On Day 1, the team discussed the conceptual framework of the workshop, focusing on how trees might be encountered as living collaborators. We considered how embodied attention, personal memories of plants, witnessing, attunement, and mirroring could become practices of care.

The discussion was followed by the development and testing of preliminary movement scores in relation to carob trees. Through exploration, witnessing, and collective exchange, we investigated qualities such as rootedness, branching, stillness, resilience, adaptation, and the slow temporality of plant life. We also considered how carob trees are shaped by environmental conditions and human interventions.

On Day 2, the team led to a key methodological question: should participants imitate the visible form of a tree, or attend to the processes through which its form has developed? The team found that copying branches as fixed poses could easily reduce the tree to an image. A more relational approach would invite attention to principles such as gravity, duration, resistance, asymmetry, tension, release and growth. Participants might first notice how their own bodies expand, contract, curve, fold, rise or sink. They could then observe where a tree reaches, divides, gathers, rests or resists, and how wind, weather and time have shaped it. The task is to allow an encounter with the tree to reorganise sensation and movement.

Sarah's score:

Direction and flow 

- growing upwards and the idea of the screw and the twist reaching upwards 

Julienne score:

Reflections 

-I can grow, but I need your support to do so

-What becomes possible through the foundations set by our predecessors 

On Day 3, the discussion sharpened the team’s understanding of ecosomatics as an in-between practice. Environmental awareness does not arise through information alone; it can develop through changing attention, bodily response and a renewed intimacy with place. 

(Photo Lomax Creed)