Welcome to Artful Movement by Bridget Stacey Luff, a movement teacher and theatre-maker. This is an occasional newsletter where I explore ideas and stories around embodiment and creativity and offer practices and prompts for you to play with too...
RETURN |to come or go back to a previous place - Cambridge Dictionary
I hope that this finds you well and safe and warm. Here in Oxford the weather is perfect really, sunny but not too hot and the plants are flourishing and flowers blossoming. Last month I was in South Africa for about a month, which is where I lived until I was 22. Half my life. I went to sort out my passport as I have dual heritage. And I do feel like I have two identities.
Or actually many really.
John O’Donohue writes in Anam Cara (which is a book I keep returning to) about how we hold all different characters within us, some of them contradict and polarise each other. And our consciousness sits wedged somewhere in the middle. That’s my less poetic and more clumsy interpretation. I feel it though. I feel it when I travel how I return and revisit different aspects of myself, how I am more than one persona, I am many.
Recently I have returned to doing some theatre work, and even doing a tiny bit of acting again. It takes me back to my 20-year-old self who was full of dreams and ambitions and grandeurs of fame and glory and now, here, I have let go of some of those ideas but parts of me still need that work. I realise I am deeply appreciative of the art and craft of theatre and storytelling. How vitally important it is for humans to share stories. Exploring different parts of our psyche including the more murky parts. The whispers of truth that echo through us when we do.
I joke that being a yoga teacher was a part I played and show I toured pretty well for ten years. I don’t mean to dismiss teaching yoga, I learnt so much and met incredible people from teaching it. But I have felt a need to break out of playing just that part for now. And yet she always lives on in me. As does every role we play in life.
So there are lots of returns for me. My South African passport renewed, my name returns to what it was before (I’ve re-inserted the Stacey), back into the mad rhythms of working in theatre alongside teaching movement and family life.
That’s why I haven’t written for a while. But a new Artful Movement course is coming soon AND I have a teaser of my new theatre site here if you’re interested and want to know what I'm up to there you can sign up for that specific mailing list.
Please do share if you have moments of return, coming back to places and people, all of these spinning and cycles of life we go through are pretty magical I feel.
Sending sunshine,
Bridget x
book recommendation:
Real Estate by Deborah Levy
theatre recommendation:
UK folk check out the new programme at Soho Theatre Walthamstow - it’s a gorgeous building newly refurbished and opened with a great line-up of artists.
Woohoo to all this 🌟
Lovely to witness your return Bridget. It makes me think about that completion of a rite of passage and how important that part of it is in the cycle of it. Exciting times for you xxx