**Update** 1 x late place now available. 

A beautiful and immersive new training programme for storytellers, performers, artists, and educators, and anyone who longs for deeper connection to the wild world, to Mystery, and to the stories that are hungry to be told.

Ever since the first ‘Once upon a time’, humanity has been guided along the wisdom trail by making meaning through the invisible hand of story. All cultures share the languages of image, symbol and metaphor and the stories arrived around the fireside thousands of years ago with the capacity to guide, educate, entertain, nourish, heal and inspire. 

Over that long stretch of time the role of the storyteller compounded to serve many functions within our communities, be it priest, magician, poet, teacher, advocate, healer, clown, and prophet – to name but a few. This many-faceted role has always attuned to the key ecological frequency of change, oriented towards a protagonist navigating through troubled times, the individual or collective in adversity, and relying on their wits, guile and cunning to find resilience and solutions.

Sound familiar?

Our future is and has always been shaped by the stories we believe in, on both an individual and collective level. The Navajo (Dine) people call the act of storytelling ‘making it holy’ and this underpins and informs the Anima Mundi School’s approach to storytelling as a practice and an artform.

We stand collectively on the precipice of major change and that threshold demands that we listen deeply – to ourselves, to each other and especially, beyond our species. Storytelling is fundamentally about listening, and our imperative now is to train our attention to the many voices clamouring to be heard and re-presented in the stories you might tell.

Their story. Your story. Our story.

The Anima Mundi School of Storytelling offers you an immersive, profound and creative exploration of what it is to be a carrier, maker and/or a teller of stories in these extraordinary times. This programme is for you if you wish to carry story as medicine for yourself and your people.

The journey is centred on a number of residential modules of 5 days supplemented by masterclasses contributed by various practitioners.

These modules will be hosted in Devon and taught by Jo Blake and Chris Salisbury. The syllabus teaches the fundamental art and craft of embodied storytelling but also includes and emphasises the process and practice of ‘threshold crossings’ in wild nature. This component of the course will support the individual journey towards wholeness using imaginal practices of courting the wild and cultivating one’s own ‘mythos’. This not only informs the stories we tell and the way we tell them but allows us to inhabit ourselves and the world we live in a more engaged and animated way.

This programme is fundamentally an invitation to develop and deepen your apprenticeship to the role of storyteller and what that means for you and your wider community. Our syllabus offers a wild and imaginal trail of breadcrumbs that invites us back to a sacred source – the wellspring of the natural world.

A nature-connected storyteller. Now there’s a thing.

NB By storyteller, we mean it in the broadest sense and wish to include a wide range of vocations and aspirations including poets, performers, artists, educators, activists, and teachers etc.

Overall Structure

The core modules are founded on 4 pillars of storytelling – the body, the voice, the spirit and the imagination.

These are supplemented by skills development on various aspects of the art form and are supplemented by visiting tutors with a particular practice and body of experience to deepen the exploration we are undertaking.

Each module will be a sensory exploration of the natural world, ourselves and the stories to keep us on the trail of an embodied practice.

However, another deep well of wild genius awaits, beyond the human, and what’s more, it’s hungry to meet you. For those who are willing to step away from the human village and attune to the heartbeat of the Earth, a great repository of wild wisdom and creative inspiration and provocation can be found. It’s time to pay more attention, and more respect, to what continues to sustain us all. When our hearts beat in rhythm with the Earth, all things become possible.

This programme recognises the potential of everyone to carry story as medicine, and to be in service to life.

This trail will help you get there.

Syllabus

A broad range of storytelling processes will develop our practice and deepen our craft and skillset. These will include voice and bodywork, the physicality of words, physical expressivity, artwork, poetry, music, developing our knowledge of the symbolic and metaphorical, performance compositional processes, telling and listening to many stories, dreamwork, ceremony.

Who is the course for?

• Storytellers and performers of all disciplines.
• Educators, activists and change-makers who wish to influence the agenda with the power of story.
• Anyone who loves story and sees their own potential as a storyteller.
• Anyone who loves the Earth, and wishes to be in creative service to a more promising future

‘I recognized myself in the mirror of the stories– and only then did it become clear to me how to negotiate the quandary of my life. And so the stories– more than just food, more than just nourishment, are medicine. Not specifically to heal– because we have a fantasy of healing– which is that the wounds and the scars will be gone, and we’ll be just as we were before the affliction ever landed on us. But to heal, as I mean it, is to make the wound a source– a generous and generative source– of what you have to give and bring into the world.’

Daniel Deardorff

Dates

1. April 26-30
2. June 29-3 July
3. Sept 23-29
4. November 19-23

Modules 1 to 3 will be on camp at our private site in the Dart Valley, Dartmoor, near Ashburton. Basic camp infrastructure is provided. Tents are available to hire if needed.

The 4th and final module will be at Dartington, near Totnes.  Accommodation is organised by participants. Home-stays within the local community are offered, for a modest cost or you may prefer a B&B option. Contact us for details.

Fees:

• Supporter rate:  £2350
• Regular rate:  £1950
• Low waged:  £1650*

*Concessions will be dependent on the overall economy of the programme and subject to application and evidence of financial need. Please contact us for more info.

Earlybird Offer – book before 1st Jan 2025 to get £100 discount on total fees payable.

How to find out more

If you missed our recent online Meet the Leaders/Q&A event on 25 November complete an enquiry form here to request a link to the event recording. 

How to reserve a place on the course

A late place has now become available. A £150 deposit will reserve your place on the programme. Click here for instant booking online.

NB This deposit is non-refundable (in the event of client cancellation) so please check all the course details and dates work for you before signing up.