Jason Cohen: Culture Carrier
Jason Cohen: Culture Carrier
Jason Cohen, the founder of Forestdance, has lived the last 20+ years of his life often in service to the magic and healing of the fire circle. His knowledge, experience, sensitivity and training as a ritual facilitator and his life long pursuit of exploring passion and subtlety in music, has led him to bringing this circle of facilitators together to offer the 39th Forestdance Gathering.
Jason, the director of the HeARTbeat Collective, Inc, an arts and cultural non profit organization, has experienced well over 200 all night fire circles in all sorts of settings. Forestdance gatherings have taken place in 7 US states and have happened 13 times in Costa Rica. These are powerful transformational eclectic ritual gatherings, rites of passage, designed to bring people into their full power through the process of burning off symptomatic energies, coming fully present, and balancing heart, mind, body and spirit inside and out of the sacred fire circle. When not facilitating one of these gatherings, Jason often is composing and performing with his musical project Incus, and helping steward two land projects, Camp Timber Trails in Tolland and the Montague Retreat Center, both in Western Massachusetts.
He also is the producer of the Unifier Festival, a larger transformational healing and expressive arts festival with a mission that includes bringing people together to support a Land project where people can connect and be in service. Jason is a community organizer deeply committed to creating spaces where people can become empowered and inspired.
Amanda Moore
Former BOD member of the Heart Beat Collective and Workshop curator for Unifier Festival is most recognized for her hauntingly surreal visionary art and gentle yet fierce space holding as an intuitive ritualist.
Inspired by her experiences as an End of Life Care Specialist for over a decade, Amanda is passionate at encouraging others to transmute our most adverse human experiences into a catalyst for Radical Self Compassion with Emotional Alchemy.
Amanda invites our inner child to rediscover what safety means by encouraging us to explore what makes a life worth living through authentic relating and somatic healing experiencing.
Laura Torraco: Plant Allies for the Root Fire
Laura Torraco is a plant lover through and through, she is the owner of Sage Green Botanicals, an herbal apothecary and clinical practice in Turners falls, as an educator with Clearpath Herbal School of Clinical Herbalism, and as a researcher and grower of many woodland plants with BearPaw Collective. She finds plants to be one of her greatest mentors on what it means to be human, and approaches plants through the intersections of ecology, phytochemistry, natural history, ethnobotany, TCM, story, art, and the profound experience of just growing and being with the plant kin. Whether she is in the field working alongside researchers to study alpine plant communities, working one on one with clients, educating others about the plant world, or weaving a basket; Laura explores plants from many various paths and weaves them together to inform and guide her towards being of service to others and to inspiring others to connect and learn from the natural world.
Ult Mundane: Drumming In Service
Ult Mundane invites us to explore principles of drumming together, to help us bring confidence and sensitivity to our service at the sacred fire.
Ult loves to blend the high energy of traditional African rhythms with the dynamic conversational elements of group improvisation.
We will experiment with adding our voices to the group in the spirit of service. Together we can deepen our ability to support establishing a rhythm, use call and response to hear and be heard, and add some fireworks when the energy is on its way up.
Ult has been studying traditional West African drumming for over fifteen years, playing djembe and dunduns. He has learned from world-renowned teachers such as Famoudou Konate and Mamady Keita. Since 2010 he has been studying with Namory Keita, a master drummer from Guinea. Ult currently teaches a weekly class where he lives in Southern New Hampshire, and offers occasional classes in the Brattleboro, MA area.
Jason Cohen, the founder of Forestdance, has lived the last 20+ years of his life often in service to the magic and healing of the fire circle. His knowledge, experience, sensitivity and training as a ritual facilitator and his life long pursuit of exploring passion and subtlety in music, has led him to bringing this circle of facilitators together to offer the 39th Forestdance Gathering.
Jason, the director of the HeARTbeat Collective, Inc, an arts and cultural non profit organization, has experienced well over 200 all night fire circles in all sorts of settings. Forestdance gatherings have taken place in 7 US states and have happened 13 times in Costa Rica. These are powerful transformational eclectic ritual gatherings, rites of passage, designed to bring people into their full power through the process of burning off symptomatic energies, coming fully present, and balancing heart, mind, body and spirit inside and out of the sacred fire circle. When not facilitating one of these gatherings, Jason often is composing and performing with his musical project Incus, and helping steward two land projects, Camp Timber Trails in Tolland and the Montague Retreat Center, both in Western Massachusetts.
He also is the producer of the Unifier Festival, a larger transformational healing and expressive arts festival with a mission that includes bringing people together to support a Land project where people can connect and be in service. Jason is a community organizer deeply committed to creating spaces where people can become empowered and inspired.
Forestdance Costa Rica 2024 Presenter Lineup is In the Works.
Previous Presenters:
Laura Torraco:
Plant Allies for the Root Fire
Laura Torraco is a plant lover through and through, she is the owner of Sage Green Botanicals, an herbal apothecary and clinical practice in Turners falls, as an educator with Clearpath Herbal School of Clinical Herbalism, and as a researcher and grower of many woodland plants with BearPaw Collective. She finds plants to be one of her greatest mentors on what it means to be human, and approaches plants through the intersections of ecology, phytochemistry, natural history, ethnobotany, TCM, story, art, and the profound experience of just growing and being with the plant kin. Whether she is in the field working alongside researchers to study alpine plant communities, working one on one with clients, educating others about the plant world, or weaving a basket; Laura explores plants from many various paths and weaves them together to inform and guide her towards being of service to others and to inspiring others to connect and learn from the natural world.
Amanda Moore
Amanda Moore, former BOD member of the HeARTbeat Collective and Workshop Curator for Unifier Festival is most recognised for her hauntingly surreal visionary art and gentle yet fierce space holding as an intuitive ritualist.
Inspired by her experiences as an End of Life Care Specialist for over a decade, Amanda is passionate at encouraging others to transmute our most adverse human experiences into a catalyst for Radical Self Compassion with Embodied Alchemy.
Amanda invites our inner child to rediscover what safety means by encouraging us to explore what makes a life worth living through authentic relating and somatics healing experiencing.
Ult Mundane: Drumming In Service
Ult Mundane invites us to explore principles of drumming together, to help us bring confidence and sensitivity to our service at the sacred fire. Ult loves to blend the high energy of traditional African rhythms with the dynamic conversational elements of group improvisation.We will experiment with adding our voices to the group in the spirit of service. Together we can deepen our ability to support establishing a rhythm, use call and response to hear and be heard, and add some fireworks when the energy is on its way up. Ult has been studying traditional West African drumming for over fifteen years, playing djembe and dunduns. He has learned from world-renowned teachers such as Famoudou Konate and Mamady Keita. Since 2010 he has been studying with Namory Keita, a master drummer from Guinea. Ult currently teaches a weekly class where he lives in Southern New Hampshire, and offers occasional classes in the Brattleboro, MA area.
Glenn Smith: Vocal Voyagers
Glenn Smith: Vocal Voyagers
We play with different ways of joining our voices together in a spontaneous way. What will it sound like? We won’t know until we go, but we’re likely to go to many places – funky, ethereal, soulful, jazzy, solemn, joyous… No experience necessary, just a willingness to open your mouth. We tap into qualities of expression that are both playful and profound, finding our way together.
Facilitated by Glenn Smith, leading Vocal Voyagers in CA, MA, and Costa Rica since 2006. Glenn has studied with many vocal facilitators, including Bobby McFerrin, Rhiannon, and any more.
We play with different ways of joining our voices together in a spontaneous way. What will it sound like? We won’t know until we go, but we’re likely to go to many places – funky, ethereal, soulful, jazzy, solemn, joyous… No experience necessary, just a willingness to open your mouth. We tap into qualities of expression that are both playful and profound, finding our way together.
Facilitated by Glenn Smith, leading Vocal Voyagers in CA, MA, and Costa Rica since 2006. Glenn has studied with many vocal facilitators, including Bobby McFerrin, Rhiannon, and any more.
Nash Atkins: The Deeper Song
Nash Atkins, founder of the sound journey and healing practice “The Deeper Song” lives his life to share the power and magic of vibration with others. Nash has been studying and performing music since the age of seven and now has become proficient at many instruments and mastered several. Along with the pursuit of musical expression, Nash has also sought to bring community together in reverence and connection through awareness of our spiritual nature.
In 5 years teaching interactive improvisational music workshops and retreats with rehabilitation communities, colleges, schools, festivals, yoga studios, and businesses, Nash has gained an intuitive ability to bridge ideas, cultures, and world views using sound and story. In our empowered expression we discover new rituals expressing the breadth of human experience.
Nash offers healing sound journeys monthly in Massachusetts, and other East Coast states; these are uniquely layered multidimensional invocations of transformation. In addition, he facilitates Earthshake Ecstatic Dance and Dancestors Cacao Dance in Northampton and Easthampton Massachusetts respectively. A neverending curiosity for many modalities of gathering, expression, healing, wellness, teaching, earthly and universal worship serves to assist Nash in intuitively becoming a conduit for collective and personal joy, insight, and creativity.
Nash Atkins: The Deeper Song
Nash Atkins, founder of the sound journey and healing practice “The Deeper Song” lives his life to share the power and magic of vibration with others. Nash has been studying and performing music since the age of seven and now has become proficient at many instruments and mastered several. Along with the pursuit of musical expression, Nash has also sought to bring community together in reverence and connection through awareness of our spiritual nature.
In 5 years teaching interactive improvisational music workshops and retreats with rehabilitation communities, colleges, schools, festivals, yoga studios, and businesses, Nash has gained an intuitive ability to bridge ideas, cultures, and world views using sound and story. In our empowered expression we discover new rituals expressing the breadth of human experience.
Nash offers healing sound journeys monthly in Massachusetts, and other East Coast states; these are uniquely layered multidimensional invocations of transformation. In addition, he facilitates Earthshake Ecstatic Dance and Dancestors Cacao Dance in Northampton and Easthampton Massachusetts respectively. A neverending curiosity for many modalities of gathering, expression, healing, wellness, teaching, earthly and universal worship serves to assist Nash in intuitively becoming a conduit for collective and personal joy, insight, and creativity.
James Bird: Bardic Embodiment
Bardic Embodiment is the practice of deep listening; of bowing in reverence to the Song of the world, while offering our unique voice to the breathing weaving of living music.
In this experiential workshop, James Bird will be giving us a look through the mystical lens of the old troubadours and bards, story and song carriers of antiquity, who held dialogue with land and performed music to help people feel, laugh and re-member. Radical, mycelial and mythic, the archetypal and historical bard offers us threads of resilience to a culture that has forgotten its roots.
James Bird is a facilitator, poet and multi-instrumentalist musician hailing from Shelburne Falls, MA. James aims to invite the magic out of seemingly ordinary moments, using improvisation or one of his many mythic songs, weaving atmospheres that invite us to feel and remember. Bird is a threshold bard, playing for those journeying through life’s many thresholds, including marriage, birth and death. He also teaches “Bardic Embodiment”, for those wishing to expand their experience as songwriters and song carriers from the vantage point of the old troubadours.
James Bird: Bardic Embodiment
Bardic Embodiment is the practice of deep listening; of bowing in reverence to the Song of the world, while offering our unique voice to the breathing weaving of living music.
In this experiential workshop, James Bird will be giving us a look through the mystical lens of the old troubadours and bards, story and song carriers of antiquity, who held dialogue with land and performed music to help people feel, laugh and re-member. Radical, mycelial and mythic, the archetypal and historical bard offers us threads of resilience to a culture that has forgotten its roots.
James Bird is a facilitator, poet and multi-instrumentalist musician hailing from Shelburne Falls, MA. James aims to invite the magic out of seemingly ordinary moments, using improvisation or one of his many mythic songs, weaving atmospheres that invite us to feel and remember. Bird is a threshold bard, playing for those journeying through life’s many thresholds, including marriage, birth and death. He also teaches “Bardic Embodiment”, for those wishing to expand their experience as songwriters and song carriers from the vantage point of the old troubadours.
Kaitlyn Cronin
Kaitlyn’s work lives in the intersection of spirituality, mycology, creativity, and the integration of Death in the sacred cycle of Life. The more she dives into each of these avenues the more she recognises they are all languages describing the same phenomenon. With the mycelial web as her greatest teacher and creation as her devotional practice, you can find Kaitlyn dancing in between realms as an apprentice to Mystery.
Through visual art, ritual, conversation and workshops, Kaitlyn weaves stories and passionate inquiries that imbed us into our ecosystems and spark a deep remembrance of our interstitial and unique place in the expansive web of life.
Kaitlyn Cronin
Kaitlyn’s work lives in the intersection of spirituality, mycology, creativity, and the integration of Death in the sacred cycle of Life. The more she dives into each of these avenues the more she recognises they are all languages describing the same phenomenon. With the mycelial web as her greatest teacher and creation as her devotional practice, you can find Kaitlyn dancing in between realms as an apprentice to Mystery.
Through visual art, ritual, conversation and workshops, Kaitlyn weaves stories and passionate inquiries that imbed us into our ecosystems and spark a deep remembrance of our interstitial and unique place in the expansive web of life.