weaving-with
A theatrical gathering that entwines craft, story, and reflection into an invitation to be in community with the Land. Over the course of the performance, a unique weaving of local materials is slowly shaped — its form holding the stories of people and place, and embodying the ties that bind communities to the living world.
The performance is both ritual and celebration: of language rooted in soil, of material drawn from the land itself, and of the gestures of making that connect people to one another and to the more-than-human. As the weaving takes shape, audiences are invited to sense how weaving becomes a metaphor for belonging — each strand carrying memory, meaning, and relationship into a tangible form.
First produced in association with TKTKTKTK Productions, weaving-with has travelled widely across Ireland, North America, and Britain, carrying with it a living conversation about culture, craft, and ecology. The Winter 2027 tour will welcome audiences of up to 600. While not every hand may touch the weaving, each presence contributes to the shared act of holding place together.
A gathering. A landscape. A weaving made together.
What if the things we make could remind us of the relationships we belong to?
In weaving-with, we gather with a community in a particular place and begin with something that connects us all: the land beneath our feet, the materials it gives us, and the knowledge held by the people who live with it.
Throughout the show, we meet the people of that place. Farmers, makers, growers, ecologists, elders, young people, artists, neighbours. We listen to their stories, learn how they work with the land, share food, walk, gather and make.
And then we weave.
And the basket embodies both: our kinship with one another and the deeper kinship that connects us to the living landscape that sustains us.
Weaving Kin isn't a programme about preserving traditional crafts, or teaching people how to make things.
It is an exploration of how making can help us remember that we belong to something larger than ourselves.
The land gives us materials.
People give us knowledge.
Knowledge gives us ways of living.
Making gives us a reason to gather.
And gathering gives us the possibility of becoming kin.
Each programme begins with a place and a material, and ends with something made collectively — a physical object carrying the relationships, stories and knowledge encountered along the way.
Because perhaps a basket is more than something we use to carry things.
Perhaps it is a way of understanding how we carry one another.
The central performance of the programme is the making of a basket. Not a demonstration by an expert, but a collective act. Each person contributes something: a piece of material, a skill, a story, a memory, a little knowledge. We learn together, shape the material together and gradually bring separate strands into relationship.
The basket becomes a physical record of the gathering.
The willow might have grown beside the river. The hands weaving it belong to people whose lives are rooted in that landscape. The techniques have travelled through generations. The stories reveal histories of work, migration, loss and belonging. The making creates new relationships between people who may never otherwise have met.
By the time the final strands are woven and the rim is bound, something has changed.
We haven't simply made a basket.
We have made a community.
For tour dates, please sign up below.