Movement Exploration, Improvisation and Your Story with Nature

Coming to a natural space, we reconnect with our bodies by starting with breath - feet on the grass, shoulders in the sunshine, body moved by the wind and cloud far away in our eyes. Through guided individual and group movement exercises, we explore somatically and let ourselves be relaxed and replenished by nature, while kinaesthetic awareness being enhanced.

Then, using performance-making tools, we interact with and select our own natural imagery to work with, unleash improvisation and expression of our feelings and tell our stories freely using movement and words. Sharing and creative collaborations within the group will enable us to come towards a collective piece formed by individual expressions interacting with the nature healer. 

*The piece coming out of this workshop event has the potential to be part of a community showcase later this summer.

This workshop lasts 75 minutes and includes:

• Coming to the presence of our bodymind, facilitated by a natural environment
• Group Connection Warm-up
• Somatic explorations, listening to and explorating movement within your body parts, in interaction with natural elements surrounding us
• Playful improvisation with your natural imagery
• How gravity and earth come into play
• Playful enjoyable exploration of your movement
• Replenishing conversations between your movement and your imagery, including uttering words if you wish
• Sharing, from individual to a group performance
• Exchanges and reflections

Highlights of this event:

• Reconnect with your body and the freedom and joy of movement improvisation
• Movement exploration that is good for your bodymind and wellbeing
• The healing energy of movement-based expressive arts, creativity and imagination, combined with nature
• A movement-based performance making experience relevant with wellbeing

About the workshop leader:

Qingyang Wang is a performer, movement practitioner, writer, educator and producer based in London, with experience in the UK and in China. Her current practice features an interdisciplinary and intercultural interest, creating a poetic space for personal connections and art as healing. Her works have been presented at FUSE International Festival, Berlin International Film Festival and Edinburgh Fringe. She was trained on MA Theatre Practice at University of Exeter. Her movement approaches have received various intercultural influences including those from Anna Halprin, Phillip Zarrilli, Laban technique and Chinese Classical dance.

Qingyang leads this workshop event with unique approaches deriving from her movement and performance practice working with life materials and poetic imagery. The approaches draw on the long-term process of making her solo performance Journey of Whispering Dreams (2022 - ongoing), a physical theatre piece blending poetry, soundscape and Chinese Classical Dance, about a healing journey that went far away from home and across cultures.

Testimony of Qingyang’s previous Movement Improvisation workshop:

‘It’s a wonderful feeling to explore the body through the images and pictures constructed by yourself. Especially when revisiting the images, combined with the space you are in at the moment, you move between some kind of reality and imagination and feel that there are many possibilities.’

This workshop event is the first of Cloud & Water series. Cloud & Water is a series of performing arts participatory events featuring diverse movement-based practices with well-being relevance and cross-cultural inspirations, suitable for all 16+. All of the events are led by artists with great track records in their areas of practice. The series is hosted by Wateway Workshop with previous success in delivering inspiring engaging events related to theatre and performance to diverse audiences.

Cloud & Water series is co-produced by Maki Li and curated by Qingyang Wang.