Marie Garlock, PhD: Mobilizer. Educator. Co-creator.
 

The Eno River Fellowship Foundation, RCWMS, + Flipping Cancer Project present

Our Bodies, Our Stories: Creative Retreat
with Patients, Caregivers, and Healthcare Workers

Saturday February 24, 2024, 1:00 to 5:00 pm

Eno River Unitarian Universalist Fellowship (ERUUF) Commons Room, Care Building, 4907 Garrett Rd, Durham, NC, 27707

More information below about this half-day retreat for patients, caregivers, community supporters, and healthcare workers

Participants in a performance rehearsal process led by Marie for the Flipping Cancer Project (patients with metastatic cancer and former pediatric cancer, family caregivers, and clinical pastoral care / interfaith chaplaincy faculty and trainees)

 

Half-Day Retreat Description

A deeper dive to play with easeful, incremental ways to shape story, bodily expression, and community connection.

This half-day retreat incorporates InterPlay methods, image theater, and other creative approaches to honor patients’, caregivers’, and healthcare workers’ interests, desires, and lived truths.

Enjoy an afternoon of art-making and contemplative care, offering humor, realness, self-determination, and collaboration.

Disability accommodations and COVID safety onsite. Tea, snacks, an outdoor covered porch and garden areas to relax. People who have been patients, caregivers, community advocates, and healthcare providers — and are more than these roles alone — all are welcome!

**Come just for the half-day or sign up for a $150 stipend for your time if you’re able to join an additional 1.5-2 hour rehearsal and informal ensemble performance for community supporters, both on March 2, and building on creative retreat experiences together (info below).

Led by Marie Garlock, PhD, with live sound healing music by Rev. Stacy Grove.

Retreat Flyer (.pdf for print, email) — Retreat Image (.png for social media) — All Media

 

Who can benefit from participating?

All patients, caregivers, community supporters, and healthcare workers welcome

  • No prior expertise needed — The purpose of this half-day retreat is to offer accessible, artful, and interesting ways to be together. All that’s required is a willingness to experiment and be supported by others doing the same!

Safety and Accessibility

  • Accommodations and a warm welcome for people with disabilities and all mobility, pain, and energy levels. Lower-sensory setting with natural light, peaceful music, spacing for sound clarity when duos or groups are speaking together, regular breaks where you can be quiet indoors or go to a covered porch or other outdoor beauty.

  • COVID safety precautions in place, with masks invited, air filter onsite, and ventilation through multiple windows/doors. We will ask for a negative COVID test for half-day participants (extra tests available onsite).

 

What will we do?

Explore what your body knows and what your stories do.

  • Given unique insights you hold from cancer + life-threatening illness experiences, we will make space for easeful, incremental glimpses into grief, humor, sacred anger, compassion and more.

  • As health workers, patients, and caregivers, we will play with our relationships to things like sense + nonsense, loss + presence, daring + delight, exhaustion + purpose in ways that can leave us feeling lighter and clearer than when we began.

Discern and name your dreams for health justice, big and small, arising from experiences with illness and care.

  • We hope to name, hone, and explore participants’ unique priorities around health equity, humanizing care, and more livable and inspired conditions.

  • We will have “affiliation groups” at times for patients, caregivers/community supporters, and healthcare workers to mutually connect.

Gain familiarity with unique methods of arts advocacy and story-based health communication, personally or professionally.

  • Experiment with applying InterPlay methods and other creative communication approaches for healthcare and community-building settings, such as image theater (Theater of the Oppressed).

  • We will play with solo / duo, small group, and larger group activities that support confidence and curiosity in story, movement and stillness, voice and breath, composition and structured improvisation.

  • In this contemplative environment, no one will be “put on the spot” and we’ll follow what supports and energizes the group throughout the day.

 

March 2 Community Performance — Building on February 24 Retreat

How?

  • By the end of the half-day retreat, we will weave together some simple, intuitive forms of story and poetry, movement, music, and contemplative, ensemble performance practices that feel easeful and encouraging for participants to “try on” for themselves and together

  • We will incorporate some mini-pieces we create during the half-day retreat into an informal performance for a community audience coming to support us at 4:00 pm on Saturday March 2, 2024 in the ERUUF Sanctuary

Call for Performers

  • Performing on Saturday March 2 is encouraged but not required of half-day retreat participants! Feel free to come check it out on February 24, and make your choice afterward about whether you’ll perform on March 2.

  • Performers will meet again at ~1:30 pm on Saturday March 2 in the ERUUF Sanctuary to prepare together for our informal performance. The performance will be followed by a short dialogue with the audience, ending by 5:15 pm.

  • A $150 paid stipend is provided to half-day retreat participants who perform together on 3/2, for your time and care. RSVP to reserve.

 

Registration