training and labs
Upcoming Labs – register now
We are excited to announce two innovative labs in October. You are welcome to sign up for one or both in the registration form below.
Moving Encounters: Mythopoetic Anthems
A voice and movement lab for self care and client work with Dan Cunningham and Amanda Levey
“The voice naturally gives rise to imaginative worlds.”
Jonathan Hart Makwaia
How do we hold the stories of others without losing our own embodied song? How do we tend to our own spiritual architecture while carrying the weight of therapeutic work?
Mythopoetic Anthems is an emergent creative arts therapy practice exploring voice, resonance, and singing or voicing your own living myth directly through your body.
In this collaborative, experiential workshop for creative arts therapists and practitioners, we will move through gentle movement exercises, explore voice resonance, and bring form to personal story and myth within a supportive, witnessed container.
Together, we will explore musicality, rhythm, and vocal presence as tools to strengthen our own creative grounding.
About Dan:
I am a queer movement-based creative arts therapist based in Auckland, Aotearoa. With a deep passion for the transformative power of the arts and yoga, I integrate these modalities into my practice to support mental and physical health, personal growth, and resilience. My holistic approach combines movement, voice, visual arts, and performance to foster self-expression and enhance well-being. Currently, I facilitate workshops across Auckland and my practice emphasises the intersection between movement and the voice using yoga as a means to prepare for personal creative expressivity.
When
Saturday 10 October 2026, 10am – 4pm
Where
Unit 37/332 Great North Road, Grey Lynn, Auckland.
This is an aikido studio with a floor consisting of beautiful mats – a perfect space for this work.
Hosts
Dan Cunningham and Amanda Levey
Catering
Some refreshments will be provided – please bring a contribution to a shared lunch.
Cost
$120 incl gst
Register
Register on the form below
Drawing with the Body
A drawing and movement lab for self care and client work with Diva Ford and Amanda Levey
An offering for creative arts therapists, artists, movers and makers to explore embodied approaches to drawing, learning a variety of techniques and approaches that can be engaged with in personal, creative, and/or therapeutic contexts.
All skill levels welcome, materials provided.
About Diva:
I am a Pākeha, queer, and neurodivergent creative arts therapist and artist based in West Auckland, Tāmaki Makaurau. I specialise in working with neurodivergence, LGBTTQIA+ support, identity, and creative connection, and with a background in Fine Arts and a passion for dance I have a long-held interest in how inter-modal approaches invite playfulness, discovery, and holistic wellbeing. My approach aims to honour embodied and relational ways of being, and invites curiosity around our environment, the systems around us, and the stories we carry.
When
Saturday 31 October 2026, 10am – 4pm
Where
Poynton Studios, 11 Poyton Terrace (just across the road from the new Karanga-a-hape train station)
Hosts
Diva Ford and Amanda Levey
Catering
Some refreshments will be provided – please bring a contribution to a shared lunch.
Cost
$120 incl gst
Register
Register on the form below
Registration form
Play
There is something magical as an adult to find people one can play with; to feel safe enough to be fully engaged and present and embodied; to be spontaneous and improvisational; to be silly and serious; to try things out; to be surprised and to make mistakes. In the play space everything is allowed and accepted as part of the play. Being witnessed and witnessing is a key aspect when video and photographs come into the play. One can be witnessed and witness, and on viewing the videos and photos can witness oneself and make sense of the choices made and fall in love with one’s own movement as a true expression of oneself in that moment. The relationship to one’s play mates is full of sensitive attunement and stimulation for new possibilities and creative sympoeisis. When play occurs in nature all the elements of nature become partners in the play – wind, sky, clouds, trees, grass, sand, rock.
Amanda has facilitated and co-facilitated training and workshops in the creative arts therapies with many different intentions and audiences.
At present she is most interested in running experiential experimental labs for participants who are comfortable to work with movement, improvisation, performance and collaborative creativity. Participants experience the vulnerability and excitement of our individual and shared experience emerging.