We’re excited to be welcoming several new work exchangers for the summer – welcome Liv, Marianna, Catherine, Katerina, and Liv!

Image: From left to right: Catherine, Xin, & Marianna

The garden is on its way back! All the good work of past efforts and dreams are sprouting forth with renewed commitment to grow food and beauty for the community of life we are!

Join us on Tuesday July 4 at 10am in the Alden Pavilion behind the Shaw Memorial Library in Plainfield (312 Main Street). Together, we will read the Declaration of Independence and Frederick Douglass' 1852 Fourth of July Address. After the reading, we will discuss the readings and issues in small, moderated, groups. Open to all 12 and over. This year, we will be joined by Martha Burns who will sing songs of freedom.

Our Summer Jam (F.K.A. July 4th) is a special and epic yearly event…family-inclusive, outdoor inviting, camping centered, and full of opportunity to dance, play, swim, and simply be within a communal setting. With the warmth of the air and the green of the fertile earth supporting us, this jam invites us to feel and expand into aspects of interdependence, intergenerational play, and interconnection. A children’s program both supports the parents as well as creates a container for children to explore together as well as with adults.

Eliana Bonard is joining us all the way from Argentina!

Following *Fedora Aberastury’s fundamental principles and Contact Improvisation, we awake our “energy centers” in order to make energy flow freely. In so doing, subtle and authentic movement happens. Expanding the volume of our body, by opening joints, by moving our spine and by letting go unnecessary tensions, we generate a true presence. Then we get to Contact with the earth and the others, deepening our senses and hearing, unfolding communication. We will practice specific contact improvisation exercises in order to develop skills, and we will explore ways in our language of improvisation for solo, duo, and larger groups.

Come join others on a path of self-discovery for a fruitful dive into your inner world. Drawing from IFS (Internal Family Systems), also called Parts Work, we will root into our centered self, that inner witness, and attend to the parts of us that hold challenging emotions or thought patterns, such as depression, anxiety, judgment, and jealousy, from a place of curiosity.

As we do this, we learn that all parts of us are simply trying their best to help us. One role they play is trying to shield us from pain, harm, discomfort or overwhelm. These are called our “protectors”. Often their strategies aren’t so great: They may distract us, lead us toward addictive behaviors, ignite anger or cause endless mental loops. Pushing these protectors away or ignoring, often makes things worse. Here, we learn to partner with them and support them.

You are invited to come dance, move, stretch, release and recharge ~ Come as you are ~ Let’s co-create a safe place to get into our bodies and celebrate the gifts of Summer!
This will be a dance of celebration with Summer. To celebrate the sun, the fire in our vitality, the fruits and crops growing upon the fields and orchards. Giving our gratitude for the abundance of Mother Earth. The love for our friends and families as well as our safety and protection. We come together as an ocean and flow with the waters ~ counting our blessings and dancing with the forest, the nature spirits and fairies.

Contact Improvisation and the Argentine Tango are two improvisational forms and emerging dance vocabularies gaining worldwide popularity. They have vastly different roots, and yet have many interesting intersections which offer opportunities for dancers of each form to expand their social consciousness and movement skill sets. They are both forms which have performing arts and social trajectories, offering their dancers a wide range of explorations in which to build dance as both an art form and a social container.

In this Workshop, Eliana and Daniel will explore some of the overlapping commonalities and distinctive differences of the two forms. They hope to encourage dancers to widen their improvisational vocabularies and overcome any confusions about how these two divergent forms of improvisational dance can inform each other. And we will have fun doing it.

Can we collectively create a space that encourages us to simultaneously mobilize while being still? Connect while resting? Create while integrating? Ground while strengthening? We invite you to join us in …The Pause… to collectively hold a space that is slow, soft, and spacious. Explore with us these antidotes to a culture that is always seeking to produce more, faster. Let’s slow down to enjoy rest and integration. Co-regulate and find stillness together so we can soften what we are holding and melt into deeper relation with ourselves, each other and the earth.

Join Loom Ensemble at EarthDance this summer for an immersive experience of collaborative, interdisciplinary dance-theater creation and performance! During this weeklong residency, participants will train daily in dance, theatermaking, and performance techniques in the morning. In the afternoon, Artistic Directors Neva Cockrell and Raphael Sacks will work with participants to devise ensemble dance-theater performances. Participants will then publicly perform these pieces, as a fully-integrated part of Loom’s professional touring show, “Tell Me How You Breathe: Dance-Theater for Collective Liberation” Performances at Earthdance will take place Friday and Saturday nights, August 4th and 5th. The show will then move to Boston for a Sunday evening performance on August 6th, which the Earthdance Ensemble is invited to be a part of!

Singing together is a ritual, and song has been part of collective ritual practice across time and place. In Resonance and Ritual, we gather an emergent community to sing together and collaborate on ritual sound experiences co-created by participants and master teachers. We combine various vocalization practices and ground them with nightly rituals rooted deeply in music. Our workshops and shared practices include improvisational singing, folk songs, song circles, invocations, and musical embodiment. The ritual practice is tied closely to land-based reverence at the beautiful location of Earthdance on Nipmuc and Abenaki land. Weaving their Earthdance roots with a synchronous vision, Marie Ebacher, Emmett DeBeer Charno and Charlotte Malin come together as song leaders and space holders to generate this space. The event will feature local indigenous leader Evan Pritchard and master song leaders Onome and Elana Brody.

The NC is an itinerant school for the principle study and application of the Axis Syllabus. Rather than a festival, or celebration, The NC is what it’s title suggests, an intensive study context. The study of the AS is meant to empower the individual to defend and promote their own health and the health of those they might be responsible for, in other words to sponsor responsible autonomy.

Check out the Teachers:

Frey Faust / Nuria Bowart / Claire Reid

The long-time tradition of weekly Sunday CI Jams has returned! Come for a class beforehand, or just for the jam. Stay for the sauna and potluck dinner! Registration not required.

Class: 5:00 – 6:30pm (rotating teachers)

Potluck: 6:30 – 7:30pm

Jam: 7:30 – 10:00pm