ANY QUESTIONS…?

You mention dancing….do I have to dance? No! The dancing is all from dancer Hayley J Matthews - you are simply bearing witness to this beautiful movement performance between the trees.

How will I get to the woods and where will I park? The woodland is just off a main road between Cirencester and Stroud, down a well-maintained track, with plenty of parking at the end. We will be in the parking space to greet you and walk you the three or four minutes into the woodland from there.

Are there amenities - hot drinks, toilets? Yes, we will be serving plenty of hot tea and coffee, and hot soup warmed over the fire, and there is a compost loo close to the camp.

What about bad weather? We have a beautiful covered area around our central fire where we can be dry if it rains, and the fire will be kept going throughout to warm us. That said, this is a wild circle - so expect to connect with the elements.

Will I have to share or talk in front of people? Not if you don’t feel called to in the moment. There’s something really special about sitting together in silence, and it’s especially magical when you’re being seranded by the wind and the birds! So see this as an invitation to be in a beautiful woodland space, soaking up the beautiful environment around you, however you need to be there.

Landings are a journey of wild dances, a chance to re-wild and re-root in the land, to be moved and to come into stillness. They are invitations to come to the cracks, the fault lines, the places where we and our world hold tension, and there rediscover the metabolisation and holding that dancing, slowing down and connecting to the land and season offers. They are sanctuaries in our challenging times.

The dance series has a seasonal rhythm, gathered around the pagan sabbats. They’re an invitation to meet our cyclical female bodies in the circling of the year – to experience how we root into the land, into change and the weather, inside and out. They offer a chance for a deep connection with ourselves, and with each other, with a sisterhood of sacred feminine power, of the simple, ancient magic of gathering in the wild woods together. 

A series of five dance and circle events, throughout the year…

Our series begins after Samhain, on 30 November, with Lakes of Anima, a dance made for when we begin to tip into the darker half of the year. It is a welcome to the dancing wilds, made for the liminal space of twilight. It’s a waking of a feminine, dancing state that is integrated with wildness and the deep ecology of not being separate, performed alongside an original ambient score made by Hayley and her husband Al.  

The series then follows with Belong - the spark of spring in deep winter (February); Migration - Spring growing from our roots  (April); Originate - Leaping Forth into Midsummer  (June/July); Burial of the Witches  - the Mabon Balancing  (October).

“They are times to re-belong to our land and in each other’s hearts. They are cauldrons of what next. Space to metabolise our grief, rage and anxieties into possibilities, into movement, into relief, into joy. I feel we’re so in need of coming to our stucknesses, and moving from here, being moved. Emotionally, creatively, spiritually. These Landing events, through a kind of feminine wildness, stretch time and give us space to digest, land, heal, see differently, get un-stuck from our separateness. That’s what I was moved to make for us.” (Hayley J S Matthews)

The Dances

Lakes of Anima, as we tip into darkness around Samhain to Winter Solstice. This dance is a welcome to the woods and the dark feminine. A dance made for the liminal space of the autumn twilight. It’s a surrendering into the dark half of the year and into the grief and suppression of the truly agent feminine and dancer in our lives. A waking of a feminine state that is integrated with wildness and the deep ecology of not being separate. It was made to bring relief to our struggles and survivings and to begin to move the feminine more greatly in us all. To move us in ways that are not separate from nature outside and our true natures within, to begin to compost public space into its wild potentiality. 

Belong, as the spring rumbles beneath our frozen feet, conjuring snow drops. A dance birthed when leaves are not yet on the trees. When there is bareness. When the light is waking. When the sun is shining through the bare boughs, and she is blinding. Maybe this dance springs new life into me, into you. It certainly meets a longing, beckons a belonging, an entwining into the spark of new growth that we continue to follow along the year. I dance this dance in the boughs of a tiny tree, risking, reaching, being held, falling through the branches.

Migration, as spring springs. This dance moves through a glade, for me spring calls us to MOVE, to change, to grow, to migrate, but from our roots and not in straight lines, and this dance does that. We might also ‘dig where we stand’ in spring, into our ancestry and into the land where we live, and it does that too. It calls me to my knees, to laughter, to stretching time and space way beyond the glade we’re in with elastic limbs. To my heart beat, yours, the trees, to resting at times, and to gestures that woke in me around eternalness, the notion that we are somehow at our future children’s funerals, and they at our births.

Origin-ate, at high summer. This starts slow, appearing at the base of big trees. It scuttles like fighting ants and slowly makes it’s way into a wild jig and leaps and lifts of joy. I sometimes do an alternate dance around Summer Solstice, which spirals and finds the light.

Burial of the Witches, as we meet the balance point of vernal equinox, and the harvest is in. As I have been ‘digging where I stand’, into my embodied life, into my ancestry, into the land where I live in the wilds of London and Norfolk these dances emerge from what I meet. And as this dance emerged, at the balance point, I met a strong sense that we still hold a tension and associated cultural realities of the witch trials. It is not so crazy, if we think what contemporary science tells us about what happens in our bodies when we watch a loved one hurt and or killed, and can do nothing about it, and how these holdings and freezes pass down genetically, neurologically and posturally. I wanted to acknowledge the burden of the trials in my body and in our culture, which still exist, and to mourn and bury those women who still remain with me, killed so violently, who were never ‘witches’. So this dance mourns, buries, celebrates and sets free. It digs up some of my Irish roots too, in its sound.