what's on
what's on
Nervous System Ecology: A four-week breathwork course
Our nervous system shapes how we meet the world. When we feel safe and regulated, we can move flexibly between states of activation and rest, returning to safety and coherence as needed. When we feel safe, perception opens, our sense of self and world expands.
Join breathwork practitioner Charlie for a four-week breathwork journey designed to give you a practical toolkit of nervous system regulation practices, as well as nurturing community times…
Wednesday evenings, 7-9PM.
Evening talk: In contact with stone
with Elizabeth Tomos
What stories do stones tell? There is an African proverb that “Mountains don’t meet, people do”, but if stones do meet each other from different places, countries, or even continents, what passes between them? What languages do they speak? How do they converse with each other? Do they experience longing for home when they are separated from their homelands?
What do the stones yearn for? And what do they remember?
Community qi-gong
A 60 min qi-gong class with Kasia Murfet to wake up your body, mind and spirit.
Becoming limb: Zines, disability and collective art-making
A zine making workshop exploring crip theory, mutual aid and creativity with artist Jo Tang.
Come along and become Jo's hands, become an extension of their body-self and support a disabled creative’s work, whilst in turn, exploring what creativity and community means to you in the wider lens of access, crip theory, and queer theory…
Reflection group: In the belly of the whale
Winter asks us to turn inward. The world turns. Darkness is birthright. The underworld calls. Instead of spiralling alone this winter, why not spiral together? Come, turn towards the darkness and wrangle with its questions / have an existential crisis - in community. With candles. And tea.
In the belly of the whale is a fortnightly existential reflection group for the darker months...
Workshop: An interspecies creative writing workshop
There is so much in the air we breathe – pheromones, spores, viruses, bacteria – that we always speak as hybrid selves, as holobionts, as mouth pieces for the air itself.
So, who really speaks when we speak?
Join writer, artist and facilitator Sophie Craven in a speculative creative writing workshop exploring interspecies communications, translations, and textual collaborations…
MARE - Workshop #1 - Animism in the Contemporary Realm. Re-cognition and co-creation
How can we as Artists/Makers re-cognise, re-concile and co-create with the more than human?
MARE presents the first in a series of workshops and eventual longer course using an alternative art school model, aiming to promote theoretical discussion and application of ideas which have been historically suppressed or sidelined in critical academic environments…
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.
Evening talk: Queer ecologies
Join Cory Wilson and Rose Pugh for an evening of academic rebellion and contemplation, exploring the so-called ‘natural unnatural’ that flourishes despite the writings of a cisheteronormative, anthropocentric system. Together, we will delve into the challenges of queering ecology, of dissecting the subjective from the objective, and of blurring the lines between science and society…
The raw material of mythology: A solstice storytelling circle
If you have been looking for story-place and story-people, come and join this winter solstice evening of myth in its raw form. Sam Crosby of Recalling Fire is coming to The Convivial for a night of sprawling story, food, community around the proverbial fire.
They say bear doesn't hibernate because winter comes, but rather that winter comes because bear hibernates. Time for us to get together and dare ourselves to invite the old stuff…
Evening talk: Spider lessons
For this session of The Convivial, Ceda Parkinson will invite us to re-imagine our relationship to the spider as we map a web of cultural mythologies. What lessons from the spiderweb can we bring into our own fragile and interrelated world? What if we were as attuned to the vibrations in our environment as spiders are to the vibrations in their web?
Gathering: Quiet pen mornings
Quiet Pen Mornings gather at the Convivial on the second Tuesday morning of every month from 9.15-11.30am starting January 13th 2026.
A quiet morning of companiable writing to soften the solitude of the writing path. A place to settle, focus and feel held by a community that understands the mysteries and challenges of putting words into the world…
The Poetics of Place
The etymology of ecology is oikos + logy, i.e., the study of house or home and family or kin. In this day-long inquiry, we will delve into what it truly means to study our home; i.e. to re-entangle ourselves within a wider web of interspecies relationships. For this we will work with the Penryn woodland as our ecological collaborator.
Join writer, artist and facilitator Sophie Craven for an intensive exploration into the poetics of place…
Evening talk: Why did the ancients make cave art?
Imagine it: standing in front of the cave mouth. The nothing leading into nothing. Walking in and following the passageway as it becomes smaller and smaller. Contorting your body through foot-wide gaps, heart in your mouth, blood rushing in your ears.
And the question that we modern humans cannot answer - WHY? Why would they do this?
For Sophie Craven, this question is a deeply imaginative one, opening out into many different modes of thinking and feeling - including theology and the study of the sacred, somatics and trauma theory, art and ritual…
Workshop: Encountering water via the Penryn River
Join Dr Rebecca Sykes and Sophie Craven for an exploration of our relationship with water, using pilgrimage, art, ceremony and science. Following water upstream, we will bring attention to water through mythology, posthumanism, flows, tides, hydrodynamics and history, exploring water through both its site-specific particularity and its mythological and ecological universality.
Who is water? How can re-remembering water and its ways and pathways help us become bodies of water for future times?
Reflection group: In the belly of the whale
Winter asks us to turn inward. The world turns. Darkness is birthright. The underworld calls. Instead of spiralling alone this winter, why not spiral together? Come, turn towards the darkness and wrangle with its questions / have an existential crisis - in community. With candles. And tea.
In the belly of the whale is a fortnightly existential reflection group for the darker months...
Raven's top surgery exhibition and fundraiser
A gorgeous exhibition space with Raven and other small artists, who will be selling work to raise funds. Raven is so grateful to be on this journey within themself and let others venture into their mind as a trans, disabled artist…
Evening talk: Seeking comfort in edges
Virginia Woolf stated, "For most of history, anonymous was a woman.” Women of the past are mysteries, their stories shared in terms of roles: wives, mothers, or daughters.
Join Poppy Wonnacott as she explores the work of Pamela Coleman Smith, and asks the questions: What about the other roles? What about the stories that don’t get told? Did Smith need to be definable to fit in? Do we need to define her? Do we ourselves need to be definable to understand others, to fit in?
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…
Community qi-gong
A 60 min qi-gong class with Kasia Murfet to wake up your body, mind and spirit.
Samhain Ritual
Join local poet and practising witch Andi Searle for a celebration of the magic of Samhain in an evening of stillness, reflection, grief and ritual…
Lecture series: RAD-ED
On Sunday 28th September, Falmouth Trans Collective will be hosting their second ever Rad Ed — a celebration of the wealth of knowledge that exists within our community, without the pressure of intimidating and often inaccessible educational institutions.
This time, the theme is QUEERING PRACTICE — what does it mean to ‘queer’ something? How does queerness intersect with creativity, with education, with our lives? How does queerness relate to you?
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…
Monthly community qi-gong
Join Kasia Murfet for a 60 min class to wake up your body, mind and spirit.
Sliding Scale available: £1-£15
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…
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.