Lakes of Anima

Lakes of Anima (aka She and the Land) is a dance birthed when cracks appeared, and I fled to the woods.

From those cracks an already brooding inquiry into the movements and gestures of the truly agent feminine poured. For me this is a state that is integrated with wildness, a deep ecology of not separateness, which has been supressed.

Lakes of Anima moves from that feeling of suppression and a desire to honour and become the deep, integrated feminine, through the grief of not having been.

It moves through falling and waking and into the integrated, liberated, flow of disappearing into the land; she is the land and the land is her.

It is the dance through which the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement was born, in and through me.

I hope that it brings company and relief to your struggles and survivings and moves the feminine in you too, in your waters, your depths, your wakings. For as we move differently, in ways that are not separate from nature outside and our true natures within, public space and it’s potential changes, dance wakes up as the poetic politic, the agent of change underneath all social, cultural and political space.

I dance this work close to my home from early to late autumn as part of the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement, in a Red Oak glade in North London (join the invite list here), and in other woodlands where I am invited. And share it with other women dancers in the Sanctuary on the Fault Line annual gatherings.

You can watch a full 30 minute performance of ‘Lakes of Anima’ for £5.48 through Vimeo here - The film was a Lift-Off Global Filmmaker Finalist in 2023.

Hayley x

Lakes of Anima Film

Duration: 30 minutes

Sound: ‘Imbolc’ by Murmura. Drums, guitar and synth Alistair H M Simmons, flue and vocals Hayley J S Matthews

Performer: Hayley J S Matthews and the woods