Spells for the End of this World
Sanctuary on the Fault Line ~ Annual Gathering~ For Women Dancers
2024: March 17, 10:00 - 18:00, The North London Wilds
Photo: Al H M Simmons
This is an invitation to women dancers to connect, renew and meet the ‘Sanctuary on the Fault Line Movement’. A feminist dance movement that re-embodies and re-orients womanhood, dance and the land as un-owned, potent grace. In the movement’s birth place, the hundreds of years old woods of Hampstead Heath.
Shifted from the 2023 December date, to March 17, 2024.
An invitation also for women movers and body workers who would like to connect with the act of dancing today.
In many ways the ‘Sanctuary on the Fault Line Movement’ is a spell, a spell for the end of this world as we’ve seen it, and for the birth of a new world, where womanhood, dance and the land we live with, are reverenced, 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.
'Sanctuary on the Fault Line' harnesses fugitivity, subterranean feminism, contemporary movement science, legacy, and a notion of embedding women dancers in an ecological notion of community. And through these offers a new valuing, a new orientation, a new life, and a new ‘stage’ for dance. Re-tuning, liberating and re-honouring dance, womanhood and the land as the unstoppable gifts they are. It lives a truth that has always been; that dancing is the post-activist’s wand, it changes, supports and innovates things.
We’ll learn and renew the ways of this movement, with Dancer and Rolfer Hayley J S Matthews, who opened the pandora’s box of it in 2020, and others who continue to connect to it, who are many around the world.
It will be a effervescent, soft weave of a day, in the glade where Hayley opens, practices and performs as part of the movement. We will touch lightly on the wholeness of the practice. We’ll move and be in voice together and apart, simply, in ways that empower and support our nervous systems to move with and through our feminine aspects in ecological community. We’ll work with how we can develop a strong aerobic foundation, without which, change never happens.
The movement has some simple wild dancing ‘anthems’, we’ll move with these and you can take them home and share them as you wish. We will have time to share our questions and discoveries in the glade where Hayley works and performs regularly. We will eat together and drink tea. We will laugh and fall and have time to attune. And we will dance, discovering the practice in our bodies, and learning some of the choreographic work that this 're-wilding’ of dance and womanhood has birthed in Hayley’s own dancing life. Particularly we’ll dwell with a dance called 'Burial of the Witches', it mourns, grieves and celebrates our ancestresses who were killed as ‘witches’, and invites them to come through our bones singing, as the powerful, healing, transformational women they were. This dance sparks in the glade at Samhain, so it will be beautiful to flourish and put it to rest at this time of Spring’s coming.
The day will run 10-6, with much time for tea drinking, picnic lunches, wandering, staying warm and being together. Bring flasks, lunches and warm layers. There’s also a cafe near by. And we can have a drink in celebration at day’s end, in the local pub, for those who would like to stay on into celebration.
If the weather is due to drown us out Hayley will be in touch to propose part of the day under cover.
You will leave with an understanding or renewal of the practice, which you could choose to ignite in your own dancing life. And with an invitation to the invisible network of women practicing this work and allowing it to blossom in unique ways in their lives, deciding to be with part or all of it's philosophy, as you wish. And hopefully, with renewed and fortified faith, that change is possible, and women and dancing can be a tidal wave of it. You’ll each be gifted a letter, with as much as Hayley is able to bring to words of the what’s and how’s of the movement, so you can digest this in the days, months and years after.
If you'd like to do more listening in to the movement before you come, or anyway, between 2020 and 2023 there were three labs that birthed this work into the world, the key note talks of those labs, given by Hayley and invited friends of this fault line type way, are finding their way here:
https://www.ensembledance.org/sanctuaryonthefaultlinetalks
Booking
Standard booking:
For those who struggle to meet their basic monthly expenses (please only use this booking if you are on benefits, or not able to buy coffee and glasses of wine out etc)