Health & WELLth Festival 2021

Intercultural Roots invites you to the Health & WELLth festival 2021: an new innovative and multicultural arts for health and social change online festival.

'NAVIGATING THE UNKNOWN'
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The Health & WELLth festival offers Masterclasses, Symposium, Workshops, Healing Hubs and Performances that explore how the arts and well-being intersect across transdisciplinary and cultural borders. We are inviting artists, scholars, performance makers and healers, as well as the general public, to respond to how we can navigate the unknowingness of these times through different practices. This meeting will explore, challenge our thinking and encourage critical reflection on the themes of trans-cultural collaboration, collective horizons and arts practices. We want to promote a series of practical immersions and reflections on what was lost or gained in this last year of pandemic and how we can enhance and expand our possibility of dreaming together and hopefully setting new purposes for navigating towards new collective horizons.

“The first wealth is health” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

At this important moment in the history of humanity, in the face of climate and health crises, Health & WELLth redefines “health” (and “wealth”) to reconsider ourselves and our relationships – with our families, friends, colleagues and communities; and in relationship with our environment, nature and the planet earth.
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This international online festival draws together in total, 52 highly experienced and insightful practitioners, and scholars and skilled performers from the UK and overseas who are facilitating over 30 hours of professionally led wide-ranging workshops, performances, discussions and masterclasses.
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“View health as an investment, not an expense.” John Quelch

Activities include a menu of concurrent sessions in contemporary dance, theatre, physical theatre and comedy, devising, spoken words, voice and movement, creative labs, sound meditation, gong-bath, theta healing meditation, self-massage, qigong, mental health and wellbeing, burlesque, cabaret, live music, DJ and party.  

“We don't heal in isolation, but in community” S. Kelley Harrell

You can join us in exchanging energy or gifting with other people, devising new artistic material, feeding back into the program, collaborating and networking with practitioners, exercising your imagination and enhancing your physical and mental health as part of a community.

“The part can never be well unless the whole is well” Plato
The Health & WELLth festival offers you a unique opportunity to participate in a great variety of body-mind-spirit ‘embodied practices’ that have huge health, wellbeing, artistic and educational benefits.  

"Sounds great! But what IS an embodied practice?"
It is the experience you have of your body as perceived from within. It’s thinking done physically! It can be yoga, dance, Pilates – anything where you experience the body with higher than normal awareness or concentration.

“A sad soul can kill you quicker than a germ” John Steinbeck

The festival programme is hugely varied and aims to be as inclusive and accessible as possible to engage people who might feel excluded by society.  It is aimed at addressing pandemic levels of loneliness, anxiety and depression.