Creating Fertile Grounds for Healing Workshops Across Chicago
During the summer and early fall of 2022, Red Clay Dance Company facilitated several Creating Fertile Grounds for Healing workshops across Chicago as part of its community engagement work. These workshops served as a way to ground the creative process for Rest. Rise. Move. Nourish. Heal.
Guiding questions for the workshops included: What are you planting or seeding in your community as a journey toward healing? and What are you planting or seeding in your community as a journey toward liberation?
Through movement, conversation, and shared experience, participants and facilitators explored relationships to land, community, and collective care. Each workshop created space for reflection, embodied practice, and connection rooted in place and intention.
Below are images recapping the engagement, along with reflections from community participants and Red Clay Dance Company members who facilitated the workshops.
Community Participant Reflection
“Creating Fertile Grounds for Healing was a transformative, full sensory experience. The Red Clay family invited nature and participants to co-create our time together throughout the afternoon through dancing, singing, sharing, listening, discovering, learning, soaking in the sunshine, and breaking bread together. It was a beautiful healing-centered experience.”
— Lori, Participant
Company Reflections
“At each Creating Fertile Grounds for Healing workshop, I learn more and more about what it means to be in community with others who share both similar and different physical relationships to land. During our last workshop, I witnessed beautiful bodies choosing to come together with individual intentions of creating a space where we all were the focus.
I enjoyed the body conversations that were happening, which showed the pure care and appreciation we each had for one another. This connection seemed to have genuine roots purposely tied together to foster space and time for communal and cross-cultural healing that will only exist in its own time. Together we planted a seed that we may or may not be around to see at harvest time, but there is a collective knowing that our work and our legacy will initiate transformations.”
— Destine Young
“It has been a gift to walk with people through their own exploration of healing and liberation and how it shows up for them. The co-facilitation style truly embodies the communal and supportive essence of the work.”
— Chaniece Holmes
“The Creating Fertile Grounds workshops provided a new avenue of sharing knowledge with audiences.”
— Leana Allen
“When reflecting on community and relationship building, I often return to the Creating Fertile Grounds Workshop Series. The agreements, the tender and insightful questions, and the space to communicate verbally and physically brought me closer to newcomers and long-standing members of the Red Clay Dance community.
Facilitating a space where people could engage with movement beyond performance — where movement became shared experience — felt deeply connected to Urban Growers Farm and the land of Chicago. These are the spaces that make intentional time for conversation, movement, and joy.”
— Rahila Coats
