Workshops

I organise occasional workshops and retreats often in partnership with another facilitator. Here are some details of past events to give you a flavour of the various workshops. I will post any future workshop dates on this page.

Walking and Yoga retreats

Led by Louise Gorst and Emma Blume these workshops combine yoga in the studio with walking outdoors. The yoga encourages us to release tension and bring awareness to our bodies and our state of mind. This awareness is then taken with us as we walk more mindfully in nature and notice what is going on both inside ourselves and outside in the countryside. These retreats will leave you feeling deeply relaxed and lightly invigorated.

Creative by Nature

Louise Gorst is fascinated in the creative process and the way that creativity happens by a process of allowing and letting go rather than consciously making something happen. She has also always had a love of walking and spending time in nature and sees a link between the two. Three years ago she set up ‘Soles & Souls’, leading walks with a focus on being quiet and mindful in nature to fully appreciate all it has to offer. At one point she lived in Australia for 7 years where she attained her Visual Arts degree from Sydney University. She has taught classes and run workshops for many years in Life Drawing, Creative Drawing and Painting and more recently Drawing & Dancing. She is also an NLP Practitioner and qualified Life Coach.

Family Days on the Downs with Soles & Souls and Intrepid Theatre

A fun day on the Downs, perfect for families with children and their friends aged 4 - 7 years. Children walk with Allie West from Intrepid, stopping at intervals for storytelling and songs - all inspired by true stories and legends of the South Downs, whilst the grown-ups walk with Louise Gorst, from Soles & Souls, taking in the breathtaking scenery and walking with awareness and appreciation of being at one with our local landscape.

Drawing & Dancing with Louise Gorst and Ann Flower

I find all my best creative ideas come to me while walking – which is good since my walking business Soles & Souls is about leading walks in the Sussex countryside. I’d recently met Ann Flower when I joined her dance class in Lewes and was bowled over by this form of dance that suited all ages and abilities and made me feel graceful and competent right from the beginning when I had no other dance experience than prancing on my own lounge floor. I’d been teaching life drawing and creative drawing and painting for many years and had stopped teaching to set up Soles & Souls. So one day on a walk I had a flash of inspiration: Drawing & Dancing – do a workshop with Ann Flower! Ann was very receptive to the idea – she’d been at art college many years before and always felt the two creative mediums were one and the same. We ran the first workshop which was a great success and now do them regularly. The participants range in age from 25 to 80+ with a mixture of dancing and drawing abilities. Ann and I found we worked seamlessly together with Ann guiding the dance and me the drawing. After lots of warm ups we lead everyone through a sequence of postures – twisting, stretching, contracting which they then draw by making marks which correspond to their experience of that posture. Participants also take it in turn to ‘model’, which is a bit like doing a frame by frame sequence of a dance while the others draw. At the last workshop we had a theme of the Can-Can and we looked at paintings by Toulouse Lautrec. Ann choreographed a simple Can-Can and bought in lots of frou-frou skirts for us to dress up in. We had huge fun, laughed a lot and gained more understanding of the connection between feeling the movement in our bodies and the shapes created by dance and making drawings and paintings of that movement and those forms.

If you would more information or to book call me on 01273 813722 or louise.gorst@gn.apc.org