I didn't realise how much of an impact these things could make on my outlook and mood over the three days. The sense of space and air around us was incredible!

The workshop itself, as Poynor pointed out to us, was like diving in at the deep end! This was a totally new way of working for us - slow and repetitive but so detailed and ritualistic that the need to focus and keep aware of our own movement needs was enough to tire us out by the end of the day.
An extremely valuable experience to work alongside different generations, different nationalities and different levels of connection to dance and movement. I really enjoyed the solitude of working alone while being surrounded by people all working with the same instructions but in their own bodies.

It was a weekend that can only be described as being good for the soul. I came to the workshop with my own questions about what movement and dance mean to me and what part I want them to play in my future. I gained more questions than answers from the experience but this is ok, I am still heading in a direction I feel confident and positive about. My life will take the course I want it to take as long as I continue to follow what inspires me.

This weekend was unexpected, a leap into something that is unknown and yet at the same time borders on the familiar. The work was deceptively intense and tiring, requiring a focus I didn't know, or had perhaps forgotten I had. As a bridge between moving and speaking we used the act of drawing to communicate our experiences - although for me it wasn't until the third day that I felt able to create an image without prior-planning or judgemental thoughts! I found it very hard to open up about my experiences because I didn't fully understand what they were... It was a strange feeling of ambivalence - all I knew was that it had effected me deeply.