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Final gathering in our How We Walk Through the Fire series of creative workshops centred around the eight fires of the ancestral solar year.
As the light descends towards the dark months of winter and we approach Samhain, the hinge of the ceremonial year, our eighth and final workshop in this series will focus on what it means to maintain a dramaturgical practice; one that fosters a regenerative, deep-time culture.
Our year-long journey has deliberately engaged with a time frame that goes beyond this civilisation’s history, towards a past that is held in the planet’s rocks and its many life forms, as well as in our own human ‘bone-knowledge’. We have called our final session Honouring the Ancestors, following the track of worldwide archaic and indigenous cultures that have always looped back to their beginnings, in order to know how to proceed towards the future.
Everything that is born and lives is part of a cycle of emergence, and re-emergence, out of the dark. Myth and story, art and ceremony, remind us of this, and the need to descend into that dark and communicate with the ancestors who dwell there. In this time of unravelling and loss, when we are unsure which way to turn, it is those ancestors who can teach the creative moves we need to make in our ordinary lives.
Join Dark Mountain’s Charlotte Du Cann and Dougie Strang in an ensemble investigation into the ancestral fabric of Earth.
About this Eight Fires series
How We Walk Through the Fire aims to forge a collective practice amongst writers, artists, and creative practitioners; and to host a culture that can both weather the storm and lay the tracks for a more ‘biospheric’ relationship with ourselves and the more-than-human world.
Each of the fires has explored different themes and approaches to this practice, from storytelling to plant medicine to performance – but all aim to foster resilience and radical kinship, and to strengthen our creative voices within an ensemble. Together we’ll ‘walk through the fire’, letting go of what no longer serves, and discovering what might bring repair and regeneration to a world, and a culture, in crisis.
How We Walk Through the Fire workshops are hosted by Charlotte Du Cann and Dougie Strang who have created many immersive, dramaturgical events and teachings for Dark Mountain, based on reconnection with deep time and the mythology of place.
Practical information
The course comprises two x 2 hour group Zoom sessions, with time for a solo walk/encounter and a creative task during the week in between. It will include exercises and discussion and provide opportunities for:
- Working within a Dark Mountain frame
- In-depth conversation with fellow writers and artists
- Deepening your practice
- Exploring relationship with the living world
When: Saturday 29th October 4-6pm BST and Saturday 5th November, 4-6pm GMT
Note all time zones are welcome to participate.
Group size: 16 people maximum
Price: £55
How to apply: As the course has limited space and we are looking for a diverse group of participants, please could you let us know a bit about yourself: where you are writing from, your current practice and why you would like to take part in the course. A few sentences are fine! Send your email to info@dark-mountain.net and we will be in touch.
Deadline for applications: Monday 17th October 2022
Tutors
Charlotte Du Cann is a writer, editor and co-director of the Dark Mountain Project. She has taught creative non-fiction and reconnection with the wild in many places, including Schumacher College, Arvon, School of the Wild, Sweden’s Riksteatern, and Natural Beekeeping Trust. She has been the co- producer of recent Dark Mountain art and writing workshops, Finding the Words When the Story is Over and When the Mountain Speaks with Us.
Dougie Strang is a writer, performer, and member of Dark Mountain’s organising collective. His work is often inspired by Scotland’s wild places, and he collaborates with various organisations to facilitate wholehearted encounters with those places, most recently as dramaturg and performer on Ùrlar, a site-specific theatre and dance production, commissioned by the National Trust and staged on the slopes of Ben Lomond.
Charlotte and Dougie have worked together on numerous Dark Mountain events, creating workshops and performances including A Dance Down the Dark Mountain, at Unfix in Glasgow and at Winterwerft Festival in Frankfurt, Conversations in the Dark at the big room in Macclesfield, The Night Breathes Us In in Reading, Base Camp in Devon, and Carrying the Fire on Rannoch Moor.
IMAGE: Rock paining by Caroline Ross (cover for Dark Mountain: Issue 13)