Dancing with Dream Maker Into the NightBody with Art and Soul - New Zealand February 25 - March 1, 2026.
Artwork by Doug Van Houten.
A residential, face to face intensive held in the stunning Baton Valley, South Island Aotearoa (New Zealand).
Program Pricing:
Early Bird - $NZ 755 - paid in full at registration before Dec 15, 2025.
Full Price - $NZ 855 - with a $500 minimum deposit to hold your place - remainder paid 4 weeks before program start.
Concession Price - $NZ 755 or by negotiation
We encourage you to pay the full price if you have the means to do so. This will enable us to cover costs and offer concessional places. If you are challenged financially, please contact the Centre for the Great Turning (NZ) to discuss.
Enter into a divine dance where our dreaming nightbody steps into confluence with the deep source of our creativity. This dance is a powerful portal to soul work, through which we bridge from dayworld consciousness to the hidden rivers of the unconscious in ways that are unique to you as accessed through your imagination, emotions, body, and relationships. Through the interplay of these modalities, you become a mysterious dream-walker shaping soul’s longing into expressions of art and motion.
During this immersion, we’ll wander slowly in the often disturbing, often splendorous nightworld with its symbols, images, and metaphors meant only for the dreamer. We’ll courageously commit to an extended stay in soul’s mysterious domain, permitting the dream to do its formidable work on our ego, to root us more fully in soul just as the old Alchemists transmuted base metals into gold. Rather than trying to interpret or figure out the meaning of the dream, we will submit ourselves as we yield to the dream’s characters, landscapes, and atmospheres.
Making art helps us make meaning. Music and movement together open numinous pathways toward deep feeling and a more embodied sense of knowing. Through dance and free movement, we surrender and allow the body to express what the strategic mind cannot reach. By sidestepping everyday consciousness and allowing the unconscious to speak in its own symbols, colors, and textures, we enter a holy inner terrain that words cannot convey. Whether with oil pastels, collage, sculpture, or even spontaneous markings on the page, the act of allowing a wild conversation to flow through us — unmediated, untethered, and alive — generates a sacred gesture toward soul. As Flannery O’Conner wrote, “The artist prays by creating”.
You’ll discover what it’s like to enter dreams as living mysteries; to boldly and vulnerably interact with its denizens and dreamscapes; to be moved by the deep intelligence of vivid dream images; to open to non-ordinary ways of perceiving and knowing; and to experience the vitality found in the under-dream of your everyday waking life.
Dancing with DreamMaker moves you deeper toward your soul’s yearning, enabling you to artfully carry the dream into the world as a gift.
Venue:
Baton Valley House, Tapawera, South Island, New Zealand.
Your Guides:
Doug Van Houten: Doug draws on the wisdom of the natural world, depth-psychology, eco-psychology, dreams, somatic knowing, poetry, and many pan-cultural, soul furthering practices that include: The Way of Council, vision fasting, shadow work, symbolic artwork, trance dancing and conversations with the more than human world. Doug’s true calling in life is to support others as they uncover their own unique gifts and in so doing, transform their lives in service to what Thomas Berry called ‘The Great Work’ of our times. Doug is also an ardent beekeeper, a visual artist, a wily wanderer, a dream tracker, an emergent ceremonialist, a heart-centered activist, and a yogi and a dancer interested in new forms of somatic practice.
Doug will be supported by Animas SAIP apprentice Rene Aish with Jaime Howell.
Food and Accommodation:
Details of food, accommodation etc. are available on the Centre for the Great Turning website upon registration.
