SEEDBODY — a series of bodily explorations/provocations

How can facilitated embodiment act as a pathway to ecological relationship and creative expression; what songs are resonant within the body?
I am attending a 2-year, part time training at the Thomas Prattki Centre in Berlin, ‘Integral Embodiment & Performance Making’. Facilitated pathways include: neutral mask (Jacques Le Coq), blind charcoal drawing & clay, voice resonance, dance and visualisation, Alexander Technique, ritual, storytelling and social arts. The final part of each module invites performance making—to give shape to an emergent theme or resonance experienced within the container of the course.

Below is my personal exploration of swampland; an environment that is illusory and impenetrable as it is mesmerising. A place of retreat and regeneration, and a sinkhole from which you never escape; the lotus grows from the swamp!

What form does my creativity take when immersed in ecological relationship?
I received this provocation from Julie Brooks while visiting her exhibition, ‘What Will Remain’ in Kendal, Cumbria. As a guiding question for the container of my life, I love it, and can’t think of a better summary of what it means to be alive. September 2023, together with Suzanne Boniface, I made a series of Hawthorne Footprint Moulds on a footpath at Shingle Street, Suffolk, UK.

The berries, when collected and squashed form an imprint-able mould, high in pectin and which naturally sets hard over the course of a few hours. Wasps, butterflies and bottle flies all fed on the decaying prints, rich in sugars.

Can I/we allow our dreams to be seeded by the earth?
What actions are needed to experience this, and what does that experience look like? Does the earth itself dream as told by the old stories? What choices need I make to access the earth’s dreaming? What is meant by this?

How to greet the earth’s roots rising up to meet me?
A provocation shared with me by Karmit Evenzur (@earthspeaks), in relation questions I hold around where to live and root myself. Flipping the question on its head has been liberating, for my feet, too. My main learning aroiund this question of where and how to live, is that providing a ‘no’ is a necessary step in creating receptive space where previously there was no movement. Or to put it another way, receptive space invokes inflowing responsive energy.

Eros in nature, eros in the body—where’s the overlap, what shape does it take?
I experience an overlap between sensuality in nature and kink; one fleshes out the other, and my body’s similarly resonant with love whether I feel it for myself, others or the fabric of our wild existence. I’m interested to nurture eros, and give shape to expressions of the love-body held within nature.