Landings
credit: Frank Balbi Hansen
Landings are a journey of my wild dances co-created with folk connected to the land. They’re events of witnessing my wild dances in the woods, together with silent walks, shared meals, feasts, circles, campfires, sabbat celebrations and time together in the wilds.
Here below, you can find the ones coming up. Or write here to hear when they are announced.
They are times of co-creative digestion, of being moved, of waking up in us the action that comes from non-action. They are invitations to come to the cracks, the fault lines, the places where we and our world hold tension and transition, and there to re-discover the metabolisation and holding dancing, slowing down and connecting to the land and season offer; time to move in our challenging times together.
They have a seasonal rhythm, as my wild dances do, moving with the seasons and weather, the light and dark. They happen throughout the year, gathered around the pagan sabbats. They’re an invitation to connect to the weather inside and out, together; to grow a wild, communal resource in our lives. Times to meet in subterranean chambers, re-belong to our land and in each others hearts, cauldrons of what next, limbos of enclosure fences.
In these times of many crises, I feel we’re so in need of coming to our stucknesses, and moving from here, being moved. Emotionally, creatively, spiritually. These Landing events are that, through a kind of feminine wildness, they stretch time and give us space to digest, land, heal, see differently, un-stick from seperateness. That’s what I was moved to make for us. A space to become fugitive of our fences, to metabolise our grief, rage and anxieties into possibilities, into movement, into relief, into joy. To grow our capaciousness, in these times, together.
Below are the dates, venues, booking links and a description of each dance below that. Through the booking links you can also find info of each particular Landing and the collaborators I’ll be working with there. Huge thanks to them, through whose hands, we build a deep ecology that gives space to dance’s deep role in our lives, to move us through, together, which becomes possible by connecting dance back to the land and season and a feminist practice that is allowed to move, in spontaneity.
I look forward to dancing, sitting, eating, listening and walking with you.
Hayley
Upcoming Landings
Tipping into darkness
15/09/24 West Cork, Ireland, An Sanctoir: Lakes of Anima + meal and campfire
20/09/24 18:30, at home in the wilds of North London, no booking, no booking, write here to be on the invite list
12/10/24 North Norfolk, UK, Poet’s Acre: Lakes of Anima + silent woodland walk, organic treats and campfire listening circle
30/11/24 Gloucestershire, The Wild Circle Space (women only): Lakes of Anima + women’s circle, meal and campfire
Devon Landings begin in Feb 2025
The spark of spring in deep winter
24/01/25 At home in the wilds of North London
no booking, write here to be on the invite list
01/02/25 North Norfolk, UK, Poet’s Acre: Belong + silent woodland walk, winter feast and campfire listening circle
write here to receive booking info once it’s up
03/02/25 Devon, UK, Ashley Court: Belong + Imbolc celebration
write here to receive booking info once it’s up
Gloucestershire and West Cork Dates coming soon, write here to receive booking info once it’s up
Spring growing form our roots
30/03/25 At home in the wilds of North London
no booking, write here to be on the invite list
25/04/25 North Norfolk, UK, Poet’s Acre: Migration + silent woodland walk, organic treats and campfire listening circle
write here to receive booking info once it’s up
01/05/25 Devon, UK, Ashley Court: Migration + Spring celebration
write here to receive booking info once it’s up
Gloucestershire and West Cork Dates coming soon, write here to receive booking info once it’s up
Leaping Forth - Midsummer
17/06/2025 At home in the wilds of North London
no booking, write here to be on the invite list
22/06/25 Devon, UK, Ashley Court: Origin-ate + midsummer celebration
28/06/25 North Norfolk, UK, Poet’s Acre: Origin-ate + silent woodland walk, summer feast and campfire listening circle
Gloucestershire and West Cork Dates coming soon
Mabon Balancing
13/09/25 Devon, UK, Ashley Court: Burial of the Witches + equinox preparations
20/09/25 North Norfolk, UK, Poet’s Acre: Burial of the Witches + silent woodland walk, meal and campfire listening circle
25/09/25 At home in the wilds of North London
no booking, write here to be on the invite list
Gloucestershire and West Cork Dates coming soon
The Dances
Lakes of Anima, as we tip into darkness around Samhain to Winter Solstice. This dance is a welcome to the woods and the dark feminine. A dance made for the liminal space of the autumn twilight. It’s a surrendering into the dark half of the year and into the grief and suppression of the truly agent feminine and dancer in our lives. A waking of a feminine state that is integrated with wildness and the deep ecology of not being separate. It was made to bring relief to our struggles and survivings and to begin to move the feminine more greatly in us all. To move us in ways that are not separate from nature outside and our true natures within, to begin to compost public space into it’s wild potentiality.
Belong, as the spring rumbles beneath our frozen feet, conjuring snow drops. A dance birthed when leaves are not yet on the trees. When there is bareness. When the light is waking. When the sun is shining through the bare boughs, and she is blinding. Maybe this dance springs new life into me, into you. It certainly meets a longing, beckons a belonging, an entwining into the spark of new growth that we continue to follow along the year. I dance this dance in the boughs of a tiny tree, risking, reaching, being held, falling through the branches.
Migration, as spring springs. This dance moves through a glade, for me spring calls us to MOVE, to change, to grow, to migrate, but from our roots and not in straight lines, and this dance does that. We might also ‘dig where we stand’ in spring, into our ancestry and into the land where we live, and it does that too. It calls me to my knees, to laughter, to stretching time and space way beyond the glade we’re in with elastic limbs. To my heart beat, yours, the trees, to resting at times, and to gestures that woke in me around eternalness, the notion that we are somehow at our future children’s funerals, and they at our births.
Origin-ate, at high summer. This starts slow, appearing at the base of big trees. It scuttles like fighting ants and slowly makes it’s way into a wild jig and leaps and lifts of joy. I sometimes do an alternate dance around Summer Solstice, which spirals and finds the light.
Burial of the Witches, as we meet the balance point of vernal equinox, and the harvest is in. As I have been ‘digging where I stand’, into my embodied life, into my ancestry, into the land where I live in the wilds of London and Norfolk these dances emerge from what I meet. And as this dance emerged, at the balance point, I met a strong sense that I, and probably therefore many others, still hold a tension and associated cultural realities of the witch trails. It is not so crazy, if we think what contemporary science tells us about what happens in our bodies when we watch a loved one hurt and or killed, and can do nothing about it, and how these holdings and freezes pass down genetically, neurologically and posturally. So I know many folk these days identify with being a ‘witch’, and this is beautiful, but I realised this wasn’t my reality, that for me ‘witch’ was a name given to many who never called themselves ‘witch’. And so it came to pass that instead of embody ‘witch’, I wanted to acknowledge the burden of the trails in my body and in our culture, which still exist, and to mourn and bury those women who still remain with me, killed so violently, who were never ‘witches’. And by so doing offer an un-freezing and integration of this tension I sensed, for me and you, so if we wish we can inhabit and evolve from it, this violence and suppression, and shake some thing up into the present moment that pre-dates the Trails (and the Enclosures and Clearings), something more of land, women, healer, dancer, connected being. So this dance mourns, buries, celebrates and sets free. It digs up some of my Irish roots too, in it’s sound :)