Raised By This Place A Spring Equinox Retreat of Ritual Theater, Play & Ecological Belonging

“I was raised by strawberries, fields of them… it was the wild strawberries, beneath dewy leaves on an almost-summer morning, who gave me my sense of the world, my place in it." 
-Robin Wall Kimmerer - Braiding Sweetgrass

What place raised you?

What sounds, smells, textures, and people shaped the way you move through the world — and when did you stop listening to them?

This Spring Equinox, at the threshold between darkness and light, we gather at Menla Retreat for Raised By This Place — a three-day immersion that invites you to remember. Not through lecture or sitting meditation alone, but through theater: one of the most ancient spiritual practices we have.

A Word From Katie

Lights dim… I step onto the stage.

The stage, for me, has always represented both vulnerability and power, a sacred space for embodied learning and spiritual exploration. Theater found me as a child and changed everything. By seventeen, it had reshaped not just how I moved onstage but how I talked, listened, and walked through the world. For a mind that had always experienced life a little differently, theater was not just an art form. It was a fortress. A compass. A way home.

In stillness... I find my core. While theater and spirit start to soar.

For in this body. On this earth. I've found my purpose. I've found my worth.

That journey led me to Teachers College, Columbia University, where I spent two years studying how children use theater to express spiritual and ecological awareness and confirmed what I had always felt: theater is not only a performance. It is a ritual. Raised By This Place is the retreat I wish had existed when I was searching.

What Is This Retreat?

Long before theater was performance, it was ritual. From the ceremonial circles of Indigenous traditions to the ecstatic festivals of ancient Greece, human beings have always used the body, voice, movement, imagination, and play to access what words alone cannot reach. This retreat returns theater to those roots.

Drawing on the practices of Augusto Boal, Antonin Artaud, Indigenous creation stories, and the wisdom that children carry naturally, we will spend three days using art as a spiritual resource: a way of slowing down, listening deeply, and embodying our relationship to the earth and to each other.

The Spring Equinox is a threshold, the moment when darkness and light hold equal weight before the world tips toward warmth. There is no better time to step through a portal. To retrieve what has been dormant. To remember that you, too, are part of the living earth.

What We Will Do Together

We will walk the forests of Castkills at dawn, moving quietly, collecting what calls to us, a stone, a feather, a particular quality of light, and placing our discoveries in sacred jars that become vessels of memory and gratitude.

We will use Augusto Boal's Image Theater to sculpt our bodies into living stories about place, belonging, and what we carry from the people and landscapes that shaped us.

We will write Raised By This Place poems, sensory maps of the smells, sounds, tastes, and touches that made us who we are. The grandmother's kitchen. The specific sound of rain on a childhood roof. The feeling of earth under bare feet.

And on the final morning, we will weave it all together into a collective ceremony: our jars, our drawings, our theater images, and our poems offered back to each other and to the land.

Theater as Ritual — No Experience Needed

You do not need to be an actor. You do not need to perform. What this retreat asks of you is simpler and older than that: a body, a willingness to play, and an openness to approaching the world the way children do — as if everything is new, alive, and worthy of wonder.

Play is not frivolous. It is spiritual. Walking in a forest and talking to a tree is how every wisdom tradition in the world has taught human beings to remember their place in the web of life. This retreat gives you permission to do that again.

Whether you come as an artist, an educator, a spiritual seeker, someone drawn to shamanism, the sacred feminine, or holistic wellness — or simply someone who has forgotten how to play — this retreat is for you.



Schedule

Friday, March 20

3  - 6 pm Arrival & Check-in
Settle in, let the Catskills receive you.
6 - 7 pm Dinner
Community begins at the table.
7:30 - 9 pm Welcoming & Intention Setting
We open the retreat as theater has always opened ritual: together. We build our shared altar, speak our intentions into the circle, establish the trust and agreements that make deep play possible, and cross the threshold into this liminal time. The equinox portal is open.

Saturday, March 21

7 - 8 am Dawn Walk: Listening to the Land
We move quietly into the forest at first light. What is the land saying? What calls to you? We collect natural elements that carry personal meaning.
8 - 9 am Breakfast
9:30 am - 12 pm Sacred Jars, Drawing & Journaling
We transform the morning's discoveries into art. Our sacred jars become vessels of gratitude and belonging. We draw our nature memories. We journal what the land is telling us about ourselves.
12:30 - 1:30 pm Lunch
2 - 4 pm Image Theater & Ecological Storytelling
Using Augusto Boal's Image Theater, our bodies become living sculptures — still photographs of personal and ecological stories. Through group tableaux and reflection, we explore our relationships to place, loss, memory, and belonging.
4 - 6 pm Free Time Hike the trails. Rest. Visit the Dewa Spa. Let the afternoon hold you.
6 - 7 pm Dinner
7:30- 8:30 pm Slam Poetry Night Around the Fire
We write and share our Raised By This Place poems — sensory maps of the people, places, seasons, and memories that made us. Guided by prompts that have moved both children and adults to unexpected depths, we discover what our bodies have been holding. Tears, laughter, and wonder are all welcome here.

Sunday, March 22

7 - 8 am Embodied Listening in Nature
A silent movement practice to greet the first full day of spring. We let our bodies respond to the forest.
8 - 9 am Breakfast
Please check out of your room by 11 am.
9:30 am - 12 pm Collective Performance & Closing Ritual
We weave everything together: the jars, the drawings, the theater images, and the poems become a shared ceremony of return.
12:30 - 1:30 pm Final Lunch & Departure
We eat together one last time before returning to the world, changed, grounded, and raised once more by this place.

*Please note that this schedule is subject to change.