Solarpunk At Home is a mindful way for you to enjoy the sunset, inspired by my time observing sunsets at the Great Petition, a feminist statue in Melbourne’s CBD.

It’s best practised in a chair, perhaps even at the public benches next to this beautiful statue by Susan Hewitt and Penelope Lee. And feel free to wash your hands and get a piece of paper and a pen. You could write on your phone, but I would prefer you to write analogue as there’s proven peer-reviewed research that writing analogue could really help shift new patterns in the brain.

Feel free to pause this now to get these; wash your hands, make it smell real nice.

Let’s do some mindful movement and reflection based on the three stages of the sunset.

Civil, nautical, and astronomical twilight.

Each has its own tools, its own reminders, and with those tools, I hope you find a free spine and a happy mind.

Place your hands on your knees and just say a little hello to your spine.

Feel free to give way into your hands.

There are many bones in your hands, 28 even.

Transfer your weight from the fronts of your hands to your back of your hands.

And just notice, try not to judge how your spine feels today.

Begin to feel like you’re playing piano.

Gently on your legs.

As you play this gentle piano on your legs, notice the connection between your shoulder blades and arms, across your beautiful long arms.

Let’s enjoy civil twilight.

Right now, the sun is just slipping below the horizon — not quite day, not quite night.

This first stage of dusk is meant to be lived together.

Continue to play with transferring weight in your hands as if you are playing piano on your legs. 

Civil twilight reminds us to be civil.

Not just out there — in here.

Think about your shoulder blades and your arms.

For your arms to lift, the wings of your shoulder blades rotate upwards — they open toward the sky.

Your shoulder blades are the wings that allow your arms to fly.

As you play piano on your legs, feel that relationship between your shoulder blades and your arms.

Your body is full of civil relationships.

Your body has already mastered what most governments haven’t.

Sigh twice — as a way to enter the night.

Inhale with the nose. Exhale through the mouth. 

A duet of bones.

A free spine is a happy mind.

Civil rights start within.

When your body learns how to cooperate with itself, we will solve how to cooperate with each other.

Just because you see war outside does not mean you need to be at war with yourself.

Finish your last movement and come to stillness. 

Sit here and witness the dusk.

The sun has already gone — it dipped below the water’s edge a few minutes ago.

But look at the sky.

It’s still pink.

Bright, glowing, bleeding pink.

How is that possible?

The thing that made the light has left, and the light is still here.

Most people think seeing means pushing your eyes outward — straining, squinting, reaching.

Don’t do that.

Instead, let the pink come to you.

Soften your eyes.

Let the colour land.

Sailors who read these skies weren’t straining — they were receiving.

Their whole body knew what the pink meant before they’d even thought about it.

Pink in the night, sailor’s delight.

A pink horizon means tomorrow will probably be beautiful weather beyond it.

Now here’s something brilliant about horizons.

A horizon isn’t a wall.

It isn’t the edge of the world.

It’s the edge of your world.

The visible is always carrying the invisible alongside it, just out of your horizon.

Your horizon is wide as you’re willing to let your attention go.

Wider, if you stop trying to control it.

Look! Allow the horizon to come to you.

Your eyes are a limb, reaching the visible.

Your crown is a limb, reaching the invisible.

Now, your eyes see the visible.

Your vision can extend and retract.

Feel the very top of your head.

Your crown.

That’s your limb for the invisible.

The stuff you can’t see but can somehow sense.

The feeling before the thought.

The knowing before the proof.

The same way you sometimes walk into a room and instantly know the vibe, before anyone’s said a word.

Look! Your eyes are a limb, reaching the visible.

Your crown is a limb, reaching the invisible.

Feel free to journal here if you wish and pause this audio , write about anything you have noticed about your vision and crown during this nautical twilight. 

In my research I take the concept of 7 limbs, taught to me by Wendy Smith and Martin Hughes as a student in 2010 & 2011 and share in this poetic manner.

Having your vision and crown as separate points of extension has shifted my dancing for the rest of my life.

I hope this small offering of it inspires you as well.

Another concept gifted from them that I will share today is filling the touch.

Have your arms rest one on top of the other so your hands can hold your opposite forearm.

Let’s use our own touch as a gauge for understanding the layers of the body.

Here we go…

Before the sun sets, let’s have one last suntan.

You are evolving toward photosynthesis.

Hope for humanity is in the conscious suntan.

And the sun was always part of that first language.

Touch came first.

Before language.

Before thought.

Before the word for mother, there was the hand of mother.

Touch is the oldest language we have, and like all languages, the deeper you go, the richer the meaning becomes.

Touch is how we first knew the world was real — not by thinking it, but by feeling it land.

Sensation before cognition.

Contact before concept.

The body understood everything long before the mind arrived to take the credit.

See if your touch can just touch your skin. 

Right now, let the last of this light land on it.

And like all touch that matters, it travels inward — it does not stay at the surface.

Let’s tan deeper.

Beneath the skin is fascia — the body’s living spongy layer of connection.

It wraps the muscles in a continuous sponge.

Fascia remodels with movement.

Varied movement hydrates it.

This spongy web that distributes light through the whole system.

Not hoarding it at the skin.

Moving it.

Sharing it.

Let’s deepen your touch. Go to the muscle, where memory resides.

Years of tension leave their mark; muscle reveals how you’ve been living — tight from fear, silent from neglect.

The day’s last light is slow and warm, asking you to stop forcing and start allowing, following the natural flow.

The body keeps the score, and awareness leads to victory….

teaching us to be like the fading sun.

Now, the best for last, the bone.

The deepest layer.

The sun reaches here, too.

Through skin, through the web of fascia, through the memory held in muscle, all the way down to the architecture, the bones.

Most people move from the outside in — rules first, reasons later, surface first, depth never.

But you are learning to move from the inside out.

To let motion originate from something deeper than the skin.

That is the evolutionary direction happening in you right now.

Inward to outward.

Move from the inside out.

“The [evolution] will be [photosynthesised]” – Gil Scott Heron

Skin receiving.

Fascia connecting.

Muscle releasing.

Bone becoming.

Touch was the first language.

Feel the four layers of your body, skin, muscle, fascia and bone. 

Play with different levels of touch. 

Light was the first sight.

Stay in the tan.

Let it go all the way through your skin, fascia, muscles and bones.

Fill the touch.

Don’t go inside yet, we have one more image before the sun sets. 

Next is astronomical twilight.

The sun is eighteen degrees below the horizon.

No scattered solar light remains.

Most people call this night and turn indoors.

The ones who stay know something different is happening.

Touch the sternum bone.

Right in the middle.

Massage your finger there — it’s soft and squishy, like it’s made to handle pressure.

That’s not a sign of weakness; it’s design.

Focus on your touch that we just trained and place your hands on your knees and gently bring your sternum back and forth. Any range is okay, even stillness is okay with your hands on your legs. 

Imagine the last sunlight of the day seems to live there, moving from the sternum through the ribs.

The ribs connect to the sternum with cartilage at the front.

When the sternum softens a bit, that softness spreads out as your transfer your weight, and the rib cage starts to move.

Sternum to spine, front to back, sun to skeleton — it delivers not force but agility.

A readiness in each spinal segment to move in any direction without bracing first.

You are agile!

You can go forward, even when the world seems to go backwards.

You are porous to the sun.

Find that pair we found earlier — the shoulder blades and the arms — and lift the arms in a shape that is comfortable.

Hold this time.

Not as a memory.

As a suspension.

You are simultaneously in this moment and outside of it.

Perceiving it and held by it.

You are holding time.

What is in one is in the whole.

Every particle of light you have absorbed today did not shine only on your best parts.

It shone on all of you, without hesitation, without favouritism, without cruelty.

Photosynthesis is spiralling around you.

Up your spine.

Before we spoke, we felt.

Lean into the law of sensation.

The law of sensing, along with our ongoing systems of co-creation — these are the forces driving us, fuelled by the internal sun within.

Hold this time.

Spine charged.

Body porous.

Light shared.

Bring your arms back your side Inhale through the nose, exhale through the mouth. 

This has been Solarpunk @ Home.

Thank you for Dancehouse for presenting this project. Thank you to City of Melbourne for funding this project

For more information on concepts shared, make sure to check out the reading list below.

Thank you so much for listening. 

This resource includes a royalty free recording of Chopin’s Waltz in A Minor B.150

Reading List:

Cecil Street an essay by Dr.Shaun McLeod

Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception , Youtube by Ellie Anderson

Skinner Releasing Technique: A Movement and Dance Practice , edited by Manny Emslie. I recommend the chapter by Stephanie Skura.

The Kinaesthetic Imagination an interview with Joan Skinner by Bettina Neuhaus

Why Gil Scott-Heron Wrote “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” by Marcus Baram

Carmen Yih’s practice skates along the boundaries of hybrid dance-theatre, telling stories that draw on forgotten histories and marginalised voices. In her theatrical work, Carmen uses movement scores and structures influenced by non-Western narrative world-building, immersive theatre, and street and club dance forms. She has been selected for Stephanie Lake’s ESCALATOR, as one of five up-and-coming choreographic voices debuting AUSSIEAUSSIEAUSSIE for the program. Carmen is the recipient of the Abbotsford Convent Maggie Maguire Residency 2025-26. Carmen’s major works include: to disappoint a god (2025) for Dancehouse Season 3, M_N (2024) at Bowery Theatre, and Texture of Absence (2025) at Platform Arts. As a performer, she has performed in Miet Warlop’s One Song (2024), Jonathan Homsey’s Thoughts on Destiny (2024), Amelia Jean O’Leary’s CODED (2025), James Batchelor’s Gesturing, Weaving, Unfolding (2023), Alleyne Dance’s HOME (2023) for Shepparton Festival and more.

Trevor Santos is a Naarm/Melbourne-born dance artist and choreographer with nearly 20 years of experience in arts, entertainment, and education. He has collaborated with artists including Guy Sebastian, Mo’Ju, Missy Higgins, Hayden Calnin, Sheppard, and Hangeng, and worked with brands such as Toyota, Lee Jeans, Nuform Clothing, Baker’s Delight, Vicks, and Boost Juice. Expanding into musical theatre, Trevor has performed in Jagged Little Pill, Miss Saigon, the global phenomenon Hamilton, and most recently, In The Heights. As a choreographer and teacher, he has worked on the 2022 Miss World Australia finals and created acclaimed independent works, 100 Haikus (Dancehouse 2021) and In Other Words. His teaching has taken him to cities worldwide, including New York, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney, Gold Coast, Perth, and Hobart.

Mikha Daely is a dynamic entertainer with deep roots in Ballroom culture, commanding the stage as a fierce Vogue Femme performer and proud femme queen. Mikha blends precision, drama, and unapologetic glamour into every performance — serving face, body, and storytelling with every beat. She has won runway and performance categories at kiki balls across so called Australia and is a member of House of Diesel. Her major festival debut came at RISING’s Night Trade program with BEEFY BEATDOWN. Across dance and theatre she has performed for Midsumma, NGV, Melbourne Fashion Week, Gay Times, and Nongkrong Festival. She made her theatrical debut in And She Would Stand like This, presented by Antipodes Theatre.

Heather Nation is an established singer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist based on Turtle Island (USA), Heather Nation excels across vocals, guitar, bass, keys, and synthesisers. A sought-after collaborator and solo artist, she writes and produces her own material while performing internationally with Lauren Mayberry (CHVRCHES), the cult favourite Baby Bushka, and LA’s dream‑psych band Death Valley Girls. Known for her sophisticated production and commanding stage presence, Heather delivers performances defined by precision and emotional depth. She also operates Bluelight Room, her private studio, where she mentors artists, develops original projects, and contributes to a growing network of innovative independent music professionals.

Benji, also known as Aero/Beji, is a classically trained clarinetist and professional musician who found a deep connection to the street dance and ballroom community through music and movement. Through these communities, he has found a space for authentic expression and a sense of liberation, creativity, and belonging.