Rooting

Rooting will invite 30 youth workers, social actors, artists and creatives from France, Romania, Spain, Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece and Latvia. Rooting is a workshop for facilitators and creative professionals who want to help young people overcome the challenges of eco-anxiety. An immersive experience of dance, collective creation and learning based on connecting with oneself and nature. A transformative experience of cohabitation and co-creation that starts here!

What we offer

It is a training. You will learn to support young people in navigating the challenges of eco-anxiety, disconnection from nature, and feelings of powerlessness. Rooting aims, through experiential learning, to reconnect participants with their environment, their communities, and themselves, equipping them with good practices and tools to bring home to their target groups. Through immersive, ecological, embodied, collective and creative practices, Rooting seeks to provide tools for self-awareness, mental & physical health improvement, personal & collective empowerment to participating youth workers.

It is an art residency. You’ll be hosted in a creative rural barn to research, question, develop and confront your art vision and practices with trainers and participants. You will work together to produce a site-specific dance performance and present it to the local community in Cornac.

Learning methods

Our methodology is based on experiential learning (learning by doing!), interdisciplinary exchange (broadening your knowledge base!), emotional and collective intelligence, movement, dance, nature-based education, and the principles of non-formal education! We bring together participants with diverse profiles to promote horizontal learning and enrich everyone’s work through the expertise and perspectives of others.

Program

Mornings will be dedicated to collective training.
Afternoons will be time to develop your projects, personal or collective creations ; to exchange about your project evolution in peer groups, sometimes in plenary ; to consult individually with Rooting trainers and/or to join technical workshops to enrich your practice.
Evenings will be open for participants willing to propose activities to each other.

Day 1 | Who is who?
Day 2 | Team building
Day 3 | Ecology & mental health
Day 4 | Embodiment on nature
Day 5 | Our heartbeat
Day 6 | FREE DAY
Day 7 | Rooting story
Day 8 | Collective creation
Day 9 | Final production
Day 10 | Rooting public event
Day 11 | Evaluation & learning outcomes

Venue & Travel

Activities will take place in France, in the Occitanie region, in the village of Cornac.

We require all participants and organisers to engage in green travel, using exclusively sustainable low-emissions means of transport such as bus, train or car-pooling (NO PLANE!). You can enjoy up to 6 days of travelling! We will be able to reimburse your travel costs up, thanks to the support of the Erasmus+ programme.

Maximum reimbursement for your green travel:
> France: 285€
> Spain: 417€
> Bulgaria, Latvia, Romania, Greece, Turkey: 535€

Trainer team

Céline Klein, an experienced dance therapist trained at the Expression Sensitive school, brings a deep understanding of the therapeutic power of movement and embodied practices. Her commitment to making dance accessible to all resonates with Rooting’s emphasis on inclusion, and her belief in the transformative power of movement aligns with the project’s goal of fostering connection with oneself, others, and nature. Céline’s approach helps participants unlock their creative potential, express emotions, and build physical and emotional awareness. Her expertise in using movement as a tool for healing and connection is particularly relevant for addressing the needs of youth workers struggling with eco-anxiety and mental health challenges. Céline will co-lead activities that integrate dance and embodied practices into the project’s methodology. She will guide participants in exploring the link between movement, creativity, and emotional well-being, helping them develop techniques to support young people in their communities.

Anne Merlin is a creativity explorer. Whilst studying visual arts and interaction design in France, she discovered the magic of creativity mixed with collective intelligence and social action. Excited about the whole thing, she co-founded Nomadways in 2014 and Tiliade in 2021 where she crafts and animates workshops mixing performing and visual arts, to explore new ways to co-create and learn in Europe and beyond. She lived all over the world, experimenting with ever more creative ways to interact and discover one another in multilingual or non verbal settings. Along the way, she collected myriads of tools & methods for collaborative creation, nature-based learning, emotional intelligence, specializing in storytelling, team dynamics and project design using creativity, movement, emotions and stories to foster well-being, cooperation & social action.