The GMC is a week-long retreat on the shores of a lake in Maine with daily storytelling, arts, dance, poetry, discussion, workshops, small groups, and more.
This year's teachers include storyteller Jay Leeming, poets Tim Seibles and Steve Scafidi, writer Aylie Baker, musician Peia Luzzi, performing artist Matthew Glassman, senior mentor teachers of Dances of Universal Peace Abraham and Halima Sussman, and more.
It is a place for poets, dancers, dreamers, and musicians. For mythologists and seekers, for those who have spent years working with ancient stories and those who have just begun to sense the pull. Some come for the poetry and story. Some come for the arts and movement. Some come because they are standing at a crossroads and need to hear an old story to make sense of their own paths ahead. You might come as an artist, a teacher, a therapist, or simply as a human looking for something beyond the edges of ordinary conversation. For the hundreds of people who form the GMC community, whether they attended once or they attend year after year, the result of taking seriously the forces inside of story, poetry, art, dance, and music has challenged and deepened their imagination.
This year we will work to explore the concept of “joyful darkness,” entering into a larger dance which includes both grief and joy, root and branch, light and darkness, and the twilit music that sings beyond all opposites. There is a word that comes from the Roma, duende, that “creative, mysterious and dark” power and force coming not from above but from below. Duende requires us to encounter the cthonic–beneath the soil metaphorically and perhaps sometimes even literally–to find the strength, creativity and insight which we seek.
“Joy is what emanates from us,” the poet Ross Gay has written, “as we help each other carry our sorrows.” This year we will work to carry and live into both the sorrow and the joy of our times, honing our night vision, drinking from the darkness around us, and seeking to find in it a nourishment to help carry us forward into a future as yet unwritten and unknown.
If your heart leaps at the idea of myth, imagination, and embodied storytelling, you belong here. If you are someone who wants to challenge and deepen your own creative impulses, if you believe that myths and fairytales are not just dusty old stories but living energy that moves through us, if the land and the water call you, we invite you to spend an unforgettable week with us in May.
