Hana van der Kolk

STRANGE NATURE

Strange Nature 2025 will gather at The Field Center in Vermont September 26-October 5! Early bird registration opens in June.

What might be revealed by touching, listening to, looking at, being deeply with a shell, a glittery garment, a fallen log turned home for an ecosystem? How might these intimate encounters be felt and expressed through our bodies? And how might they change how we conceive of our bodies all together? What are the dances, rituals, practices, new ecosystems, tributes that emerge from here? 

In this week long collaborative workshop anchored in group ritual, engaging body, attention, and imagination-centering practices, and passionate and uncanny encounters with objects, landscape, and costume, we will “dialogue” with ourselves, one another, and everything to ask: how and why might we become more tender, more monstrous, more clairvoyant, more fluid; recognizing/uncovering our already multiple, hybrid, contradictory, messy, monstrous selves, groupings, world in the process. 

In 2025 we gather near the autumnal equinox and will welcome the decay/transformation that comes with autumn, acknowledge and look for intimacy with (our) shadows and (our) beasts, locate and dance with/as our alter egos, invite hard conversations, and practice softness/forgiveness. Dancers, artists, writers, schemers, activists, healers, and aspiring/inspiring freaks, come join us in play, risk, and world-making. 

Guided by dancers, makers, researchers, and facilitators Lea Kieffer and Hana van der Kolk, Strange Nature began at the Field Center in 2022 with the curatorial and match making vision of Field Center founder Jared Williams, and reconvened in 2023 and 2024. 

In 2022, we began. In 2023, we gathered around water, the temple, the monster, and the shapeshifter. Strange Nature 2024 focused in particular around the invitation of staying with—the ugly, the trash, the horrific, the confusing, the incongruous, the boring. We wondered what becomes in the ferment, the rot, the decay, the composted? What alchemizes, transforms, surprises, fools, delights?