what's on
what's on
Collaborative Vocal Improvisation - An experimental lab series
A playful and embodied space with Play Artist Katie Rose White to explore your voice through movement, improvisation, and collaborative sound-making.
This is an opportunity to free your voice and explore the realms of Collaborative Vocal Improvisation techniques. In these experimental workshops we'll play games, improvise, and connect through our voices and creativity…
Workshop: Patterns of place - Decoration, adornment and collective place-making
Why have humans always adorned the spaces they love? What is decorative art and why do we love it? How is the world around us already patterned? And how might we bring our love of the place in which we live to adorn the walls of The Convivial?
Join artist Phoebe Deeprose and The Convivial host Sophie Craven for a day of collecting patterns from in and around Penryn for incorporation into a mural for the walls of The Convivial’s learning space...
Workshop: MARE #2 - Tentative Entanglements with Oddkin
Seekers are invited to engage deeper with other than human ecologies as we focus on real time phenomenology, spending more time outside, working with wild clay and artistic texts as conduits to connect with the oddkin whose home we share.
This is the second 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…
Evening talk: The Art of Your Heart x Hilary Thorn
If our emotions are held in the body and the body is wiser than the mind, where does our truth lie? Where is our deep wise self? In this unusual and exciting 'talk' from artist, acupuncturist and focusing practitioner Hilary Thorn, we will explore a practice of talking without talking. Using the simple tools of paper and pastels, we will see what happens when we ask questions of our heart and let the body lead us in response…
An Ostara ritual for Spring Equinox
The world is quickening, the Spring Equinox approaches, winter has come to its final lingering moments. Come and gather with practising witch Andi Searle to celebrate this great balance where the scales are tipping away from dark and towards light…
Workshop: Queering land and Lyonesse
Collaborators Jaime Lock, Chloe Christian and Ellie Roser invite you to join their workshop Queering land and Lyonesse.
In a gentle, 2 hour session of writing, sound-making and group discussion tasks, we will make creative connections between queer rurality, ancient landscape and the story of Lyonesse- a lost land swept under the sea between Penzance and the Isles of Scilly. This workshop is part of a series across Cornwall which are helping to shape the development of a new performance project- How Big, This Big- which asks us to imagine queer bodies holding up ancient stones, as part of soil and in the waves…
Workshop: Writing the sensuous world
Oral language welled up from an ongoing and reciprocal call-and-response with the living, organic world. In turning to the page, we shifted into a mode of engagement in which we mostly talk only to and amongst ourselves. In this day-long workshop with Sophie Craven, we will explore methods for worlding the world through an approach to language which grounds it again in orality and a process of call-and-response with a sensuous world.
Using the Penryn woods as our ecological collaborator, we will explore deep listening practices, movement as language, ecological rhythm and meter and sounding, before finishing by putting pen to paper. We will ask: how might we attune to an already-speaking world? Is it possible to write with the world? Can the written word connect us to reality, rather than abstract us from it?
Gathering: Quiet Pen Mornings
Step into a calm, quietly luminous space where writers of all kinds gather to create side by side. Whether you’re shaping a poem, drafting a novel, developing a research article, revising a thesis chapter, or simply following a thread of thought across the page, you are warmly invited.
Each session begins with the offering of an optional writing prompt; a small spark to light the way, or to take you on a new path, though you’re equally free to simply journey deeper into your own work-in-progress, in any genre or form.
Gathering: Half-day rest retreat
What would it feel like to really slow down in the speed-obsessed culture?
How might it feel in your body to untangle worth from doing?
Resting together creates spaces for imagination, clarity and possibility but this is not why we rest. Radical rest is a practice of rest as a deliberate and countercultural act. We are resting not to reward ourselves, not as a collapse, or escape– but as reclamation. Radical rest is remembering that our worth is not earned through exhaustion. Rest is a birthright.
Join Kasia Murfet & Sophie Craven for a half-day retreat.
Longer course: Poetics of place
Join writer, artist and facilitator Sophie Craven for a four-week long intensive exploration into the poetics of place. Drawing on thinkers such as Bayo Akomolafe, Sophie Strand, Robert McFarlane, Vanessa de Oliveira Andreotti and others, we will thread theory into practice with a variety of exercises, discussions and makings.
Essentially, we will co-develop an inquiry into what it means to become intertwined and entangled with the landscape around us over the course of four in-person gatherings.
Longer course: What if we learnt to slow down together? SWG x The Convivial
Sophie and Evelyn invite you to ‘grow ivy into the cracks’ with us in this hopeful and rebellious action inquiry. We’ll come together in the practice of slowing down as a form of radical resistance and transformational work.
Together, we’ll have space to be fallow, existential and messy, sit with both the ease and resistance we feel in doing this, and play with the possibilities and questions that dwell in the cracks. We offer a space for slowing down enough to feel, for dancing between learning, unlearning, reflection and practice, and for opening up enough to imagine alternatives…
Gathering: Quiet Pen Mornings
Step into a calm, quietly luminous space where writers of all kinds gather to create side by side. Whether you’re shaping a poem, drafting a novel, developing a research article, revising a thesis chapter, or simply following a thread of thought across the page, you are warmly invited.
Each session begins with the offering of an optional writing prompt; a small spark to light the way, or to take you on a new path, though you’re equally free to simply journey deeper into your own work-in-progress, in any genre or form.
Community qi-gong
A 60 min class with Kasia Murfet to wake up your body, mind and spirit.
Evening talk: skein x Tom Hirons & Rozi Hilton
For this magnificent session of The Convivial, storyteller and writer Tom Hirons and artist Rozi Hilton offer their experiential project, skein. skein is a playful community-coherence tool and experimental art form in which players contribute to a holographic story-matrix…
RAD-ED: A series of lectures by community, for community
The inimitable Falmouth Trans Collective bring an afternoon of nutritious lectures to our doors to mark and celebrate LGBTQ+ history month! Come on in and cosy up with us to share & celebrate community and knowledge. And tea.
Drop in, cash donations welcome!
Evening talk: Celebrating adult play as a remedy for burnout
For this session of The Convivial, Journey to Play founder Meg Fry will explore how burnout creates barriers to play for adults, as well as how we might be able to bring more play into our day to day lives as a radical act for collective flourishing.
For Meg, the challenge is not simply to encourage adults to play - which places the onus on the individual without recognising the systemic issues surrounding burnout in our culture - but rather to create the conditions (physiological and relational) to make it accessible…
Nervous system ecology: A 4-week breathwork course
A four-week course with breathwork facilitator Charlie Cheeseman to deepen relationship with the breath as an inner resource, and to begin developing new baselines for the nervous system through regulation and capacity building.
We'll explore the numinous qualities of the breath, and deepen awareness of the body as a living ecology nested in wider ecologies and nervous systems, always co-regulating…
Frankie Fleur Valentine's Show
Join Frankie Fleur and friends for an afternoon of music, art, self-love and sisterhood in the heart of Penryn. 💗
An afternoon of cozy romance, dazzling original music and warm community. There will be cake, candles, flowers and fizz and some lovely live sounds. There will also be art for sale.🌷⭐️
Come wine and dine yourself + pals this Valentine’s.
Gathering: Quiet Pen Mornings
Step into a calm, quietly luminous space where writers of all kinds gather to create side by side. Whether you’re shaping a poem, drafting a novel, developing a research article, revising a thesis chapter, or simply following a thread of thought across the page, you are warmly invited.
Each session begins with the offering of an optional writing prompt; a small spark to light the way, or to take you on a new path, though you’re equally free to simply journey deeper into your own work-in-progress, in any genre or form.
Community qi-gong
60 min class to wake up your body, mind and spirit with Kasia Murfet.
Sliding Scale available £1-£15
Gathering: BURROW
Burrow: New rituals for winter through sound, song, sculpture, video and poetry, hosted by Another Way. With contributions from Minko, Samuel Glazebrook, Jess Borders, Jesse Voth, Valley of the moon. Join us at The Convivial in Penryn on Thurs 5th February, 7pm-9.30pm. Come to hibernate - feel free to bring cosy clothes, blankets, pillows. This event is BYOB :)
Evening talk: An Imbolc storytelling circle
Come to The Convivial for an evening of ancient mythology and reflection to celebrate Imbolc: the new year according the Celtic calendar.
Guided by Sam Crosby of Recalling Fire, take an evening to a explore the turning points in your life through the lens of mythic meaning-making. Start the Celtic new year with a strong dose of remembering, sharing and food.
And bring a bottle, if that's your preference.
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: Spider as teacher
POSTPONED FROM 08/01 TO 15/01 DUE TO RED WEATHER WARNINGS!
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…
Community qi-gong
60 min class to wake up your body, mind and spirit with Kasia Murfet.
Venue: The Convivial, 18 Lower Market St, Penryn
Sliding Scale available £1-£15
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: 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…
Exhibition: Mary Sue Beats the Beatniks
A 3rd Year Fine Art, Comic/Zine exhibition on for one day only. With original paintings, comics and prints for sale, a comic and book exchange as well as behind the scenes 'making of' installation…
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.
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…
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…
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...
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…
Community qi-gong
A 60 min qi-gong class with Kasia Murfet to wake up your body, mind and spirit.
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?
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?
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.
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?