“The Treas are Sanctuaries” is a walking score imagined out of the quote written by the German-Swiss Artist Hermann Hesse, who was born in a region near the Black Forest. The score explores the idea that we all know how to communicate with trees…

“Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to speak to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth. They do not preach learning and precepts, they preach, undeterred by particulars, the ancient law of life.”

Wandering: Notes and sketches, by Hermann Hesse, published 1920
See score for full instructions.

Nahelli Chavoya and Srijaa Kundu

Bios Pending

Nahelli Chavoya
Nahelli Chavoya is an interdisciplinary artist from Mexico, currently based in Ireland, where she is pursuing a PhD in Arts Practice at the University of Limerick. Her artistic practice includes installation art, written poetry, and dance. Her work is a practice of contemplation through movement, walks, and words. Central to her work is the exploration of rhythm, memory, and the ephemeral nature of existence. In 2023, she was an artist in residence at Björkö Konstnod (BKN), where she began creating Granite Dreams, a screen dance installation that is part of her PhD artistic research on the poetry of dance.Granite Dreams contemplates the rhythms of two locations, Björkö, Sweden, and the Slieve Blooms Mountains, Ireland, merging environmental and inner rhythms. During the residency, she met artist Rebekah Dean, who later invited her to create a site-specific performance at the Sculpture Trail The Sky is Moving Sideways in 2024. She created Arboreal, a meditative dance piece that reflects on life, death, and time through the perspectives of trees.

Srijaa Kundu
Srijaa Kundu is a dancer, choreographer, ethnochoreologist and a fledgling edgewalker from Calcutta/Kolkata, India, interested in the intersection of dance, community, identity, and migration. She is currently pursuing an Arts Practice PhD at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance, University of Limerick. With training in Kathak, Yoga, and contemporary techniques, Srijaa experiments and integrates her diverse practices to create personal and culturally resonant work. She also identifies as a mother of plants and wishes to have a garden of her own where she can sip Darjeeling tea and listen to birds.

Read through these instructions prior to doing the movements. Take a walk with a friend/s. Walk in a forest, copse, park or woodland, to find a grouping of 2 or more trees.

1. Stand together with one tree, look up at the tree, observe the shape of the tree’s upright position. Take 4 deep breaths as you observe.

2. Mimic the tree’s upright position with your arms and body. Take another deep breath.

3. Gently lean on each other towards the right, keeping your arms in position, take 4 deep breaths.

4. Repeat this action, leaning towards the left, take 4 more deep breaths.

5. Lower your arms, and walk to the next tree.

Repeat the movement until the trees have finished.

Rebekah Dean (British b. 1958) cross-disciplinary London Artist Curator, working in live and visual arts, and combining both practices in order to challenge and engage audiences. She uses the activity of walking for sustaining creative practice, and was a selected presenter at the California Institute of Integral Studies, in San Francisco (2024), for her project ‘Walking & Drawing as Socially Engaged Practices in Relation to Site and Wellbeing. “As I age, I notice an absence in my extremities, and walking becomes the method I use to tune into my body’s potential as a creative material. I remember more deeply, I visualise and know my internal landscape more clearly; my unique neurodivergent perspective recognises the body as its point of reference”. 

She was artist in residence 2024 at the Björkö Konstnod (BKN) in the Stockholm Archipelago, and her performance ‘Game Care’, which explored designated game care sites of the Stockholm Archipelago, in relation to notions on patriarchy, was selected for the SUPERMARKET Art Fair in Stockholm, April 2024. She was a recipient of Arts Council England funding for the curation of the 2024 Sculpture Trail, ‘The Sky is Moving Sideways’. 

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During 2023, She appeared in a solo exhibition ‘Discharging Materials’ at ‘The Surgery Gallery’, London, and the group show ‘Mother’s Ruin’ with the floor installation ‘Contagion’ at 35Blumen gallery in Krefeld Germany. In March, Dean led public Walking & Drawing wellbeing workshops, as part of Women’s History month, at The Feminist Library. I am currently an exhibiting artist in the ‘Artist Support Pledge 3’ exhibition, Huddersfield Art Gallery.
More projects by Rebekah Dean on Insta

About the score

After performing the beautiful score Trees are Sanctuaries by Rebekah Dean, I had a conversation with her about her work. She mentioned that she felt like a dancer while performing Berg’s Duo score and wanted to explore this new dancer she had discovered within herself. I replied that she is indeed a dancer. And I wanted to create a score that reminds others that they are dancers too.

For me, dance is about paying attention to the movement that we are, a movement intrinsically connected to every movement we perceive. Our bodies move from the same impulse that formed the stars, shaped the ground, stirred the ocean waves, and carried the shifting wind. When we perceive movement, are we not dancing through it? When we move, isn’t the space dancing through us?

When we deeply contemplate movement, I believe we immediately enjoy and perceive it in the same way we would experience a choreography in a theatre. Sometimes, movement stirs something within us on a philosophical level. I believe that contemplative stillness can be dance when we dance through the movement we see. In a similar way, walking, as an act of movement-based contemplation, can become dance. When I walk in this way, I find that there is no such thing as “space” and “us”; rather, space is us.

I hope this score invites others to let themselves be moved by what we call “landscape,” and guides them into finding that liminal space where the boundary between our bodies and space dissolves.

“The Unfold – In Conversation” later known as “The Thread of Scores“. What if we hence having no funding just would move a head and share. The first three scores is a result of walking together. Walking as art form. We did this in the program WAP at BKN in 2023. As we make a Walking Score we hand over the act of doing to others. What is it that we hand over? How do we think about this act? What comes forward? Can we by the relay support each others practices and embark on grounds not treaded before in our practice? Can we facillitate the development of our own practice by doing a project with in another on? If we do so what happens?

The relay of performed walking score in its original edition will create 12 original walking scores by artist from various disciplines. The curatorial format asks one artist to hand over to the next artist and so on. In 1-3 months post the original performance the originator and performer meets to have a conversation about the score. The below listing unfolds as the relay develops. The concept forms a link between artists and initiates a conversation on walking scores and the experience of walking a score to open up a dialog on scores and on modes of production. We initiate this process by handing over the score to another artist to perform. However the idea of the score is not to be for that artist only but for others to also do.