seeds festival is an interdisciplinary arts and ecology festival gathering artists, community activists, scientists, spiritual leaders, permaculture practitioners, and more for ten days at Earthdance, an artist-run workshop, residency, and retreat center located in the Berkshire hills of Western Massachusetts. seeds festival investigated arts and ecological research from a variety of fields of inquiry. It proposes several notions: that the intelligence of embodiment has specific offerings for our understanding of ecology, that artistic practice is a valuable tool and vehicle for this research, that when experiential research is shared, discussed, and archived, it indeed can benefit from and for this interaction, and that socially engaged research can mutually support the arts and the regenerative practices for the earth.
seeds festival was comprised of workshops, performances, panel discussions, land projects, and generated artistic investigations, forming a unique and vital organism. seeds was co-founded by Margit Galanter and Olive Bierings in 2008, and is produced by Earthdance with different curatorial teams each year. seeds festivals took place at Earthdance, where Margit Galanter was Co-Director from 2006 - 2009.
seeds festival was originally called SEEDS (Somatic Experiments in Earth, Dance, and Science) until 2016, when its title changed to seeds festival, and chose to dissolve the acronym. After years of discussion about the racilaized challenges of working with the terms somatics and science, we decided to change the title as a move towards dismantling supremacist language as it relates to ecological practices.
