Fluid States: A Poetry & Performance Workshop by Lucy Cash

December is the winter month of longest nights and shortest days. Water is its element – a fluid, shifting form that easily mutates between one state and another: remembering, forgetting, translating and metamorphosing. It’s the season when much of the natural world is quietly at rest, lying fallow, dormant but subtly active.

INVITATION to DIGRESS 

In this interdisciplinary workshop Lucy Cash shares some ways into an embodied poetic practice that is an invitation to digress between movement, writing, speaking and drawing. By engaging with these different imaginative states, we’ll explore a playful process of creating texts that invite another (a reader, a listener, an interpreter) into a collaboration of imagination.

Whatever your relationship to language, this workshop takes a poetic route considering language as a material that has shape and movement and pattern, and a sentence as a choreography for our own thoughts or another’s. We’ll move through a series of short creative tasks – open and suitable for all – that generate words, movement, images (drawn or performed) and that offer the possibility of exchange with others to build towards a collective score that we can perform as a group.

Beginning by tuning into some simple embodied, movement practice, we’ll invite the liquidity of water to reveal what we can let go of creatively and what we need to carry with us as we move between different creative modes, and as we move towards the end of one year and the beginning of another.

In keeping with Lucy’s own practice, the workshop invites us to connect with other-than-human bodies and ways of being. Lucy Cash is a UK-based, interdisciplinary artist whose work engages choreographic processes to explore how we relate to one another - as humans, and as bodies that connect to other-than-human bodies and places.

Working between film, writing and visual arts; her practice is intentionally diverse and experimental. Projects evolve through the practice of being together, negotiating our interdependency and revealing the ways in which what we think of as human intelligence, subtly relies on the myriad other intelligences of the world around us.
Her interests lie in choreography as a relational practice; improvisation; visual and sonic experimentation; poetic forms and innovative forms of hosting, care and curation.

Lucy has received funding and commissions from the BFI; Arts Council England; Creative Scotland; BBC and Channel 4. Her works on film and video have taken the form of both single screen and multi-channel and have been shown in film festivals and in galleries including Sophiensaele and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Hyde Park Art Center; Cultural Center and Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, USA; Bonington Gallery, Nottingham; Tramway, Glasgow and Whitechapel Gallery, Tate Modern, and the Natural History Museum, London. In 2019-2020 she created an interactive film for Akram Khan company’s Chotto Xenos. Also in 2020, her short film, How the Earth Must See Itself - a collaboration with choreographer, Simone Kenyon (UK) - was shortlisted for the Scottish Short Film Award. In 2021, alongside artist, Luke Pell, she curated, Phosphoresence, at The Barn, in Banchory. In August 2022, also with Luke, she created Our New Common Forest: A Queer Almanac for SpudWORKS Gallery in Hampshire.

In November 2023, This Endless Sea, a six-screen moving image work and a collaboration with Chloe Smith is being exhibited as part of Light Moves festival, Ireland. In Jan 2024, Lucy’s new exhibition with Mark Jeffery (USA) opens - Winterage: Sweetland - a multi-part exhibition, installation, and community engagement for WestShore Community College, Michigan, USA.