Workshop: Creative Explorations with Ecology
Date: Saturday 30 September 2023
Time: 11am-4pm
Venue: The Lowry Aldridge Studio
Closing Date for Registration: Monday 25 September 2023
Register: https://forms.office.com/e/keA59S5LFF
In this workshop, Ali Matthews (devisor and performer) and Kate Adams (dramaturg) from this autumn season’s Mushroom Language: A Fungal Gothic will invite you into their joint practice, drawing on relationships with ecosystems and generating creative material from the natural world.
We are excited about making work that takes nature as its template – that tries to understand and inhabit our ecosystems in new and meaningful (and funny and terrifying and weird) ways.
Through activities that may include drawing, writing, embodiment, role-play and framed improvisation, we will open up ways we take inspiration from and unfurl ideas from ecological systems.
This is a workshop for performance makers of all backgrounds and disciplines – movers, writers, shakers and makers. Please bring in something that connects you to a particular ecosystem or natural environment – this might be an object, a piece of text, an image or a movement fragment.
Schedule for the day:
11am – 1pm: Morning session with a comfort break
1pm – 2pm: Lunch break
2pm – 4pm: Afternoon session with a comfort break
Ali Matthews is an artist who works across performance, music and video. Over the past two years, she has been working with arts and science partners across the UK alongside a vibrant creative team to research and develop her show Mushroom Language. She has created work for venues as diverse as ArtsAdmin/Toynbee Studios, Chelsea Theatre, York Mediale, Project Arts Centre Dublin, Glogauir Studios Berlin, Lancaster Arts, Contact Theatre and Aberystwyth Arts Centre. Her gig theatre piece The Witching Way (created with Leo Burtin) premiered at the Royal Exchange in 2019 and toured to venues including Lancaster Arts and Square Chapel, Halifax. In 2019, she was selected as a Manchester International Festival Creative Lab artist. In 2021, she was a Ferment artist in residence at Dartington Arts in Devon. She received an Lancashire Arts Exchange commission in 2021 to redevelop her play for video, BOBBY, LUNCH IS DARKNESS, written in collaboration with an AI text chain generator. The Guardian has called her “a bewitching performer whose songs cling and haunt” (for the ‘Ballad of Isosceles’ at SLAP Festival). She is produced by Plum Grosvenor-Stevenson with support from Making Room. She also makes music under the moniker Pink Oyster.
Kate Adams is a performance maker, dramaturg, university lecturer and member of the board of directors for the Climate Psychology Alliance. She creates imaginative non-fictional worlds which activate landscapes of human connection and emotions combining figurative modes of expression such as dance, music and stories with nonfictional material. Her current project, Water is Attracted to Water celebrates the human relationship with water and opens up questions relating to the ecological and climate crisis using an approach rooted in ecodramaturgy and climate psychology. She is an experienced dramaturg and has collaborated with Danae Theodoridou, Scott Thurston & Sarie Slee and has a long standing collaboration with Medie Megas including working as dramaturg and performer for Trapped (2018) at the National Theatre of Greece, co-produced with Onassis Cultural Centre for Fast Forward Festival.
