Ellen Furey © Alanna Stuart

Ellen Furey — Lifitng the Ceiling

June 9 to 13, 2025

9:30 am to 12:30 pm (Mon-Fri)
Full week: $95 (taxes included)
Drop-in: $28 (available one month prior)
Language of instruction: English
Questions can be asked in English and French

REGISTER

WAITLIST

This workshop is mask-friendly to accommodate teachers and participants with accessibility needs. Learn more about our Accessibility & Masking policy.


CATEGORY

OBJECTIVE

Lifting the Ceiling (the proverbial one tacitly created to block out awareness of our vast skies) is a workshop designed to help us recognize latent dreamscapes for life, work and art making, as big and as good-feeling as we can muster; stretching to include the too big, too much, too ambitious, the too idealistic, the impractical.

I desire to create deeply affirming and positive collective experiences that validate who we really are as either spiritually or fantastically more than human, soul beings perhaps, allowing us space to explore outside of practicality and current conditions (personal, interpersonal, societal).

CONTENT

The workshop rehearses imagining and believing the possible worlds we desire—not through a framework of reform, but through one of confident fantasy. What is (y)our desired future and present, and how can we rehearse it into life?

Drawing from my background in spiritual accompaniment, psychic development, and non-medical death care, I will delve into exploring alternatives to a mindset of precarity. Exercises will include adapted writing prompts, movement scores, work-outs, short meditations, structured sharings/discussions and paired reflections aimed at nurturing potential and courage.

Workshop PaceWorkshop Features
Variable
Adaptable to the group’s needs
Intense emotional work
Visual support (i.e., documentation, texts…)
Short verbal applications
Exercises are adaptable
Subgroups exercises
Cardio exercises
High music or sound level

BIOGRAPHY

Ellen Furey is a performer, choreographer, psychic guide and death doula working in experimental and contemporary dance. Her practice has been sustained by an interest in discursive, collaborative processes that emphasise both the mess and power of our subjectivities as individuals and as temporary collectives. She is finding ways to centre an idea of creativity as an infinite, yet often quashed or relegated, resource that can support us relating to this world through avenues that are multiple, unexpected, renewable, powerful, and purposeful, within and outside of the arts.