About movement & creative practice

Margaret's work brings together somatic movement, dance, contact, and creative process to support a capable, expressive body grounded in health, curiosity, and lived experience.

Dance & Creating

We have the means to go deep into the state of creating, drawing resources from a well within that exists for us to bring into action. Our bodies have the capacity to move in space and time with uninhibited rhythm and gesture. The theatre is a place of permission. It's where we discover, and live the dynamic forces inside of us away from reductive conclusions.

Dance or creative workshops with Margaret are opportunities to taste the purity of commitment to each movement, and the thrilling joy of play. When we consciously move in and with this field of gravity, an ease arises. Movement becomes effortless. Our attention can then be focussed on the material that we are creating, on what wants to be made.

Margaret guides a room with gentle instruction and example, predominantly through exercises and improvisation. It is for individuals to discover their own unique source of embodied creativity, to expand and grow in all directions, with the ground as the foundation and the constant. It's a place for the body to speak.

Motion & Wholesome Training

What's beautiful about these kind of courses is that we get to have a good dose of failure come into our pocket. Although it's something perceived as potentially threatening during our day-to-day lives and something, perhaps, to be avoided, within the investigative realms of training, failure is a friend and pivotal to our growth and evolution.

Wholesome training acknowledges the interconnectedness of our bodies and that even when we move specific parts of us in isolation, the entire organism is coordinating this possibility. Coordination includes timing, availability, proprioception, interoception, spacial awareness, strength, flexibility, and ease. It requires a high level of collaboration between our neural pathways, reflexes, and our cellular intelligence. In order to create and develop efficient coordination, we need to constantly expose ourselves to increasingly complex situations or tasks.

Failing to achieve a task is seen as a stimulation for the dynamism of this process. We have succeeded in exposing ourselves to new learning and have set our inner workings into motion.

Because the majority of us learn faster and thrive in an environment of play, Margaret's light and joyful approach encompasses the determination and focus needed to stay in the game, so to speak. Movement nourishment is practised via different forms to mobilise and activate physical awareness and ability for health, athletisicm and longevity. She guides the group through different exercises that involve balls, sticks, rhythms, balancing objects, and collaborative and combative partnering games.

Contact & Touch

Perhaps even prior to the post-COVID world, touch was widely misunderstood and misused. Now, we get even less practise at being a fully interactive human being, with more of our daily lives spent on digital devices as a way of 'staying in touch' rather than actually meeting in person.

Whatever we share a space with, we are navigating with our physical bodies. We practise it daily with objects, animals, plants and other people. We sense the space between us and them, and communicate directly, or express, by engaging with that space. Physical contact is the potential. It's that potential which heightens the state of being together.

The multiple ways to touch, the how's and where's to communicate accurately what wants to be said to a friend, a stranger, a lover, or to a pet is a worthwhile investigation. Patting a dog on the head is not giving the same message as patting the same dog on its stomach. A light palm on the arm to indicate you'd like to pass someone by is not the same as barging them with your shoulder.

We practice holding phones, cutlery and steering wheels for hours every day. We know exactly what pressure is required in each situation and we're able to adapt to new ones quickly due to a physical familiarity. Yet, unless we engage in a martial art, specific form of dance, or have an open-minded partner, the majority of us don't get to explore and widen our sensitivity to the vast range of contact that is possible or feel how our bodies respond to each one. A massage therapist, a chiropractor and an osteopath all use their hands on our bodies but each one feels very different.

Workshops that involve physical contact are often structured in a way that participants are able to focus on one new thing at a time. Margaret allows a healthy amount of time for individuals to familiarise themselves spacially first and advance towards contact organically, with great awareness of each participant's capacity. Whether the aim is to improve at sliding, sticking, brushing, pulling, collapsing or making contact with another's centre of gravity, the exercises are designed to allow understanding to arise from direct experience. Sometimes a workshop partner can be there to challenge us beyond our own familiar patterns, sometimes they're to increase our sensitivity where we may have lost it, sometimes they're there to teach us the difference between what we think we're doing and what we're actually doing.

Touch is a tool, a need, a dynamic, and a life-long gift. It's fundamental to our continued health both physically, mentally and spiritually. It is one of the most basic things that exists, and yet one of the most complex things to master. By actively engaging with it, we can enhance our myriad of relationships as well as deepen our experience of life.

The Living Anatomy

Our understanding of the body is constantly being shape-shifted by leading-edge research, with still so much to discover. The mental image we carry of our anatomy has a huge influence on how we hold ourselves, move and interact. Sometimes, it's simply a matter of refining the understanding of how we function that allows a completely new experience and response. By clarifying what we are made of, what its role is, and the complex synergies of how every part affects the whole, we begin to grow an appreciation for our complexity and potential, choosing environments that allow us to continue toward health.

Classes in Living Anatomy are engaging and active, as Margaret gets the group involved in activities or individual exercises to feel their way through understanding different systems or tissues of the body. Her teacher, Gary Carter is one of the leading fascial experts in Europe today. This course is a wonderful way to bring more depth into movement practices and daily choices.

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