Creative Ground Retreat
Where creative process meets physical practice | Celebrating the creativity in the everyday!
February 24-26, 2023
with Kelsey Didion & Emily Ritger
$225 plus meals and lodging
Join The Midwives Artistic Collective for a weekend retreat. Take space to root into your creativity. Take time to honor the innate creative spirit in each of us. Over the weekend, we will reflect on how creativity shows up in our daily lives, how to nurture it, and connect to our embodied creative impulses.
We all create art that is unique to our lived experience and the bodies we inhabit. How does our body affect what we make? And how does what we make affect our body? We will explore creative expression through movement, connecting to our intuition, and responding to our impulses.
The Midwives believe everyone is an artist. This retreat is for individuals wanting to experiment with their creative process as well as those wanting to make space to tap into their creativity. Creators and makers of all disciplines are welcome.
Over the course of the retreat you will be able to choose from mindfulness practices, yoga, group discussions, working time, guided making, and sharing work. Surrounded by The Christine Center’s beautiful forests and hiking trails, you will come away refreshed and encouraged to create from an intuitive and embodied place.
Kelsey Didion (MFA, SEP-in-training) is a yoga teacher and body-based therapist-in-training. After a decade as a professional actor, she is currently working towards her Master’s in Clinical Mental Health Counseling and certification in Somatic Experiencing, a body-based therapy modality. Kelsey’s creative practice explores the intersection of sound, sensation, and experience. She is inspired by neuroscience, good books, good conversations, and her dog Jobi, a very good boy.
Emily Ritger (MFA) is the founder of The Midwives Artistic Collective, an artistic development nonprofit focused on nurturing the public creative voice. She is an adjunct professor at Carthage College in Kenosha, Wisconsin and Loyola University in Chicago where she teaches theatre. Emily is a writer and director based in Chicago. Her work draws from her experience of growing up in small town Wisconsin. It celebrates rural America – its voice, land, dialect, sense of community and the people who carry on the traditions and way of life inherent to living off the land. Her work explores the philosophy and religion inherent in nature and living off the land, and the cyclical birth and death inherent in life on a farm. http://www.emilyritger.com