SANCTUARY ON THE FAULT LINE

dance movement

an ecology, a philosophy, a support system, a training and sharing ground, a network of unseen threads

re-embodying dance with legacy, the land and subterranean feminism

re-awakening dance as poetic politic; the potent un-owned grace that holds and changes all

with women dancers as her great alchemists

and wild public space where this catches alight, and re-belongs our humanhood

This page is as alchemic as the movement, it is a space that acts as a portal to the movement as it emerges, evolves and turns. And offers and invites connecting or joining the ways and the nourishment of Sanctuary on the Fault Line, as she is right now. It’s unfinished, it’s mycelial, to a mental age logistician it looks like a hot mess, it will give you a feeling, and other portals to jump through. Enjoy.

say my name, in many names…

it’s easy to feel Sanctuary on the Fault Line, not so easy to capture her in words, she’s a born escapist artist, but come, and let’s circle by first saying her name in many names, and we’ll move towards how you can meet her more intimately and become part…

Sanctuary on the fault line is a dance practice, an earth-wide dance movement, an entwined philosophy, a radical act of care, a re-awakening of feminine action in the dancing body and in dance itself

a re-creation of dance, womanhood and the land as unowned freedom with ground

embedded in a local, ecological, wild notion of public space, a network of meeting places

A coming to the fault lines of current systemic reality, an accepting the impossibilities and injustices, and moving other-how

An alchemical reach from hopelessness, connected to a deep re-knowing

a re-membering of the wisdom we knew, woven with the springs of the current mental age, to bring ‘why dance’ into potency

a well-spring

In many ways Sanctuary on the Fault Line Movement is a spell, for the birth of an altered world, it is dance playing her part in this.

Womanhood, dance and the land are reverenced and re-understood, and come to potent action, through and within the re-orientation the movement offers. And then beyond this, through the women who connect to it, and into the worlds they make when they dance.

It harnesses and taps veins of fugitivity, subterranean feminism, legacy, ritual, contemporary movement science, wild public space, a philosophy of fault lines and sanctuaries and a notion of embedding women dancers in a wild, ecological notion of local community, with public, close-up, close-by, with no borders

Burrowing in these ley lines, it offers a new orientation, new valuing, a new life, and a new ‘stage’ for dance. It lives a truth that has always been; that dancing is the post-activist’s wand, it changes, holds, supports and innovates things.

It’s a call, not like a scream, but an holler of alchemic grace.

How does Sanctuary on the Fault Line work??

Good question. If you are reading this from a ‘civilised’ position in modernity, fasten your seat belts brothers and sisters. and if you are reading this from wildness, prick your ear in your den dear one, we’ve had to go a long way into our loneliness to get here, and we’re so weary. There might be further to go, but this is a space for that. And we are all both wild and civilised, in our own unique measures, some with a greater measure of one than the other, here we are. Are you sitting suitably comfortably, uncomfortably, excitedly, painfully, hopelessly, gleefully? In your sense of being, as it is now? Then let us begin.

Sanctuary on the Fault Line is no new world. It is a space where things unfurl, underbellies to the sky, die, renew, find gesture, disappear, and are allowed to do that. It’s a shame in a way that we must write and speak it in words, because it is not words, it is a dance, and it protects dance as that un-languaged thing of otherness. But at this time, when words hold so much weight, they also help us to travel, here we are. And in all tis slipperiness dance forms in this movement, and meets you.

The Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement (and practice) invites any pro woman dancer, from or in any place, with any dance practice, and of any age to connect or dive in to the movement as much as they wish, and to become part of it’s invisible network, if they wish to do so too. And invites any public to the dances that happen the movement. It is evolving and finding it’s way-less way. Dancer and Rolfer Hayley J S Matthews opened the Pandora’s box of movement in 2020, she dances in the movement and continues to invite others and share the work. And right now has formed a number of ways women dancers can connect to it, train in it, find out for themselves how to open it to public through their own dancing, or walk or dance here to nourish and fortify their dancing.

Here they are:

• As the movement was born there were three labs/wild conferences, and these combined potent talks with workshops and dancing that over nine days between 2020 and 2023 communicated what the movement is, and it’s philosophy. The key note talks of these days are in many ways a gate way to the movement, and they are becoming available to all here

• Soon the full labs, including all the classes and workshops will be available too - the last lab ’The Dance of Being’ is already available, to read about that you can head here. You can purchase an online ticket, let us know through the contacts page and we’ll send you the lab to dive in your own time.

• Hayley opens an annual gathering for any pro woman dancer, mover or body worker who might be interested to lean in, or continue to lean in. 2024’s gathering is March 17 in London, info here. At these gatherings women practice and are given the how’s and what’s so they can take the practice into their lives if they wish to, and are also welcome to come and explore and be nourished without any expectation. Hayley is also open to invitations to hold a gathering near you and with you.

• And lastly (and never lastly) you might find that if you start practicing, you might one day look around the woods, the car park, the roof top, your mind’s eye, or wherever it is you go to in your own spontaneity, fellow woman dancers, and find yourself in an enchanting, invisible web. For the practice /movement though it has no formal ‘structure’ these days, is surprisingly alive, with other women dancers around the world, with wren, flame, wave, rebel, and you are warmly welcome and known here. And together we are a tidal wave. And you might look around one day and find yourselves here too, ‘non-pro dancers’, ‘audiences’, ‘others’ and see one of us in the wild, or even find you are one of us, or woven too, and you are warmly welcome here also, to the alchemy and care.

“Let this be a strengthening, a drinking in, a blossoming, a gathering, a mycelial infiltration, a disintegration, a recalibration, an absorption of worth, a healing, a rewilding, a grief, a rage, a joy. A recovering, a deep grounding, a somewhere to go, an uplifting, a togethering, an unshackling, a beautiful disappearing from grasp, a beating drum, a flooding of dance and ‘woman’ ~ in all her powers ~ through women dancers ~ to you. Hayley x ”

A further note from Hayley below. On how this work has come to be, and some guidance to dancers on how to how to dance in the movement, plus she unpacks some of the terms above and dives into how this movement ‘works’

A note from Hayley

“ In 2020 a confluence of two women dancers burst their banks into my dancing life, and this is where legacy hit me between the eyes, and erupted into ‘Sanctuary on the Fault Line’. Since then other women dancers have begun to peek at the horizon, but that’s a story for another time. These two dancers bursting at my banks were Thea Barnes and Isadora Duncan, somehow they were tapping me on the shoulder, holding their legacy in their hands, offering it to me. It was the same feeling I had then, as the feeling I have dived into my psyche to feel, around the time I was conceived as a twin - a feeling of ‘please not me’, a fury at the responsibility of being connected like that, and at the same time, a nothing I could do about it, which makes me laugh now, while still feeling some of that resistance. I think the resistance comes from a lack of support in our world for both twinhood and what these women had to offer.

The message I got from Isadora was ‘ ‘pure freedom’ comes at a price, it’s not the whole thing. Ground, that’s what we need.’ And from Thea, this is harder for me to say, because her legacy is held by some seriously beautiful, powerful women, her relatives and some who they have aske to join them, and I’m sure they have so much more intimacy with Thea’s legacy to speak it. But I can say, perhaps fortified by the feeling that they choose me to receive the first Thea Barnes Legacy Award at that time in 2020, that she challenged convention and opened doors for others. And to me she said ‘hide, integrate, re-wild, dance, share, teach, and when subterranean feminine power has fully come through your dancing, come out!’

So there we are, that’s the beginning. And Isadora’s work has been a very strong part of ‘Sanctuary on the Fault Line’. First through legacy dancer Elizabeth Schwartz, who began to teach me the rep and technique and then through legacy dancer Barbara Kane, who shared Isadora’s rep at all three of our first labs, and continues to teach me and other fault liners. And Thea, I’m still hiding with her, moving to the tipping point.

I had been feeling unsatisfied before this, to put it lightly, somewhat broken, to put it more directly, regarding my relationship to the world around me as dancer.

The Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement is the sharing of what arose from here, also as I met the Covid19 pandemic, which in a way became an opportunity, a liminality of possibility, as well a deep rivulet of hot challenge. The SOTF practice that I share is an experience of what I have dug up so far, as it weaves through my body, soul and psyche, finding a new relationship between dancing and the world around me. It burrows deeper into my feminine side than I have ever dared dive. I don’t know the way each step shows itself after the next, eventually, and I keep singing it out, and other women dancers come, sometimes it calls them in and sometimes it sends them, into their own part. It’s a strong practical, emotional and philosophical footing somehow. And I share as I go, and open space for any professional woman dancer, from anywhere in the world to explore it as it set out above. The ways I share it changes.

—— below this I’m still in editing mode :) more to come, there are practical how to’s to share, which I will x

I’m going to move through the elements of the movement and practice now, and then move towards the practical ways dancers and witnesses can become part of the movement, or dip their toes in it’s resources and invitations. Here we go. Sanctuary on the Fault Line is simple, but under that simplicity is much to re-member, so it’s also a thicket, let’s go through together.

Feminine Action

‘Feminine action’ is a phrase I’ve invented, because there wasn’t one that felt satisfying to me to describe what I’m inviting and making space for, for me and for others in his movement. So let me expand on it.

When I say ‘feminine action’ is a ley line of the Sanctuary on the Fault Line movement and practice, what I mean is acknowledging and connecting to ‘feminine action’ is one of our resources, we connect to it and let it move us into dancing.

So let me describe what ‘feminine action’ is here. In the body one of these actions is the movement of womb, when around the time of ovulation, she moves up towards the diaphragm. She does this to call in the sperm, should he arrive, and so it is a hidden action of fertilisation. As the womb moves upwards this movement draws the sperm upwards towards the ovum. So we see that the directionality, the forward moving, the ability to see a horizon and shoot at it, which is excellent and necessary, and the ability for ovum to be present, to fall, to receive, to embed, which is also excellent and necessary; this duality has a partner, and it is not a ‘thing’ but a movement. This is what I refer to as ‘feminine action’. Like the ‘greater feminine’ if you like, the ‘great she’. She is unseen, a huge holding, moving things to where they need to go, a background, context kind of reality/force. She is essential.

She is also in the work of mycelium, in the essential underground darkness of the life of trees and forests, which is coming to realisation. And in how our emotions work, if they are allowed to (I’ll expand on that later), and in the tide.

Feminine action is often un-noticed and unseen, and in us is sometimes supressed or disregarded, it seems hard to understand. It lives in the worlds beneath consciousness and subconsciousness, it’s subliminal and often occurs in internal or dark or underground spaces.

And my feeling is that these actions need also to move into outer worlds, to move us not only internally but into our actions and behaviours, and how these behaviours form how we move socially, culturally and systemically. And dancing, is a bridge for that. It is at the synapses.

It is not that I am an advocate of realising all and bringing it into the light of consciousness, like Freud, although Freud offered some wonderful work to the world, I’m more a practitioner of living partly in the dark, of including and integrating these subliminal, unseen movements and channels for these movements in our embodied worlds and in society and how it operates. And a realiser that while we don’t acknowledge these feminine actions, of womb movements, of mycelium, of happenings in the dark, in our value systems and our exchange system, there are parts of our work and our self-hoods that are deadened. And at times these actions, unacknowledged completely or unacknowledged in value, as they can be, are placed into a space of free labour, and so supressed and exhausted. Or suppressed or made redundant by our cultures. And so in our world. And these parts are of great value and necessity to us and our world, as we can hear, as I describe them above.

And dance, dance is a feminine action that has been suppressed and unrealised. It is movement herself, the great she. And it has a role in our bodies and societies that is so far unseen. And even in dance, as she exists today, she is supressed and unrealised. Because there is a big part of dancing that is being drawn, drawn to be with what is happening, in spontaneity, drawn to let emotions move in and through us to others. And it is too much to ask this action to keep pausing to bring to words, to ask, to be told, to write an application, to audition, because she MOVES. Yet like womb’s movement, is easily disrupted or exhausted, not when we realise and hold space for her, but when we don’t, she can disappear. If other actions are called instead, she is very obliging, she easily freezes, and stays frozen, immobilised.

So Sanctuary on the Fault Line is a call and an invitation and a support system to awaken spontaneity in the woman dancer, who knows this feminine action very deeply, to awaken this movement, this flow. To reinstate it because womb doesn’t wait, because emotions get stuck. And when we have a culture that supports this feminine action, which supports our wombs, our trees, our tides, our dances, this great she of feminine action gets strong and steady, and supports everyone. That’s what dance does in her buoyant healthy state, she supports everyone. So Sanctuary on the Fault Line invites women dancers to have a space they can go to in spontaneity, without permission, a ‘wild space’, to make and to share (perform). And this is the opening of the vein. Am I making sense? And as many of us move like this, in a movement, can you imagine what is happening?

Sometimes when we begin this path where spontaneity is again possible, grief and rage and other wonderful, essential, graceful messes erupt, and these are her tributaries, the tributaries of feminine action. So stay with it and dance it, or witness it and feel it if you are witness in this movement. Sharing these dances with others is the beginning of unblocking. And if no other person comes and you are dancer in this movement, you are not alone, we are here and so is sky and bird and earthworm.

And why? Because while I, and you don’t have the power or skillset to change our cultural and social systems, I, and you, and we come to the fault lines of this reality, and inhabit and become moved by these paces in the dark, these ‘subliminal actions’, these ‘feminine actions’ of emotion and feeling and womb. Knowing that beneath the politics that governs and becomes how we operate culturally, socially and politically is the poetic, and when the poetic current changes, in how it moves or what it is moved by or allows itself to be moved by, the poetic being the very ‘feminine action’ of society, the upper world then slowly changes too. And dance is a poetic current. And so is ‘feminine action’, so we free it to dance.

As you can begin to hear, ‘feminine action’ happens in every layer of our world. And dance is it in society. And sometimes we have to dip back to ‘wild space’ to bring it back. That’s what we’re up to here.

If you’d like to hear more about how dance is part of how our emotional lives operate, head to the TALKS page, and if my talk isn’t up in Wave 2 yet, it will be soon.

Subterranean Feminism

Ego work

Re-belonging to land

(also a message about dance’s essentialness, and the essentialness of the feminine and feminine action, and the essential presence of the feminine in dance practice)

Gift economy

Wild public space

Re-embodying woman, land and dance

(available, unavailable, owned)

Wild space

legacy

(inc. mother trees, dunacn, barnes, what isdora and thea told me)

Ritual

Contemporary movement science

Fugitivity

Becoming part

(and rooting in greater uniqeuness rather than seeking uniqueness alone )

Coming to the Fault Lines

Breaking away from the alone-ness of the mental age

(inc Gebster’s qualities)

Diana as architype

Sanctuary

How to practice

(inc seasonal, spontaneity, disappearing, wild space, naming ourselves or not - inc acknowledging support is to get a greater foot hold, naning ourselves not just as fault liner but as dancer, can be a kind of re-birth - the role of dancer can get so muddy)

This role of ‘dancer’

(keening women, neurological)

Not the ‘easy way out’

I’m not saying that this is a path fraught with danger, but it is not also a path where any denial of what is is possible, and that isn’t easy. But then, life isn’t easy, this being of flesh and soul at once, these many current crises, this bliss even. For me it’s better to accept the trouble and move with it, from the fault lines, in good company, and to trust. Rather than to tread water or create from ’no ground’. The fault lines, as frustrating and gruesome to accept at times, are our ground, and what seems backwater, background, side-lined is the greatest sanctuary. And is no backwater, it’s just there’s been a cultural move that has told us so.

We all go different ways with it

(being wiling to allow these to be part, rather than a stardom)

The Invisible network

What next?

My aim, which grows, is to re-orient and re-value dance through the lens (by which I mean the deep pool of embodied experience and intelligence, because this is the feminist lens) of a deeply feminist, radical, realistic approach to how dance is made, shared and articulated. A way-less way that re-owned spontaneity, flow, deep value and confidence back into the hearts and lives of women dancers, where it could flow out again to public. A way that also awoke connection, presence, attention, belonging, emotion, flow, essential ego work, ritual and freedom as integral to dance training and practice. I wanted to awaken a network of streams that would tap us back into the ground water of dancing, and the value of this ground water for us and for others. With a recovered ability to pour this ground water into the world. And to rest, attend and divert whenever needed, as part of a seasonal, cosmic practice, while creating a wellspring for our practice. Where dancing means we metabolise our grief, our rage, our care, our joy and all the feelings we cannot language into the beauty of the world. Not ‘only’ for dancing and dancer’s own sake but so dancing can be re-awoken as a way we pass messages, hold each other, digest emotion, direction, next steps and possibility and potentiality for community.

At times public and male dancers were invited too, to the labs, to consider, witness and awaken the feminine side of our dancing lives and their meaning and power.

In this territory the movement moved in, of dancer and the feminine, there is much vagueness, confusion, frustration, wounds and displacements to move with. But what I hope is that in these three years that the movement moved it gave a re-wilding, a huge gulp of breath, a drink to as many as I could, to go some way to this re-awakening I write of.

The practice continues in my own life as a dancer. And I am sure is with those who joined me, finding it’s way to feed them and others through their own bodies, experience, lives, souls and dancing. More the huge thank yous to everyone who was part. And you can meet it in my regular dances in wild space, I’m sure in theirs, in the talks and in the annual gathering if you are fellow female pro dancers.

Hayley x “

Dancers in the header photo from left; Hayley J S Matthews, Rachel Elderkin, Sandra Voulgari.

Film description: A tiny film made as the network of pro women dancers began to gather…dancers in this film: Rachel Elderkin, Chloe Snelgrove, Amy Mauven, Lisa Sang, Julia Pond, Daisy Black, Sandra Voulgari, Emma Zangs, Hayley J S Matthews and Anastasia Kostner. Film shot by Ruby Phelen.