The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor

How can we break out of the modern industrial mindset that holds us captive, and find our feet on the dancing floor of Earth?

Over the last decade, the Dark Mountain Project has held a unique space in which art, story and myth entwine to help us face the realities of a time of ecological unravelling. As the climate crisis and a mass extinction accelerates, it feels urgent that we actively transform the ways we engage with life and reconnect with the wild world around us.

Join Charlotte Du Cann, Nick Hunt, Caroline Ross and Mark Watson this autumn for an online course hosted by Schumacher College, to forge a co-creative practice that can challenge the dominance of modernity, and regain our original kinship with the more-than-human world.

Since the publication of the Uncivilisation manifesto in 2009 the project has served as a gathering place for writers and artists seeking to ‘uncivilise’ themselves and their work, and to remember our original role as connectors and communicators within the sentient networks of Earth.

In this spirit, the course sets out to teach essential practices and tools to navigate times of descent, using story, myth, plant medicine and natural materials that help root us in place and time. We will be walking into the twilight, into the liminal spaces of our neighbourhoods, holding a dialogue with the land, using our imaginations to speak with the other-than-human world, and engaging the head, heart and hands of everyone taking part. 

As part of this ensemble investigation, we will be gathering roots, dreams, materials and words. We will be creating work to celebrate what we encounter, as human beings have been doing for millennia, reconnecting with our archaic bodies and remembering our ancestral kinship with plants and creatures and the elements. 

Practical information: This six-week online course will involve group discussions, solo weekly tasks and 1:1 sessions, and culminate in a sharing of creative work at the end of the month. It will provide opportunities for working within a Dark Mountain frame, in-depth conversation with fellow explorers, and a chance to focus on deepening your own practice and core relationship with the planet.

Our exploration will run from the end of October, though the month of November, tracking the shift of the year, as it moves from autumn into the darkness of winter. During this month you will be in the company of four Dark Mountain ‘spiral’ guides: with Charlotte Du Cann, discover how to work within the mythos of the Underworld, following the bee-shaped dance steps of Ariadne; with Nick Hunt, step out into the twilight to make imaginative journeys into edges and the unknown; with Mark Watson, hold fast and encounter the plant world, working with trees, roots, seeds and the underground mycelium; and with Caroline Ross, gather wild and salvaged materials to create a thread of return, to engage in ways of unmaking and remaking as human beings have done for our entire existence. 

We look forward to journeying with you!

For booking and further details: The Labyrinth and the Dancing Floor – Dartington Trust

IMAGE: Woman of the Horses by Kate Walters
Ness of Brodgar, Orkney
(from Dark Mountain: Issue 16  – REFUGE)