One Day Experience / Workshop, 10am - 4pm

Spring awakens and resurrects our practice after the energy dip of winter, bringing the excitement to 'spring' into action.

Everything has a season. Our bodies, our relationships with people and our habitat, our challenges and phases in life. Life isn't static it contains patterns, cycles and rhythm and with it opportunity for awareness, adaption and harmony. 

Move with Seasons is an event to rediscover playful and meaningful movement in the context of nature and the season with a supportive group. It is my invitation to start a journey. Along the way we explore the relationship, interconnections and interactions between body, people and environment - your self, interactive and locomotive practice - and how they sculpt one another. Does what we practice explore qualities and relationships we can carry over into life? How do we adapt to change if we don't expose ourself to variety, adversity? Is it useful to recognise parallels between your life and the changing seasons?

We move with each other
We move with the environment
We move with the seasons

Come and rediscover what moves you

COST: £95 EARLYBIRD / £120 AFTER 5TH APRIL

Places are limited to 12.

You will experience:

• Rediscover playful and meaningful movement in the context of nature and the season.

• Explore the blurred lines between effectiveness (utility) and expression when moving solo or interacting with the environment or another human(s) and how creativity is cultivated in both.

• Ecological movement - Ideas around the co-creation of movement between body, people and space and a solo, group and environmental practice.

• Tree climbing to Tree-Running to Tree-Dancing and back again - learn how to flow in trees via the lenses of different forms of arboreal locomotion, tree climbing and dance. Play on the continuum of Treerunning and Treedancing, effectiveness and expression. What techniques in Parkour work well in trees. How can we take ideas from our solo and partner dance and movement situations practice and apply them to dancing with the trees?

• Flow - learn to flow in context on the ground and over various obstacles, whether grass, bark or with other humans.

• Ground interaction - ground flow and break falling, rebuild your relationship, confidence and vocabulary moving on and getting to and from the ground.

• Partner/group interaction - rapport/connection building games, with body to body, roughhousing / rough and tumble play and contact improvisation

• Manipulative skills / cooperative building - Unique building and crafting tasks putting lifting carrying and tool use into context and exploring creative expression in finding harmony in adding to one's environment with the "sculpting of space"

• Mobility development tools - joint health and longevity, building coordination and collaboration to channel the forces experienced by our bodies. Flexibility with strength and control, resilience and the sensitivity to react to the unknown.

• An introduction to strength training with practical application to context, moving through the environment and adapting to the unknown/chaotic situations in mind.

Replenish your connection with nature within the beautiful woodlands of Hampstead Heath

What is moving seasonally?

Adaption. Awareness of rhythm, change and ‘spirit of place’. Relationships.

Most can relate to how they eat differently according to the season; the temperature, emotional connection, how they feel and what 'should' be most relevant - what is actually available to eat at that time of year. I believe the seasons also affect how we move, whether we are aware of it or not - from one’s body language (shivering with self-embrace from the cold or open and confident from the warm sun) to awareness of how we want to train and move, which if done predominately outside will influence what is practical and relevant. The conditions from a utility perspective, but also with awareness, can feed our emotions to impulses which feed our movement.

We move to fit the environment (adaptability) and the environment MOVES us (impulse or emotionally).

Awaken, rejuvenate and resurrect your movement practice after the inevitable hibernation period over the winter months. Spring is a time of regrowth. The excitement of seeing the plants around you blossom again, mirrors ones practice as we have more daylight again and the preparation for all out exuberance and celebration in summer starts to take on shape more. There's nothing quite like the excitement of seeing the majestic change around you, as the once bare and beautiful trees burst with welcome seas of green to remind you spring has sprung.

This connection to our seasonal environment is what makes us human. “Move With The Seasons” is my invitation to explore our relationships; with our bodies, habitat and tribe (community). Our primal sense of rhythm and change when moving in our habitat is best experienced when in nature, not in a year-round controlled environment such as a gym. A movement practice can benefit from this oscillation rather than flat-lining in a uni-season of disconnection. Static, for me, feels like stagnation. No change lessons the opportunities for awareness and adaptation - which lessens my engagement. I do my best to remain open to change through exposure to the dynamism of our seasons. Change to my habitat. My community. My family. My children. My ageing body. Open to the adaptability required and the opportunity for creativity that never ceases to get old.

Being outside is the best expression of our humanness, with contextual and playful movement giving us the best foundation of movement we can. What better way to explore natural movement than in context of habitat and actually being outside. Our skin grows strong only when exposed to diversity of surfaces, and that diversity of nature is nourishing. We cannot appreciate wrapping up in the warm without experiencing the contrast of nature's powerful change in season from summer.

Remember your ability to be joyful in nature - to run, jump, climb, swing, dance, flow and roughhouse, to be swept along with the innate excitement of being outside. Feel the thrill of longer days and notice the majestic change as the trees start to burst with green. Reawaken your senses running through the woodlands as you propel yourself forward, deep in the present with a full mind and body focus that a nutritious environment provides. What is more rewarding than succeeding at a task that is outright difficult and engaging? This connection to our seasonal environment and our challenges and triumphs is part of what makes us human.