Realisation 2023

Indra Adnan
Speaker

Indra Adnan is Founder and Co-initator of The Alternative UK, a socio-political platform serving systemic transformation. AUK publishes a Daily Alternative news blog, develops cosmolocal agency networks (CANs) and connects planetary regeneration projects. Indra is concurrently a socio-psychotherapist, writer and consultant on soft power. She is also Visiting Director of Poiesis at Perspectiva. Clients have included the Danish and Brazilian governments, World Economic Forum and NATO. Her book The Politics of Waking Up: Power and Possibility in the Fractal Age was a Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year in 2021.

Chris Ash
Improviser

Chris is a composer, workshop leader, musical director, sound designer, and multi-instrumentalist. A founding member of Showstopper! and An Improbable Musical, he is sometimes found teaching Musical Theatre Writing at Goldsmiths or Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, or coaching Musical Theatre Improvisation at the Royal Academy of Music. As a composer, Chris created “Wasted” with Carl Miller; a “Live Rockumentary” about the Brontë siblings. Collaborating with digital media company Megaverse, Chris has created music & sound for Virtual Reality, and smartphone gameplay.

Chris has led creative workshops for International School students around the world, including on the “Unseen Stories” of asylum-seekers in Hong Kong, and on “Bayanihan” in Manila (ISTA). He has been a guest musical director for many of the London 50-hour Improvathons, and at festivals in Oslo, Rome, Edmonton, Hamburg, Canmore, Copenhagen, Birmingham, and beyond.

Chris Ash and Susan Harrison will be improvising a mini musical, exploring whichever themes rise to the surface during the festival. Using your suggestions they will conjure up a slice of spontaneous entertainment to delight and inspire.

Nick Ashley-Cooper
Speaker and Host

Nick Shaftesbury graduated from the London Business School with a Masters in Business Administration in 2008. After an early career as a DJ and music promoter in New York City, he returned to the UK in 2005 and has since overseen the restoration of his family home, St Giles House. The project has won several national awards, including the 2015 Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) Award for Building Conservation and the Historic England Angel Award, Best Rescue of a Historic Building or Site. The work has been documented in a book entitled, ‘The Rebirth of an English Country House’, which he co-wrote with Tim Knox, the current Director of the Royal Collection. He is the first Shaftesbury for 50 years to live in St Giles House, alongside his wife Dinah and their three children.

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee
Speaker

Dominique Savitri Bonarjee is an artist, a dancer, and a lifelong seeker. She is an avid (somewhat unstoppable) maker working unrestrictedly across moving image, sound, performance, textiles, bio-art, handcrafted electronics, etc. Her doctoral art project at Goldsmiths University, entitled ‘Space of the Nameless’, advocates for epistemologies of the unknown as a way to recalibrate (human) knowledge’s bloated orbit. Discovering ways to wade into the unknown is the focus of her embodied research methodology which includes wobbling, collapsing, and liquefying. She teaches dance as a form of neti-neti/self-inquiry practice. Committed to weaving disciplines, she invented the Embodiment Hackathon as a workshop format that cross-pollinates curiosity and imagination across movement research, electronics and craft making. She shows work internationally in galleries, performance spaces, biennales, fields, beaches, pavements, and is resident artist at The Study Society for Nonduality, Colet House, London. Her book ‘Butoh as heard by a dancer’ is forthcoming, published by Routledge in 2023.

Rowan Cobelli
Speaker

Rowan Cobelli has been a full-time student and trainer of Yoga for 22 years, and offers an integrated approach to inner resolution, true rest and the art of being who you are.  He will be offering early  morning yoga sessions orientating around integration, using simple, slow and restorative movements to create an environment to find space inside. Space helps us to ‘feel’, acknowledge what is moving in the body and to become more conscious of the dense and subtle processes running. Space and an approach of ‘non-grasping’ along with an exploration of identity can create both the experience of rest along with a profound opportunity to recognise yourself beyond the form of things.

Richard Dunne
Speaker

Richard Dunne is Founder and Director of The Harmony Project, an education charity working with schools and educators in the UK and around the world to help them develop a new way of learning inspired by Nature’s principles of Harmony, principles that teach us a way of life that is sustainable and well.  The work of Harmony has been inspired by His Majesty King Charles III and his book ‘Harmony, a new way of looking at our world’.

The Harmony approach to learning brings together subject specific skills and knowledge around projects or enquiries of learning that take the learning beyond the classroom and apply it to the real world.  Each enquiry references a principle of Harmony in Nature – Interdependence, the Cycle, Diversity, Adaptation, Health and Oneness.  When learners understand these principles of Harmony, they learn what they need to do to live sustainably, too.  It is our lack of understanding of these principles that has led us to a place where the future well-being of our planet and its people is now at stake.

Richard developed this way of learning in his previous role as Headteacher of an Ofsted graded Outstanding School.  He now shares this approach across the education sector nationally and globally through presentations, workshops and school support programmes.  He has written a teachers’ guide to enable teachers and educators to implement Harmony principles and practices in their education settings.  The guide is being promoted as a blueprint for Education for Sustainability with the Department of Education in England and it is informing case studies for the new Curriculum for Wales.  It is now in 9 languages.

Pippa Evans
Programme Co-ordinator

Pippa Evans is an award winning improviser, musical comedian and author of Improv Your Life: An Improviser’s Guide To Embracing Whatever Life Throws At You. In 2013 she and Sanderson Jones started Sunday Assembly, the church for people who don’t believe in God which became a global phenomenon. Though no longer involved in the Sunday Assembly project, Pippa finds herself drawn to the Venn Diagram of secular spirituality, improvisation and humour. How can we be fully ourselves in relation to others? Can we do serious work without taking ourselves too seriously?

Teaching improvisation has taken Pippa everywhere from Drama Schools to boardrooms, working with everyone from footballers to NHS workers. Pippa has been collaborating with Perspectiva since its early iterations and is excited to return to the Realisation Festival for 2023.

www.pippaevans.com

Kübra Gümüşay
Speaker

Kübra Gümüşay is an award-winning writer from Germany. In her best-selling book Sprache und Sein (Speaking and Being) she examines how language dictates politics and shapes the way we think.  Gümüşay is the founder of several award winning campaigns and associations – e.g. the campaign #SchauHin against racism, the feminist alliance #ausnahmslos for which she was awarded the Clara Zetkin Prize for Women, and the campaign ‘Organized Love’. And most recently, eeden, a feminist co-creation space in Hamburg (selected as »Kultur- und Kreativpiloten Deutschland« in 2019), and future_s, a feminist research- and advocacy organisation for desirable futures. In 2018, Forbes Magazine selected her as one of »30 under 30« in Europe. In 2021 she was recipient of the Tarabya Artist in Residency Fellowship of the German Kulturakademie. In 2022, she was a Senior Mercator Fellow at the Centre for Research in Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH), at the Centre for the Future of Intelligence and a Visiting Fellow at Jesus College, University of Cambridge. Gümüşay’s current research focuses on just futures, real utopias and the politics of imagination.

Ed Haddon
Speaker

Ed is a coach who specialises in working with entrepreneurs and those looking for a more autonomous meaningful life. He works with purpose led leaders to develop their own models of success in business and life. He is particularly interested in redirecting focus from shareholders to a broader set of beneficiaries. He uses coaching to generate honest conversations and change, working at the intersection of psychology and business. He is the author of the upcoming book The Modern Maverick, which helps readers unlock their potential for the benefit of all those around them and society as a whole. He holds degrees in Psychology from Oxford University and in Business from Harvard University and a Diploma in Performance Coaching from The Coaching Academy.

Susan Harrison
Improviser

Susan is a member of Showstopper! The Improvised Musical. She has also improvised with Mischief Movie Night, Austentatious and her own company These Folk. She teaches improvisation for Hoopla & The Bridge and is passionate about creating a playful & supportive environment. As an actress she’s worked with numerous companies including; CBBC, The National Theatre & Radio 4.

Susan Harrison and Chris Ash will be improvising a mini musical, exploring whichever themes rise to the surface during the festival. Using your suggestions they will conjure up a slice of spontaneous entertainment to delight and inspire.

Satish Kumar
Speaker

Peace-pilgrim, life-long activist, and former monk, Satish Kumar has been inspiring global change for over 50 years. He undertook a pilgrimage for peace, walking for two years without money from India to America for the cause of nuclear disarmament. Now in his 80s, Satish has devoted his life to campaigning for ecological regeneration and social justice. He is a world-renown author and international speaker, founder of The Resurgence Trust and Editor Emeritus of Resurgence & Ecologist – a change-making magazine he edited for over 40 years. 
To find more about Satish and join him in protecting people and planet click here.

Grace McIntyre
Speaker

Grace McIntyre is an artist with a multidimensional mindset, bringing her lived experience and professional expertise to build workshops and interventions for the individual and group. Informed by the experiential process of connection, she creates conditions for challenge, honesty and exploration into the mind and body through the mediums of play, movement, art making and dialogue. She is a Integrative Art Psychotherapist, Coach, Mediator and Group Facilitator. Her therapeutic practice has specialised in working with complex trauma and neurodiversity. Her coaching business is directed towards the creative industries, and organisations who are looking to think outside of the box. Grace has a particular interest in systemic constellations, patterns, the subconscious, imaginal worlds of the psyche and the world as a place of infinite possibility.

Iain McGilchrist
Speaker

Dr Iain McGilchrist is a psychiatrist, neuroscience researcher, philosopher and literary scholar. He is a Quondam Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, an Associate Fellow of Green Templeton College, Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, and former Consultant Psychiatrist and Clinical Director at the Bethlem Royal & Maudsley Hospital, London.  He has been a Research Fellow in neuroimaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore and a Fellow of the Institute of Advanced Studies in Stellenbosch.  He has published original articles and research papers in a wide range of publications on topics in literature, philosophy, medicine and psychiatry.  He is the author of a number of books, but is best-known for The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Yale 2009),  In November 2021 his two-volume work The Matter with Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World was published by Perspectiva Press.

Ivo Mensch
Speaker

Ivo  Mensch is developing the Praxis strand of Perspectiva. He designs practices and courses as a means to skilfully navigate larger arcs of cultural transition, shifts in consciousness and whatever the meta-crisis throws at us. He researches and writes on Time (Temporics), the Imagination and Logos as fundamental realms of change. Ivo is an ordained monk in the Zen Buddhist lineage, and practices for over a decade in the wisdom school of the Diamond Approach. Besides working for Perspectiva, Ivo supports individuals in their unfolding and realisation as a coach. He is a published author and has written on the inner, developmental sides of entrepreneurship. He worked over a decade as a journalist, covering tech, law, spirituality and was a communications consultant after an early, winding career in tech, yacht carpentry and greenhouse construction.

Elizabeth Oldfield
Speaker

Elizabeth Oldfield is an experienced leader, speaker, writer and podcast host with a passion for intelligent public engagement on issues of faith, identity, and healing our common life. She appears regularly in the media, including BBC One, Sky News, the World Service, and writing in Prospect Magazine, UnHerd and The Financial Times.

She also hosts The Sacred, a podcast, events and visual content brand which creates space for a wide range of guests to reflect on their deepest values. For ten years she was Director of Theos, the UK’s leading religion and society think tank. She spent the first part of her career working at the BBC in television and radio, contributing to programmes including Beyond Belief and the Moral Maze, as well as Radio 3 and 4 documentaries. She is motivated by the dearth of real wisdom in public life, by a desire to increase empathy across our deep differences and the way spirituality can help individuals and societies flourish. She has a masters in Theology and the Arts and lives in an intentional community in south london.

Tomiwa Owolade
Speaker

Tomiwa Owolade is a writer and critic. He writes about literature, politics, sport and identity for The Times, the Spectator, the Evening Standard, Literary Review, and UnHerd. He has also appeared on BBC Radio 4 discussing some of the ideas in this book. He won top prize at the RSL Giles St Aubyn Awards 2021. This is Not America is his first book.

Jonathan Rowson
Co-founder, Perspectiva

Jonathan Rowson is a writer, philosopher and chess Grandmaster who was British Chess Champion from 2004-2006. HE holds degrees from Oxford, Bristol, and Harvard universities, was former director of the Social Brain Center at the RSA and an Open Society Fellow. He is co-founder and director of Perspectiva, a research institute that examines the relationship between complex global challenges and the inner lives of human beings. His latest book is The Moves that Matter – A Chess Grandmaster on the Game of Life.

Tom Shakespeare
Speaker

I am a writer and broadcaster (regularly on BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 3), employed at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM).  Best known for disability research in UK and global south, and also for bioethics (former member of Nuffield Council on Bioethics) and for disability arts (former member of Arts Council England).  2020 Quaker Swarthmore Lecturer (“Openings to the Infinite Ocean: a friendly offering of hope”).

Rory Stewart
Speaker

Rory Stewart has been an academic, writer, adventurer, politician and diplomat. After a brief time in the Army and the diplomatic service, he walked 6000 miles on a 21 month trek across Asia, was the acting governor of a province in Iraq , established an NGO in Afghanistan and was appointed a Professor at Harvard, and wrote a number of books before entering Parliament. He served as a minister in a number of departments and was a cabinet minister before his bid to be Prime-Minister. He is now President of the non-profit GiveDirectly.

His walk across Afghanistan shortly after the US invasion is described in his award-winning New York Times bestseller, The Places In Between. His books have sold more than 600,000 copies worldwide and have been translated into 13 languages. He has made a number of documentaries and he also co-presents (with Alastair Campbell)  the UK’s leading political podcast  ‘The Rest is Politics’.

Mark Vernon
Speaker and Programme Co-ordinator

Mark Vernon is a writer and psychotherapist. He contributes to and presents programmes on the radio, as well as writing for the national and religious press, and online publications. He also podcasts, in particular The Sheldrake-Vernon Dialogues with Rupert Sheldrake, gives talks and leads workshops. He has a PhD in ancient Greek philosophy, and other degrees in physics and in theology, having studied at Durham, Oxford and Warwick universities. He is the author of several books, including his latest, Dante’s Divine Comedy: A Guide for the Spiritual Journey. He used to be an Anglican priest and lives in London, UK. For more information see www.markvernon.com.

Linda Woodhead
Speaker

Linda Woodhead MBE FBA is F.D. Maurice Chair in Moral and Social Theology and Head of the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London. She researches religion, spirituality, and values in post-Christian societies. Her most recent books are That Was the Church That Was: How the Church of England Lost the English People (with Andrew Brown, 2016), Gen Z, Explained (with Katz, Ogilvie, Shaw 2021) and Unknowing God: Towards a Post-Abusive Theology (with Peter Harvey, 2022). She is currently researching the way that ‘values’ have become a new religion.