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A seasonal series of afternoon retreats in the woods for women. Women’s circle, dance performance, campfire and warming soup. Land and unravel with us. Your hosts are dancer, music maker and Rolfer Hayley J S Matthews and women’s circle weaver Emma Johnson.
This is our first of 5 in a series that runs from November 2024 to September 2025. ‘Landing in the Dark’, on November 30, runs 12:00- 16:00. In a beautiful woodland near Stroud (location on booking).
Come to all or one, we’ll conjure a deep, metabolising ecology. This is beautiful feminist work. ‘Landings’ are events of contemporary dancer and musician Hayley J S Matthews’s wild performance practice, alongside shared meals, circles and campfires. They are moving through the UK and Ireland in 2024/25 in collaboration with some beautiful folk. In Gloucestershire the talented Emma Johnson of The Wild Circle is collaborator. For a year long journey through the seasons and our seasons, with women.
Hayley’s ethos is that dance moves us through things we cannot move through alone. This is it's visceral, grounded, feminist role. She comes to wild space to offer and practice this. Because our upper cultures can often complicate and un-ground this basic role of that dance offers. We could say that women’s circles play the same role. And soup :)
‘Landings’ are times of co-digesting our lives, of being moved, of coming together. In our times they give us time to re-discover the metabolisation dancing, circling and connecting to the land and seasons can offer. They are sanctuaries for our creative and emotional lives. They are times to re-belong to our land and in each others hearts. They are limbos of enclosure fences.
The first dance we’ll experienced on November 30 is called ‘Lakes of Anima’ made for when we are tipping in the dark half of the year. It is a welcome to the dancing wilds, made for the liminal space of twilight. It’s a surrendering to the deep ecology of not being separate. With an original ambient score made by Hayley and her husband Al, aka ‘Murmura’. You could also call this dance. Moving our stucknesses.
You can watch a trailer of a film of the dance, which was finalist in the Lift-Off Global Film Festival 2023, here, or rent the whole 30 minute film for £5.48 there too:
https://vimeo.com/ondemand/murmura/
Emma and Hayley will welcome us together. We’ll begin with tea and circling round the campfire, we’ll move into the woods to be with the dance, sitting with the trees or moving through them, for 30 minutes. And return to the woodland hearth for vegan soup and closing. Come in warm, weatherproof clothes, bring hot water bottles and blankets if you like.
These Landing events intentionally bring us to meet all seasons, come as you are, with what you need. We'll only re-schedule if there are very high winds or torrential storms, in which case we'll offer to transfer your booking to a new date or refund you.
This November 'Landing in the Dark' is £48 to join, including soup, bread and refreshments. Others may be different depending on their length and if we expand into summer feasting :)
About Emma
Emma Johnson is a women's circle facilitator and space-holder, based in the beautiful Cotswolds in Gloucestershire. She says: "We talk a lot about ever-decreasing circles, and yet my experience of life since holding women's circles has been about ever-increasing circles. The spiralling out of my world through Circle has created such a rich tapestry of experience, connection, knowledge and community. Circle work has become my soul-food, my medicine, my way home and my journey forward. Women's circles have reconnected me with my deeply matriarchal family line, and made real the legacy of women’s stories that have been passed down through my ancestors. And now, in my own life, that legacy is being passed on and seeded in my children, my wider family and my community. I often say in my circles, that gathering in this way feels like a quiet revolution, a way of holding each other with a compassion and openness that we then take with us from the Circle and out into the world. The ripples of this work are never-ending. And they are vital. " Emma forages from local woodland for her circle altars and seasonal displays, and her work is deeply connected with seasonal year and the pagan Wheel of the Year. Her spaces always consider how the movement and changes in nature reflect our own internal landscape, and offer a ritual place to pause, slowdown, reflect and connect. https://www.thewildcircle.space/
About Hayley
Hayley J S Matthews is a multidisciplinaire; a contemporary dancer, Rolfer, flutist, vocalist, teacher, speaker and feminist re-wilder.
She makes territories of dance, moving image and ambient metal music as Murmura. She creates and dances solos, ensembles and movements under Ensemble Dans-Tank. And works as freelance dancer, collaborator and Rolfer.
Among others Hayley has danced, choreographed and taught with and for Isadora Duncan Repertoire Company (Paris), CoDa Dance (UK), English National Ballet, Sadlers Wells, East London Dance, Out There Festival (UK), Tanzfabrik (Germany), Norfolk and Norwich Festival, Dance Umbrella (UK) P.A.L/Stressfree (UK/France), National Theatre Ghana (Accra), The Cockpit (London), Brighton Fringe Festival (UK), Bayo Akomolafe’s ‘We Will Dance with Mountains’. And over and over with the wilds.
The foundation of Hayley’s current practice, she calls ‘Sanctuary on the Fault Line’, in which she conceives, makes and shares dance outside of systemic normalities, deeply connected to the land she is from and the people and creatures who dwell there with her. She does this to experiment with deepening the voice of womanhood and dance in her time. To re-awaken dance and womanhood’s immense potential to sustain social and environmental health, change and behave as poetic politic. She also leads an earth-wide movement to hold and guide other women dancers in re-wilding, under the same name.
Hayley was born and bred in London, born under the bells of South Ealing and growing up in the dodgy end of Hanwell, connected by deep and wide Irish, Iceni and French-Canadian ancestral roots.
In 2020 Hayley was awarded the Thea Barnes Legacy Award, an award of female leadership in dance across the UK and US. And in 2021 was nominated for ‘Women in Dance Awards, UK.
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Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Summer Crescent, Stroud, GL5 1, United Kingdom
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