Primal Praise - Retreat and Play Lab to get more Free and vitalize the Land

Weekend long immersive experience in the ancestral technologies of ritual play and animist embodied art making with Larissa Kaul

Primal Praise is a weekend long immersive experience in the ancestral technologies of ritual play and animist embodied art making. In this setting, we treat our creative participation and presence as a form of devotion and offering to Reality, as a necessary nutrient for the wellbeing of self, community, place, and planet.

This is a space aimed at recovery from the legacy of colonialism and supremacy culture. We will engage in contemplative practices, deep listening, movement, sound, and theater structures to shift our state and engage our creative energy. Our explorations will be linked with the ecological context, the land that is hosting us, and will unfold in partnership with what we are sensing. This is a liberatory practice that holds profound implications for shifting our patterns of behavior and for shaping culture toward greater responsibility and health.

Open to anyone regardless of previous experience, best suited for those willing to take sustainable risks, play with mystery, and seed the future.

Our facilitator Larissa is based in Portland, Oregon USA, stopping in the UK on their way home from India! This is a rare opportunity that may never repeat itself. Larissa is interested in building community hubs and networks that can support transformative art and artists across the globe.

Dates: April 5-7 at Fell Edge Farm

Sliding scale prices: £250 - £400

Limited spots, food included, option to spend the night.

Overview of our Play-Lab/Retreat

Friday April 5th ARRIVING and SHEDDING

Our first evening together will focus on landing well and shedding what will not be useful to us during our play-lab; unecessary masking, unaligned expectations of self or other, contortions in our embodiment and thinking that keep us anxious and unable to be generous with self and other.

Arrive by 6pm, opening circle, dinner, blob around spa and intention crafting

Saturday April 6th BECOMING A DANCING REFLECTION OF PLACE

We will get introduced to more maps, tools, and frameworks or “view”, but we will be spending much of our time in practice and play. We will explore ritual theatrical structures including systemic constellations as a way to “become a dancing reflection of place”, or a creative, responsive collaborator with the surrounding ecology of Fell Edge Farm. We will ask how we can be of greatest benefit to this place with our creative presence, and experiment with how to bring that into fruition, with a culmination offering to take place on Sunday morning.

10am-5pm main bits, other stuff may happen before and after

Sunday April 7th PRIMAL PRAISE: THE CREATIVE FEAST

Our embodied research culminates in a more structured offering to the surrounding ecology on Sunday morning. Whatever we picked up on in our deep listening and communing practices in the last two days will get a chance to be acted out and played with ritually. Whatever we enjoyed the most, or seemed to inspire the most shimmering response from the land will get to be amplified. Larissa will guide us through simple ritual theatrical structures to devise how this will go. Followed by after care and luxurious reflection that makes sure whatever transformations have taken place can find a proper home. Think artist buodoir, spring time salon.

What skillsets and outcomes does this experience touch on?

• Developing exquisite self-intimacy through creative excercises that encourage naturalness, honesty, and grounded wildness
• Participating in ritual actions with a group that actually feel nourishing and are based in neuroscience and play science
• Practicing listening and communing with beyond human realms, including the local material ecology and/or spirits, subtle energies, etc
• Exploring what it means to play while also being a responsible participant in a world that has a lot of pain and struggle

What conditions are needed for group “ritual play” to be of benefit, rather than re-traumatizing or not deep enough to move the needle? 

I have been to many different events where “ritual” or “group work” was in the description and walked away feeling drained, or overly manic, or incredibly bored. One missing piece in many of these settings has been a robust understanding of how the nervous system and our embodied social experience influences our capacity for learning and taking sustainable risks. Because we are biological organisms that require certain conditions for our survival, we have systems that allow us to discern between what is good for us or not, some of which is innate and some of which is learned and can be changed with practice. What I have seen over the years is that we have to balance our system’s desire for comfort and homeostasis with its need for new experiences and growth or change. 

VARIATION AND PRECISION

Another complexity that we have to consider is that although there are some universal principles we can follow to address that need for balance, each person’s situation is unique. What will support me in my ability to play in one moment will be different in the next. Because of this variation I design experiences that flow with universal principles while also leaving enough space for you to “choose your own adventure”, or to be attuned to your precise biological thresholds, needs, and limits. In fact, developing this form of self-intimacy is one of the skillsets I always focus on in these containers. 

BECOMING THE ARTIST OF YOUR LIFE

We call this a Play Lab because it is designed to give you space to self-direct your learning at least to some extent and to approach everything you experience as embodied research. It is not a space to give your power away to the teacher, an idea, or fantasy about what you think the experience will be. Because most of us were raised in incomplete ways, without good initiation processes and coherent community, we sometimes recreate unhelpful power dynamics with people in leadership roles (facilitators, teachers, therapists, etc) and become very attached to an idea of a person or teaching. By putting ourselves in the roles of “player”, “artist,” or “embodied researcher” we remain connected to our own sense of direction, interest, and limits, and we allow everything and everyone to be REAL. Please do not think of yourself as an individual person coming to “get healing” from a teacher. Consider yourself as an artist, player, or researcher gathering with others for retreat and sacred laboratory. So we shift our inner motivation from being in a position of “needing help/please heal me” to “someone is making exquisite space for me to gather with others to get inspired.” And guess what? The second one actually ends up being the one that creates the most nourishment/healing. 

About Larissa

Larissa Kaul (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist, facilitator, ritualist, and trained therapist designing eco-sensual experiences to shape culture and liberate artmaking itself. Their closest consorts are the piercing wisdoms of Death, Love, and Play. Their life as a spiritual, liminal, mixed race, beyond binary person with chronic pain and mad gifts influences how they design and facilitate.

About the venue

Fell Edge Farm is in Addingham near Ilkley in West Yorkshire. The work shop is being run in a warm refusbished barn with sprung dance floor, kitchen, showers and WC. People can sleep over in the barn for a fee of £5. There is BnBs near by and depending on numbers there might be a bed in a private room for £20 on the Farm. For more info on the venue go to: http://www.felledge.co.uk/what-is-fell-edge-2/

If you have questions regards bookings please email Nora at thegentlebuilder@gmail.com. For questions about the content of the course you can email Larissa directly at lkaulcounseling@gmail.com.