Schumacher College - Where ‘unfolding dialogue’ can happen once more.
As we move to the autumn, there is an abundance of activity to be observed in the animals visible even to those of us living in urban spaces. Crows and Jackdaws are aplenty and deer will soon begin the rutting season. I’m hopeful that the courses I will be running in London in October and November will bring participants who can do much of their initial observation of an animal or bird ‘in the wild’. By that I mean ‘in the real’ as opposed to on a screen.
It is three years ago this week that I was lucky enough to be invited to lead a series of workshops at Dartington Arts School and Schumacher College- for the Movement, Mind and Ecology MA. The days spent at Dartington, in such an alternative space and with such thoughtful students provided fertile ground to be investigating my particular body of work, ‘Transformation and Imaginative Improvisation’. Deer were the main focus of observation and work on the MA programme during the days spent at Dartington.
In my few days there, I had some incredible encounters- people I’d not have met in my theatre focused world. I met Kara Moses, the wildlife tracker and nature connection facilitator and on my first evening we were brought together for a discussion. The initial question put to us was about how we encountered animals. Bringing together our very different strands of work was an inspired impulse by Dr Rachel Sweeney and Marie Hale and the discussion was exciting and lively and mind opening for me! A place like this where these discussions could be imagined and then held through an ‘unfolding of dialogue between disciplines’, felt rare and very wonderful and I sensed the great privilege I had to be part of it then. It wasn’t a debate that was held that evening- a hot topic of the moment- it was a discussion- between two women working in very different approaches and seeking different outcomes, facilitated by Rachel and Marie and held in the library in Dartington.
Schumacher College, pioneers of holistic , ecological education ceased to be last year in the form it had grown into within the grounds of Dartington Arts School. You can read more about this in Rachel Musson’s piece called ‘Heartbreak and Hope- a story of Schumacher College. But it is not ended. Schumacher College has been acquired by the Satish Kumar Foundation and this summer is springing up with a renewed energy. Good news indeed.
“Transdisciplinarity, for us, means to create and participate in a continuous, unfolding dialogue between the disciplines: between ecology and poetry, between economics and phenomenology, between design and mythology, between soil science and contemplative practice. In short, we offer an interwoven, interfused, intertwined, deeply polyphonic way of learning. ”