Walk of Life
 Movement workshops with Helen Poynor

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Training

Wild Women
24-26 March
2023

 

Spring Awakening
22-23 April 2023

Women in the Land
10-11 June 2023

 

Summer Songs
7-9 July 2023

Embodied Landscapes
29 Sept - 1 Oct 2023

Autumn in the Woods
14-15 October 2023


Participants' Comments

My relationship with moving has changed – my moving is becoming more honest…I have not been able to separate me from my moving…I’ve never experienced that before. I feel like I’ve been given a very special key. 

Working outside has been so profound – I have returned to the land and I feel it.  I remember feeling it as a child. Body as landscape – Body in the landscape.

I came back home after ‘Women, Rocks and Water’ feeling more alive than ever.  Within me there was a new sense of my moving body through space.  The awakening of parts of my spine was the awakening of “dormant” dimensions of my being.

The work with Helen is movement practice but also practice for life.  I find within it the uniting of my passions, physical and philosophical, in the playground of presence, experience and connection.

I have found the work in the environment inspiring and personally enhancing. I have loved the work as an individual within the group in the vastness and minutiae of the sites.

The Walk of Life has brought me into direct relationship with the coast, with its detail, its varied landscapes and seascapes, its beauty, gentleness and its power. I feel the age of the rocks and the newness of the life in the rock pools. The cliffs are speaking of all they have seen before them. The coast is rich, complex and inviting. I am meeting it as an old and new friend, ready to hear its wisdom and to share my stories. I am taught about permanence and change and levels of time existing together. The Jurassic Coast is alive and dancing with me.

I really like your prosaic, no frills style of teaching. It's authentic, clear and goes deep. 


Publications include:

'Is that yoga or are you just making it up?' and 'The matriarch and the mollusc and all things in between' with Caroline Frizell, in Creative Bodies in Therapy, Performance and CommunityResearch and Practice that Brings Us Home (Routledge 2023).

'OUT!' Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (2021)

'Walk of Life Training in Non-stylised and Environmental Movement' with Paul Kramer and Hilary Kneale in Theatre, Dance and Performance Training (Vol 12.2 2021)

Anna Halprin with Libby Worth (Routledge 2004; 2nd Edition 2018)

'All Fathers are Fictional: a practitioner's perspective on the process of creating autobiographical performance', Journal of Dance and Somatics Practices (2019)

'Earth, Tree, Rock and Sea' Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 10:2 (2018/19)

'Landscapes of Loss, moving and mourning'. Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (2013)

'Body Body' in Embodied Lives (Triarchy 2014)

Working Like a Farmer: towards an embodied spirituality' in Dance, Somatics and Spiritualities: Contemporary Sacred Narratives. (Intellect 2014)

'Wrestling the Slippery Fish' in in Research Methods in Theatre Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2011) co-authored with Libby Worth.


Yes, But is it Dance? in An introduction to Community Dance Practice (Diane Amans (Editor) Palgrave Macmillan 2008)

'Anna Halprin and the Sea Ranch Collective, an embodied engagement with place' in Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 1.1 (intellectbooks 2009)

Dancers and Communities,  co-editor with Jacqueline Simmonds (Ausdance NSW 1997).

To download Helen's article Breathing Space: Artists Exploring Health published in Animated, Winter 2004
please click here: Breathing Space: Artists Exploring Health

To download Helen's article Earth, Tree, Rock and Sea published in Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 2018/19 please click here: Earth, Tree, Rock and Sea'

This is, I think
what holiness is:
the natural world,
where every moment is full of the passion to keep moving.

Mary Oliver