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The Land We Are
The Land We Are is a project by dance artist Vanessa Grasse, offering a variety of creative activities in woodlands and green spaces. Inviting us to fully experience through our body, our movement, our senses and our physicality, to revive our connection with and care for trees, the land and natural ecosystems.
Experiencing through the body is a fundamental way of knowing which allows us to find deeper, meaningful and empathic connections.
Activities include choreographic works, movement workshops, remote scores, and interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and environmental experts.
Each activity offers a practice of moving with trees, woodlands and other environments, investigating ways to facilitate shifts in our anthropocentric experiences; offering embodied, creative and accessible experiences of ecology and relationship with the more-than-human world.
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WOVEN LAND
A participatory audio guided choreography for urban or rural parks, woodlands and green spaces.
Participants are guided via an audio track into a physical, poetic and immersive outdoor experience that invites them to connect to green spaces, trees and other people, from an embodied and ecological perspective.
A ritual of ecological and social interconnectivity in a period of climate, health and social connectivity crisis. A series of solo and collaborative movement tasks unfold via a poetic narration, inviting you to intimately immerse yourself within the surroundings, be playful with found natural materials and interact with the group.
The work integrates choreography with poetry, research into tree ecology and Land Art processes, with audio scores by musician Oliver Dover.
31 July 2021 We Wonder Festival, Rotherham,UK
21-26 June 2021 Sanafest, Norway
7 October 2020 Badischer Kunstverein, How do we care? Fest, Germany
Woven Land is part of Xtrax Outdoor Dance Collection Catalogue at Birmingham International Dance Festival and UK Dance Showcase 2021 and OAUK Reconnect marketplace 2023.
See video pitch with technical information for the show HERE
AVAILABLE FOR TOUR BOOKINGS
BOOKING INFO PACK FOR VENUES & FESTIVALS HERE
Photos: LIzzie Coombes
MEANDERS
An immersive performance through woodlands and fields, sensing, being with and becoming landscape. An invitation to witness and participate in a journey of connectivity with the environment and each other.
After being guided on a sensorial woodland walk we are invited to witness formations of bodies and branches in metamorphosis. Branching pathways emerge from and return to the land, in cycles of transformation, decay and renewal.
As the journey unfolds we find ourselves involved with exploring, moving with branches and each other. Ultimately co-creating a temporary sculpture, which will rest in the landscape as a trace of our gathering.
Meanders weaves choreography, Land Art and tree ecology, exploring our relationship to landscape, trees, natural forms and materials, with a particular interest in 'branching forms' which are evolutionary paths of growth and interconnection that humans share with the Earth and other organisms.
Choreographed by Vanessa Grasse in collaboration with the dancers and contribution by Land Artist James Brunt.
BRANCHING DIALOGUES REMOTE WORKSHOP
19 November 2021 Body IQ festival
June-July 2021 Climate Encounters Festival
NOW AVAILABLE TO BUY DIRECTLY FROM HERE
This remote audio guided workshop invites you on an outdoor immersive, physical and poetic journey with a tree and with branching worlds. Downloadable audio tracks, visual and written guidance, movement explorations and embodied imagery will guide you to move, connect and explore with a tree, in a park, woodland or garden of your choice. Beginning indoors with a video introduction and physical warmup to tune into different species of branching that are present in ourselves and in natural environments; four audio tracks will then guide you on a walk to meet and move with a tree; ending with a short response and reflection once back home. You can experience the work in your own time, individually or with a few people in a place and with a tree of your choice.
Branches are one of the various evolutionary pathways that we share with other creatures and systems. Branching systems are present throughout different organisms, through biological and geological evolution. By attuning to our own branching systems we will explore the possibility of entering into a relational engagement with other branching worlds, noticing what this dialogue might reveal to us about our belonging, our connectivity with the Earth, with other species, and in particular with trees. The workshop offers a somatic lens and entry point towards your own wider ecological investigations, creative and healing practices.
You will receive a link with:
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30 min video including a visual introduction and an audio guided indoor warm up
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4 audio tracks: guided movement explorations to take outdoors
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2 pdfs with complementary activities
The audio tracks and pdfs are downloadable and for you to keep.
INTERNATIONAL DAY OF FORESTS
Chick here
to download the movement score created for International Day of Forests
21st March 2021
CLIMATE ENCOUNTERS CONVERSATIONS
Chick here
to read the interactive blog post created for Yorkshire Dance's Climate Encounters Festival 2021
REMOTE RESPONSE COMMISSIONS
2020
During the Covid-19 lock down, 5 dance artists who couldn't join the research in Sugarwell Hill Leeds, were commissioned by Vanessa Grasse to create a small project in response to a creative brief and movement scores from The Land We Are. The projects took place in England, Scotland, Switzerland, The Netherlands and France.
LEEDS DANCE PARTNERSHIP FELLOWSHIP
Research - Residency at Leeds Beckett University
2019
SUPPORT
Support us by making a donation.
The Land We Are is an independent project relying on temporary funding and donations.
Your donation will go towards either a savings pot used as match cash when we apply for funding, or it will be directly used towards the development and creation of a self-funded activity.
