Maya Ward

Contacting the Animate Earth will be an immersive outdoor experience weaving together Contact Improvisation dance, Taketina rhythm practice, and animistic flow writing. We’ll be camping together on the banks of Birrarung, by the ancient and central songline of Wurundjeri Country, at the stunning Longridge campground in Warrandyte, and undergirding these practices with deep listening to body and place. 

Contact Improvisation provides the central thread, offering a way to meet both human and more-than-human bodies through listening, responsiveness, and mutual support—an ongoing negotiation of weight, touch, gravity, and relational awareness. Taketina introduces rhythmic structures that entrain attention and perception, supporting states of presence in which movement arises from pulse, cycle, and pattern rather than will. Animistic flow writing extends these embodied encounters into language, not as description, but as a practice of correspondence with an animate world.

Working outdoors, the bushland and river function as active participants rather than settings. In all three practices we will invite water, weather, terrain, as well as the each other’s animal bodies, to attune our moving, sounding, and writing. In doing so, we will be practicing sensing the space between ourselves and another as a vibrant, emergent aliveness and intelligence.

This experience is for dancers, movers, writers, and embodied practitioners interested in relational and ecological approaches to practice—where contact becomes a way of knowing, and the Earth is encountered as animate, responsive, and co-creative.

Co-devised by Justin Holland and Maya Ward, Contacting the Animate Earth is the fifth iteration of a body of practice they have built over the last few years, combining the group altered state practices that they teach separately into an integrated mode of attunement to the ever-present pulse of life. 

Ideally participants come from 4pm Friday and camp the two nights.

There are a small number of places for those only available to come for the Saturday.

People will bring their own camping gear plus food to share.

After arrival, set-up and a shared potluck meal, we will begin our first session on Friday from 7-9pm.

Saturday program will include

Rooted in Rhythm

TaKeTiNa: grounding in the primal rhythms that echo the heartbeat of the earth. Through stepping, clapping, and vocalization, participants will align with the cycles of nature, calming the mind and opening the body to creative flow. 

Writing with the Wild 

Animistic (co-becoming) flow writing. Guided prompts will invite participants to listen to the voices of the more-than-human world—the whisper of trees, the rhythm of water, the stories of stones. Writing becomes an act of communion, where participants give words to the spirits and energies encountered in the Imaginal

Contacting the Animate Earth

Bodies harmonised with place, listening to and leaning in with other humans, exploring the expansive, ever-new relational space between

Sunday

Morning practice - bringing it all together 

9.30- 11 Breakfast and pack-up

About the Facilitators

Maya Ward’s thirty year arts practice has been to inspire intimate, ethical and ecstatic connections to place grounded in embodied, intuitive and intellectual experience of interdependency. Her focus now is on teaching her method of animistic flow writing she calls co-becoming, a practice of writing with the earth based on the ancient oracular traditions of Europe and indigenous Australia. For over ten years she has been a passionate practitioner of contact improvisation, teaching in her home village of Warburton and incorporating the somatic learnings of the dance into her writing and writing facilitation.

Maya has worked across a diverse range of artforms and in solo, group and community settings. Her PhD in Creative Writing explored a somatic and shamanistic metaphysics via anecdotes of place and embodied experience. Her memoir The Comfort of Water: A River Pilgrimage Transit Lounge, 2011) is an account of her 21-day journey from the sea to the source of the Yarra River, following the length of a Wurundjeri Songline. She also works in the areas of permaculture and sustainability education and design, dance facilitation and community arts. www.mayaward.com.au 

Justin Holland is a dancer, teacher, and long-time practitioner of Contact Improvisation, with over 25 years of professional experience in the performing arts. He has practiced and taught Contact Improvisation for more than 20 years and has studied with Nancy Stark Smith, Martin Keogh, Helen Clarke Lapkin, and Martin Hughes.

A founding member of Bird On A Wire Dance Theatre, a Contact Improvisation performance ensemble, Justin has performed widely in Australia and internationally. He is a graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), a qualified yoga teacher, and works across dance, improvisation, and music. In recent years, he has also devoted his practice to the TaKeTiNa Rhythm Process, teaching workshops in Australia and Asia and undertaking senior training with founder Reinhard Flatischler.

Justin is the father of 2 adult children and has lived in Warrandyte by the Birrarung for 26 years. He currently works as Musical Director and Choreographer with Somebody’s Daughter Theatre Company, a Melbourne-based community arts organisation working with women in prison and marginalised youth.