A seasonal series of day retreats in nature for women
women’s circles, dance performances in the wild, campfires & shared seasonal feasts
with dancer Hayley J S Matthews & Women’s Circle Facilitator Emma Johnson
November 2024 - September 2025
In a beautiful woodland near Stroud (location on booking)
Come to all or one, we’ll conjure a deep, metabolising ecology
photo: Frank Balbi Hansen
Saturday 30 November, 14:30 - 19:00. £89 (inc drinks a& autumn feast)
(more dates to come for winter, spring & summer 2025)
Deep, metabolising, feminist work. Landings are events of contemporary dancer and musician Hayley J S Matthews’s wild performances, alongside shared meals, feasts, walks, listening circles and campfires. They are moving through the UK and Ireland in 2024/25 in collaboration with some beautiful folk. And they are coming to Gloucestershire with Emma Johnson of The Wild Circle. For a year long journey through the weather and the seasons inside and out, with local women.
They are times of co-digesting our lives, of being moved, of coming together. In our many crises they are invitations to come to the fault lines, the places where we and our world hold transition and tension, and here to re-discover the metabolisation dancing, slowing down, circling and connecting to the land and seasons together offer. They are sanctuaries. They become alchemic cauldrons for our creative and emotional lives. They are times to get subterranean of our upper cultures. To re-belong to our land and in each others hearts and weave a deep space that holds us. They are limbos of enclosure fences. And they invite dancing into its deep feminist role of moving us through things we cannot move through alone, of alchemising us in the cracks. Waking dance up, as it woke up in the plantations, to move us to places we can’t see.
The first dance on November 30 is called Lakes of Anima, made for when we are tipping fast into the darker half of the year. It is a welcome to the dancing wilds, made for the liminal space of twilight. It’s a surrendering into the grief and suppression of the truly agent feminine and dancer in our world. And a waking of a feminine, dancing state that is integrated with wildness and 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 made of Lakes of Anima, which was finalist in the Lift-Off Global Film Festival 2023, here, or rent the whole 30 minute film for £5.48 there too.
Emma and Hayley will welcome us together. We’ll begin with tea and autumn snacks, followed by an opening circle, walk in silence through the woods, experience Lakes of Anima. And return to the woodland hearth for a vegan Autumn feast and full circle around the fire. All food and drinks are included.
These Landing events intentionally bring us to meet all seasons, come with all you need to stay warm and dry - blankets, boots, macs, hot water bottles ….
More About Hayley and Emma
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/
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.
Click here to see other Landing events