As our village grows there are more opportunities for all of you out there to learn from us and at the same time find out more about our ecovillage.  Attend workshops on natural building, dance, food preservation, and sustainable culture leadership, and see first hand how we are creating a model for a more sustainable world. Our workshops are organized by different people at DR, so you’ll have to contact the organizers to find out more about registration,  accommodations, and details about the workshops themselves. See the links below for each workshop category. Hope to see you at Dancing Rabbit this season!

Natural Building

Timber Frame Workshop  June 10-25, 2012

Students will spend 2 full weeks at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage learning the historic craft of timber frame construction using mortise and tenon joinery, as well as experiencing and learning some of the fundamental connections between building structure, design, and sustainable lifestyle alternatives.

Straw Bale Workshops  July 22-August 2, 2012

Students will spend 10 days at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage learning the fundamental craft of straw bale construction, as well as plastering techniques with clay and lime, creating artistic embellishments, and more.

Ecovillage Design

Ecovillage Education US:Sustainable Culture Leadership Training  June 29-August 5, 2012

Ecovillage Education is a 5-week trans-disciplinary, experiential program set within one of the US’ leading ecovillages. Develop your capacity for creating or enhancing communities and projects using social, economic and ecological sustainability lessons learned in the worlds’ most sustainable communities.

Dance

The recently opened Casa de Cultura at Dancing Rabbit is hosting two dance weekend workshops this year.  The first Off-Grid Blues Weekend held last fall was a great way to break in the dance floor at the Casa de Cultura, and it was a blast for participants.  This year there are two dance weekends planned.  Check out the links below for more information on the workshops.

Contra Culture  April 27-29, 2012

“Contra Culture” will be a unique blend of Ecovillage and Contra Dance community cultures.

Off-Grid Blues   September 21-23, 2012

Off Grid Blues is a community-focused dance event. Some of the best dance instructors in the nation will be there to share their knowledge and love of dance with you.

Food Preservation

Putting Up the Harvest – Canning Fruit and Vegetables
Three sessions: July 7th, August 4th, September 15th, 2012

Join us for a food preservation workshop where you’ll get hands-on experience in an atmosphere where questions are encouraged and confidence gained. With a focus on both safety and flavor, we’ll go step by step from beginning to delicious end. Includes six hours of hands-on instruction, lunch, canning tools, recipes and samples to take home and share.

Sandhill Farm, home to friends of Dancing Rabbit, is a small neighboring intentional community here in northeastern Missouri.

Sandhill has been practicing organic agriculture and gardening since 1974 on 135 acres, and the community provides most of its own food, including vegetables, fruits, herbs, sorghum syrup, honey, chickens, and turkeys. This video gives us a glimpse into how members of the community actually grow their own food, and how this lifestyle is central to community life at Sandhill Farm.

Hopefully this is the first of future DRTV: Neighbors videos!

The Milkweed Mercantile at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage is an off-the-grid, straw bale bed & breakfast, organic cafe, and eco general store. Alline gives us a mini tour of the business, which is currently under construction, but opening soon.

The Mercantile is currently a finalist for a $10K award at Ideablob.com. Please consider voting for us if you like what we’re doing. The winnings will go towards the purchase of a wind turbine if we get enough votes. Simply visit this link and register to vote: Straw bale off-the-grid business opens!

Thanks for your support!

Hello dear viewers. Despite what you may think, DRTV is not dead. It’s merely on a break, since I have been busy building a cob house the past four months. With all that stomping of mud, little time is left to capture daily life here at Dancing Rabbit.

However, there is some exciting and relevant news. Life With Thomas, the fifth DRTV documentary entry, is playing at the Hi Mom! Film Festival in Carrboro/Chapel Hill, North Carolina next week on September 5. Here’s the schedule.

If any DRTV fans are in the area, I urge you to check it out. And if any festival attendees happen to see this, I’d be curious to hear how it went.

Expect a return to DRTV in the soon-coming future…

- Brian

Rocket stoves are superefficient wood-fired stoves that can easily be built using readily available and recycled materials. They are a common sight in cob, straw bale, and other natural building designs.

In this video, Nathan and Tony describe two different rocket stove systems, detailing the inner workings of the stoves and their unique ability to store heat much more effectively than traditional wood stoves. Unlike other stoves, rocket stove flues can run horizontoally through cob benches or other cob furniture, effectively storing much more heat that would otherwise be lost.

For more information about rocket stoves, visit rocketstoves.com, or check out Ianto Evans’s and Leslie Jackson’s book Rocket Mass Heaters: Superefficient Woodstoves You Can Build (And Snuggle Up To).

This video is also available on Revver.

Here’s a brief look at the seasonal aspects of life at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage. Daily routines are largely influenced by the current season – winter is a time for relaxing, socializing, indoor projects, spring planning, and most importantly, staying warm. And by the end of winter, members are gearing up and itching for spring with new or continuing building projects and gardening plans.

In this video, Alyson describes wintertime maple sap collection, Liat shares her plans to transform a school bus into a house (complete with greenhouse), and Dan talks about seed saving and starting seedlings.

This video is also available on Revver.

Part 1

Part 2

Mushroom hunter, tent dweller, food fermenter, odd jobber and eco-expounder, Thomas has been living at Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage for the past five years. In Life with Thomas, we get the chance to familiarize ourselves with one of the community’s unique denizens. Thomas shares his personal story and how he came to desire a more ecological lifestyle, inspired by life experiences and global environmental issues. He also gives us a cooking lesson, goes mushroom hunting, reflects upon his wigwam, and pursues other exciting daily activities at his home in Dancing Rabbit.

You can also find this video at Revver. Be sure to use our spiffy new social bookmarking features below, and share this video with friends and family!

On October 5-7, Dancing Rabbit celebrated its 10th anniversary and reunion, and rabbits present and past joined to commemorate and reminisce about the community. In this episode of DRTV, Tony and Cecil, two of the six original Dancing Rabbit co-founders reflect on the progress and growth of the ecovillage against the backdrop of the reunion celebrations and festivities.The land on which Dancing Rabbit is situated was originally purchased ten years ago, in October 1997, and since then it has come quite a ways since the days when the community was almost nothing more than a vision.

About a month or two ago, we set about creating a short video to enter in Current TV’s so-called “Ecospot” contest. Although we didn’t make the cut as a semi-finalist, we can at least share the fruits of our labor with you now. Just for some background info, the theme of the Ecospot contest was global warming, and contestants had up to 60 seconds to create a video centered around inspiring solutions to the climate crisis. Anyway, here’s what we came up with.

(As a little note, if you happen to watch our DRTV videos on Revver, you can help support us by clicking on ads at the end of each video. We receive a small share of revenue for every click! Although we wouldn’t condone clicking on any ads elsewhere, hey, at least this one serves a good purpose!)

And as another note, have you considerd subscribing to our RSS feed? If you have an RSS feed reader installed on your computer, you can subscribe to the DRTV feed and become instantly notified as soon as new videos are made available.

Thanks!

Part 1

Part 2

Lately, there’s been a lot of building work going on around Dancing Rabbit, including everything from the continuing progress on Ironweed‘s cob/straw bale hybrid kitchen, to the frame construction of the Milkweed Mercantile, and to Dan’s urbanite foundation construction for his soon-to-be straw bale house.

So for this episode of Dancing Rabbit TV, we’re taking the opportunity to provide a “how-to” natural building lesson, an in-depth video about earthen plastering techniques and application. Tamar guides us through every step of the way, showing how easy it is to make natural plaster from just a few simple ingredients (there might be one somewhat surprising ingredient in there, too!), and both making and mixing the plaster, and then applying it to a natural home wall. Anyone who might have some curiosity or interest in learning more about natural home building, or specifically earthen plastering is encouraged to take a look!

You can also download a high quality Quicktime version of this video (62MB).