Moving With

Abstract

Moving With is a short film made in partnership with Jonny Randall, to capture a moment in time between
mother and son and their local landscape. A celebration of simple things: being together, moving together,
listening, and watching all we have on our doorstep. It documents dance artist Lucy Nicholson and her son,
Benji’s, regular dance walks in their local village of Staveley, Lake District, Cumbria.
Mother and son dance together, responding to the accompaniment of their natural surroundings with a
backdrop of the beautiful national park. Acknowledging the power and grace in stillness, slowness,
gentleness, calmness – without challenge, target or adrenaline we love, appreciate, participate and
experience our natural world.
The film then documents the sharing of the Moving With process through screening, workshop and drawing
with local families and schools in the North West.
We know that a large part of the apathy towards the climate crisis is in our othering of our ourselves in
relationship to our environment and as a remote region within the Northwest, this project offered a
wonderful opportunity to engage our local and wider communities with their own natural surroundings and
to encourage young and old to feel more connected to their environment, not doing something in it, on it
or over it but moving with it.
The film offers a unique aesthetic and creative practice – an intergenerational, sited, improvised work. We
were interested in acknowledging the embodied knowledge Benji offers this project – asserting his inherent
improvisational ability as a valuable artistic aesthetic to view and learn from. We’re proposing a new way to
make work, share work and engage audiences with the work.