Liz Pavey: dance artist/researcher and lecturer at Northumbria University, Shiatsu (Japanese bodywork) practitioner, qualified Business Coach and a member of the NU’s Internal Coaching Network.
Living Stone: We are the Rocks Dancing is an ongoing practice research project investigating how durational improvised dance can help us make sense of the immensity and rhythms of geological time through developing an embodied sense that we carry deep time within us.
Emerging from an opportunity to perform with the Great North Museum: Hancock’s Frosterley Marble – a dark grey limestone found only in Weardale, Country Durham, and contains fossils of corals living in tropical seas about 325 million years ago – the practice foregrounds our elementality and intra-being – specifically our embodiment as rock, our mineral composition – and our embedment within natural cycles and ecosystems. It encourages a questioning the of social imagination of rock as something static, lifeless and separate from us, and fosters ecological responsibility through offering an embodied appreciation of our planet as living organism not resource.
Offering communal experiences of slow being, workshops and performances have taken place in museum galleries, academic conferences, and in ‘the wild’.
A durational improvised performance in relationship with the Frosterley Marble. Performance curated by Liz Pavey. Performers: Lynn Campbell, Rachel Kurtz, Mandy Rogerson, and Nikki Woodward . Photographer: Stephen Sharkey https://www.stephen-sharkey.com/ With special thanks to Claire Pençak, Alys North, and Karen Rann; Ruth Sheldon from the GNM Hancock; and Jill Essam from Harehope Quarry Project.
“I have woken this morning still connected to the other dancers, the space, the magnificent limestone and all those tiny creatures that were once living and moving on this planet. I feel timeless!“ Rachel Kurtz
Living Fossils, GNM Night: Wonder & The Wild, June 2023
A second durational improvised performance in relationship with the Frosterley Marble. Performance curated by Liz Pavey. Performers: Greta Heath, Esther Huss, Rachel Kurtz, Beth Loughran, Alys North, Liz Pavey, Claire Pençak, Karen Rann, Mandy Rogerson, and Chenyu Xion. Sound by David de la Haye. Printmaking by Alfons Bytautas. Photographer Colin Davison. With thanks to Ruth Sheldon (GNM Hancock), Jill Essam (Harehope Quarry Project), and Hannah Waters, Cecilia Stenbom and Kev Tweedy (Northumbria University).
“I wish I could have stayed longer…. The dancers were starting to ebb together, like stones being pulled in the river’s current.” David de la Haye
Participatory Projects
Deep Time Bodies
Deep Time Bodies: nine workshops leading to an hour-long improvised performance in the Fossil Stories gallery GNM: Hancock, January 2024. We moved with bones, rocks and fossils from the museum’s handling collection and situated our improvisation within the gallery’s architectural rhythms and the rhythm of its narrative of geological epochs. We moved through different elemental states and breathed as a group as we oscillated between congregating together and spread out across the gallery mingling with the audience. Photographer Stephen Sharkey
Participant comments: “I guess rocks and geology are the hardest things to for me personally to engage with… you can’t see them living and breathing and growing… But this is a really lovely way through this…. If I go walking now, I’m looking around me going, Ooh, how do I move to that rock or stone?” “I’ve wanted to go away and find out more. Discover more, read more and question question more.” “This project has made me think of the vastness of the earth, how it was formed and continues to grow, to shift, to change, and to move all the time…. The fossils we’ve looked closely at and held and moved with in this project have left detailed impressions”
The arrogance and the glory of our brief scuttling over the Earth’s body as if a microbe might tell the story of my whole life in a split second, capturing whole histories. Then what does slow mean? Micro to macro? I’m a flash of dust, a million flaring stars. I am forever and almost never. Being is relative. We celebrate awake, aware, joy on the thin crust, on the edge of deep time, flash in a cosmic pan. Poetry by Deep Time Bodies participant Norma Thompson
Deep Time Futures: moving with the more-than-human
Deep Time Futures was a series of eight workshops I co-designed and delivered with artist/lecturer/PhD researcher Bridget Kennedy, October-December 2024. Located at GNM Hancock, underground at Killhope Lead Mining Museum, and in the forest and on the rooftop of The Sill (Northumberland National Park Landscape Centre) investigations moved with ideas about deep time past, present and future. Funded by a Bartlett Award.
Participant comments: “Liz is encouraging us to move in a lazy way and that is someone giving me permission to luxuriate in time, to soak time up, not to chop it into tiny little pieces…” “These sessions have been… body-opening to move in different ways” “Feeling that this belongs to us, we are part of this… not isolated from nature, the rocks” “the minerals were our audience”
Deep Time Walks
Co-created by Dr. Stephan Harding in co-ordination with geologist Sergio Maraschin, a ‘Deep Time Walk’ is a transformative journey through 4.6billion years of Earth history via a 4.6km walk, where each metre you walk equates to 1 million years. Using the kinetic movement of walking, the experience offers a bodily sense of the vast amount of time it has taken for life on Earth to evolve. (See www.deeptimewalk.org)
Having discovered this amazing practice through the Long Time Academy podcasts, I completed the facilitator training and have been leading many Deep Time Walks: in Northumberland – Earth Day 2023, Northumberland; in Newcastle upon Tyne – June, August, October 2024, April, May 2025.
Participant comments: “I am a visual and kinaesthetic learner, and it was right up my street.” “It was informative, thought provoking and mind blowing. The calm way you led the walk made it easy for us all to contemplate and imagine the evolution of our planet and naturally led us to think about our responsibilities towards it.” “I enjoyed the ability to reflect thoughtfully on deep time, with a sensitive guide offering just the right amount of information at key points. I realised at a deeper level the impact of humans, and of extraction in particular, on the planet.” “I think it will stay with me as one of my most powerful art experiences.”
Liz Pavey 