Land Based Songwriting Workshop with Elexa Dawson

Adult Group Class / Songwriting Program

Place is central to our understanding of ourselves as individuals and communities. Participants will find words to convey feelings through a meditation on a place. Recalling the textures, moods, and sensations of your spatial memory, we will discover how the places that made us inform our creativity and worldview. Facilitated by acclaimed Potawatomi songwriter, Elexa Dawson, this workshop will focus on discussion, recollection, idea formation, so no instruments needed. Participants will take away tools to create land-inspired music through a deep connection to the places that nurture them. Participants will take home new techniques and a practice of noticing that will enrich their songwriting and creativity in daily life.

Elexa Dawson is a practitioner of the soul. Her red-dirt honey vocals and rhythmic guitar style deliver a sound that hits home. Both familiar and intriguing, her songs speak of the earth and community, and celebrate all relationships, from mother and child to friend and lover.

Kansas-based and Oklahoma-born, Elexa is a songwriter, educator, community organizer, Folk Alliance Region Midwest's Board President, and serves on the Board of Directors of Music to Life. Elexa is a Kansas Touring Roster Artist, Music to Life's Juried Artist, and Mid-America Arts Alliance Interchange Fellow. Former fellowships include First Peoples Fund and Western Arts Alliance Native Launchpad.

Elexa is the founder and director of Good Way Gardens, a land-based arts organization, and is co-founder of Weda Skirts, one of Kansas' best-beloved female folk ensembles. She runs an independent label, Turns Out Records. She’s also a founding member of popular folk groups The Power Lilies and Heyleon.

Grouped with: Songwriting