🌳 Eco Expression — Artistic Residency 🌳

Exploring the realms and applications of artistic performance in tree scapes.

📍 Varese, Italy 🗓️ 3 – 4 July 2027 ⏰ 09:00 – 17:00 daily

🌿 What's Inside?

This gathering is centred around the practical, philosophical, political, and pedagogical approaches to artistic creation and performance in tree scapes.

It's a chance for performers, artists, and practitioners to take their work into a new dimension — embedding their current practice within trees, and exploring the affordances tree spaces offer for nourishing our artistic, performative, and creative sensibilities. 🌲

We'll move between two modes of learning:

🔼 Vertical — a space to learn ideas, methods, and practices proposed by us
🔄 Horizontal — learning through collective intelligence, shared embodied practice, and emergent pedagogy

By the end, you'll leave with:

🎭 New ways of applying, thinking about, and expressing your current art form in tree scapes
🧰 A set of practices you can use and share within tree scapes
🌱 Nourished eco-artistic, creative, and performative sensibilities to carry into future projects

Additional to the workshop…

All Participants will be invited to join a free optional two day Movement research gathering directly after the workshop finishes.

Research Gathering | 5-6 July

The Design

This will be a horizontal (non led) space for the group to co create Ecosomatic movement material that can be taken away and applied into many different contexts or realities.

This will occur in the same location as the workshop so you can keep your camping set up and carry on the experience for two days longer if you so wish.

Need more information

get in touch

🍃 The Learning Approach

🕺 Participatory Action — Transformation through direct experience. Material will be co-creational and emergent, drawing on Contact Improvisation, Contemporary Dance, the Feldenkrais Method, Arboreal Locomotion, Parkour, and Martial Arts.

👀 Witnessing Observation — Learning by seeing. Time spent quietly watching and observing as a route to integration and deeper introspection.

💬 Reflexive Discussion — Developing shared language. Building shared vocabulary for phenomenological experience, and exploring how our disciplines translate into non-human-made contexts.

🧠 Collective Research — Cultivating collective intelligence. Co-created research with no single leader — everyone as a generative figure moving toward something emergent and collective. A pillar of this residency.

🙋 Who Is This For?

⚠️ This residency is not open level.

Designed for people already deep into their own performative/artistic medium — e.g. circus performers, dancers, acro-yogis, avid rock/tree climbers, acrobats, and parkour athletes.

Expect high-level physical practice in vertical environments. Strong spatial awareness, falling ability, and good weight-distribution skills will be necessary.

Not sure if you're a good fit? Get in touch — we're happy to chat it through. ✉️

🧳 Practical Information

🚆 Transport

Just outside central Varese, Italy
Closest station: Varese Station — a 25-minute walk or 10-minute bus
Direct train access from Milan Malpensa airport

⛺ Accommodation

Hosted in a large private garden full of ancient Italian trees
Bring your own camping gear (tent, sleeping bag, mat)
Full kit list provided upon booking confirmation

🍎 Food & Water

Food not included
Supermarket just 3 minutes' walk from the property
Drinkable water on site, plus a large communal fridge

🚿 Amenities

Showers and bathrooms on site
Communal fridge

🎟️ Sign Up

📅 3–4 July 2027 | ⏰ 09:00–17:00 | 📍 Varese, Italy

📧 Rootsofplay@gmail.com

Eco Expression

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