With Kirstie Simson and Simon Whitehead
Practicing Places Part I (zoom, online) 18 May, 2025.
1pm – 6pm
A day to orient to the practices and processes of finding, making and moving with found materials.
Introducing ecosomatic scores to ground us where we are, within a wider collective field.
Cost: £70-£50 (sliding scale).
Practicing Places Part II (in person) 21 – 25 July, 2025.
Cwm Cych Valley, west Wales.
An in-depth process of finding, playing, stitching, making and moving in a complex forested river valley ecosystem in North Pembrokeshire, with daily studio practice in a local village hall.
Making a garment with cloth and found materials, a shawl to move in and with…
Cost: £320 (2 lower cost places available for those unable to meet the full cost; & one work/study place available, please enquire).
(Join for one or both workshops)
Finding materials – stitching them together – a tangled shawl
Making coverings for the body – concealments, making difference
Moving and making within the studio/ and without (a forested valley)
Worlds and body-composites imagined as yet unknown, though recognised, animated, remembered…
To book or for more information contact:
Stirling Steward – rstirlingsteward@gmail.com.
We can provide a list of local accommodation and travel information. Closest train stations are Carmarthen or Aberystwyth. Nearest airport is Cardiff. Buses run to within walking distance of the village of Abercych. Postcode for the hall is SA37 0HB.
(It is possible to pay in instalments).
Kirstie Simson and Simon Whitehead.
Dance/ Movement – situated workshops
We have called our work together Practicing Places. This collaboration has been developed as an intensive movement workshop each summer since 2017 in the small village of Abercych in rural Pembrokeshire. Each workshop lasts 4 days and participants are accommodated in the village and surrounding area. Based on the premise that we are always active in processes of making places, the days spent together explore the significance of embodied practice as an approach to unearthing key questions around ways of being with ourselves, each other and belonging to the earth.
Kirstie and Simon offer simple movement & listening scores for indoors and outdoors, interwoven with time to walk, draw, swim and eat together. Time together is blended with solitary time, for reading, writing, walking and drawing. The opportunities to seek support around current preoccupations in our work is balanced with deep physical practice, in the evenings we swim, walk in the dark and talk around the fire.