Katy Lee is performing for Dusk at Warkleigh

Katy is first and foremost a ‘woodlander’ but often wear an artist hat too specialising in creating site specific arts / environment performances and projects.

Katy has devised and delivered numerous community and professional Dance / Performance Art projects over the last 20 years.   All of Katy’s professional work has been created for non-theatre venues from castles and heritage sites, city centres and band stands to natural spaces including woodlands and coastlines. Her work is primarily movement and site based/inspired. Current area of interest is finding alternative ways to represent dance, to enable the work to live beyond a single performance. Collaboration and community engagement is an important element to the work. Story and myth has also played a crucial role in her work.

In 2012 Katy set up Courage Copse Creatives with her husband, a woodland enterprise based in the woodland where they work and live in North Devon. They are predominantly charcoal makers, but also run educational and arts projects for local schools and colleges, focusing on heritage woodland craft and woodland ecology. The restoration and management of Courage Copse is at the heart of the enterprise, to show it can be economically as well as environmentally viable. Community engagement, sharing the natural environment for physical, mental and emotional well-being and explaining the importance of managing woodlands and natural heritage is a key driving force to the work. The Arts are often used as a vehicle to communicate this. Courage Copse Creatives have received funding from Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council, England to facilitate this.

Katy’s poem for Dusk, Red Coat, Wolf,etc, is being read at Warkleigh on 21st December.