After the final summer evening talks of 2025, The Convivial will run an annual fortnightly community symposium from November through to late May every year. There will be a break during summer and autumn months, aside from ad-hoc workshops and events, but you are most welcome to get in touch if you would like to host something yourself at The Convivial. The space is available at a donation cost!
what's on
what's on
Evening talk: We remember ourselves home
Cacao helps us to create a space where masks drop, tenderness rises and people meet each other in their humanness. Living well through the lens of cacao means choosing to slow down, listen deeply and offer love freely. It is a practice of remembering that self-love is very much interwoven with community care.
For this final session of evening talks for the summer, join Babu and Moss in a heartfelt offering and exploration of what it means to create a soft circle in which to stir the sacred, sip slowly and move ourselves gently back into the heart of things…
Workshop: What makes a village?
Join artist Rachel Elizabeth Coleman at the ZedShed, Jubilee Wharf, for a gentle movement and collective imagination workshop to explore what ‘rural life’ means to us, and how we understand and relate to the idea of rural spaces and communities now.
Drawing from their practice as a dance artist, the session will use gentle movement such as walking, sitting and lying down to open up a warm and curious discussion about our personal experiences of rural life, what are some of the challenges rural communities face, and what makes these places unique and important…
Workshop: The poetics of place
This November, join writer, artist and facilitator Sophie Craven for an intensive exploration into the poetics of place. We will co-develop an inquiry into what it means to become intertwined and entangled with the landscape around us.
Using the ancient woodlands of Penryn, as well as The Convivial’s learning space as our campuses, we will explore what it means to ‘world the world’ (Mika et al) through eco-phenomenology, posthumanist theory and practice, and storytelling…
Longer course: Underworlding
Join Sophie Craven this Winter for a hopeful and generative journey through the underworlds of ancient mythologies and cosmologies. We will begin by exploring the many ways in which the underworld has been exorcised from modern culture. Then, through an exploration of underworlds across Ancient Sumeria and Mesopotamia, Ancient Greece, Siberia and beyond, we will look at ways in which we might weave the dark back into the fabric of reality.
A gentle and luminous container for darker months.
Poet Laureate of Penryn - A Penryn fair day reading
Come on over at 5PM on Saturday 23rd August to hear Penryn’s first poet laureate, Jeni Whittaker, and other acclaimed poets of the poet laureate competition, give a reading of their poems in celebration of Penryn’s town fair…
A free fruit punch will be on offer in the sweet summer sunshine (fingers crossed!)
Evening talk: Looking at rituals for endings
Our contemporary society operates on a myth of growth, ascension and immortality — all ways of thinking which inspire distraction, future focus, scarcity. But can tapping into the inevitability of endings help us to live with more presence, more cyclicality, and more abundance?
In this generative and reflective talk for The Convivial, musician, writer, story gatherer and funeral celebrant Alex Dunkley will explore the nature of endings and the rituals we use to support and process these…
Speak Bird, Speak Again: 45 folktales for Gaza
A drop-in vigil and reading session of 45 Palestinian folktales; all proceeds to UNICEF.
Evening talk: Movements of solidarity
Movements of Solidarity: Embodied practices for change
with Ruth Pethybridge
What moves can you make towards the world you want to build?
What does solidarity really feel like in the body?
How can we move from 'I' to 'We' as we face the polycrises of the 21st century?
Through this session at The Convivial, Ruth will share her research on dance as a form of protest and gently invite you to participate in movement scores inside and out that reflect on the theme of solidarity and support change from within our own bodies…
Workshop: Storying from the Imaginal
Storying from the Imaginal
Have you ever read a great novel and felt that it was alive? Have you ever wanted to write a story or book that was alive in just that way?
In this generative and exploratory workshop for fiction writers and aspiring fiction writers, writer, fiction editor, and book coach Eleanor Robins will present a fresh-but-ancient approach to the fiction writing process…
Monthly Community Qigong
On the last Friday of every month, join facilitator Kasia Murfet for an hour-long morning Qigong class to wake up your body, mind and spirit.
Sliding scale from £1-15 per class.
Evening talk: What can a circular practice look like?
What can a circular practice look like?
with Katie Bliss & Rachael Jones
In this session for The Convivial, Katie and Rachael ask, ‘what can a circular practice look like?’, and how can a circular practice – or following cyclical rhythms of being in the world – be integrated into linear time, if at all? Tracing their own backgrounds and experiences across art and ecology, they invite others to reflect on these ideas through sensory activities, diagramming and discussion…
Love and Transformation - Stories from beyond
Love and Transformation: Stories from beyond...
An evening feast of Siberian folktales and myths exploring what happens when love (and not mere desire) calls from outside the village. Leaving behind everything we are familiar with in order to heed the whispers of the gods will always turn us inside out, upside down and back to front. Only one thing is certain: along the way, we will be changed.
This summer in the The Convivial living room, join storytellers Isa Schöier and Will Wilson on a mythological journey exploring when love draws us out of our homes and into other worlds…
Monthly Community Qigong
On the last Friday of every month, join facilitator Kasia Murfet for an hour-long morning Qigong class to wake up your body, mind and spirit.
Sliding scale from £1-15 per class.
Evening talk: Conviviality and ecology
Conviviality and ecology: the hospitable poetics of oikos
What does it mean to live generously and with hospitality at the heart of everything? To be convivial with the world around us?
In this hopeful talk for The Convivial, host Sophie Craven will build on Ivan Illich’s notion of ‘tools for conviviality’ by exploring the hospitality, abundance and generosity of human and other-than-human souls. She will play with and intermingle the words and worlds of conviviality and ecology to explore what it means to live generously with the world…
Evening talk: Queering remembrance
Queering remembrance: Art, performance and the memorialisation of queer history
In this first session of The Convivial’s summer series, queer artist & performer Leo Oliver Kirk discusses the importance of ‘queering’ as a concept; what it means to integrate queer theory into everyday life, and the influence this has on our practices. With specific reference to the AIDS crisis and the art activism surrounding it, Leo questions the cyclical nature of our histories, and the unique ways through which art can memorialise and remember.