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Dungeon mistress to wellbeing goddess: Charlotte Church is reborn once more
From churches to TV to tours to a country wellness retreat, there’s nowhere Charlotte Church can’t call home – even if ‘home’ is ever-changing. Isabel Thomas calls up the national figure mid- transformation between her final Pop Dungeon shows and the opening of her ambitious build, and finds no matter how busy, she’s always up for a catch-up.
As her genre-mashing, high-energy theatrical cover band, Late Night Pop Dungeon, em- barks on its final tour this December, Charlotte Church is moving her focus towards wellbe- ing. The singer, campaigner – and now own- er of a wellness retreat – has led a career of unexpected turns, often in the spotlight of an unforgiving media.
“It’s not that I like doing things people don’t expect, it’s that I can do nothing other than that,” she explains. Led by instinct, she be- lieves that forging new things is what she’s here to do. It makes for a busy lifestyle, but she’s buzzing with energy. In our short call – somewhere in London on her end – she races enthusiastically through all her current projects with a hearty “Let’s go!”
With the chaotic energy of Pop Dungeon, Charlotte Church showed that tackling other people’s songs can be an immersive experi- ence rather than predictable and formulaic. Filled with multi-genre remixes from a band of jazz, pop, rock and indie musicians, the shows have been known to whip crowds into a frenzy. It’s not unusual for attendees to claim they had a transcendental time.
She believes this is due to people missing out 10
on experiencing their favourite artists while they were still alive, making for an exhila- rating experience intensified by the band’s serious compositional approach. Charlotte is full of admiration for them, and it’s clear that performing together gives her so much joy. In previous interviews, she revealed how past performances would involve retreating into herself until the song was over; in this incarna- tion, she’s present and full of vibrancy.
Why bring it to an end, then? “It’s so special and powerful right now, and I want to leave it there in that state.” There’s pride in ending a project while it’s still strong, and she’s en- thused by new directions: reducing suffering and supporting people to find meaning and purpose in life. In 2019, she founded The Awen Project, a democratic learning community for school-age children, and she’s about to open The Dreaming, a wellbeing retreat at Rhy- doldog House in Cwmdauddwr, Powys.
The retreat is based on the idea that our world is complex and fast-paced with overstimula- tion frying our immune systems. It’s intended as an antithesis to the pressures of yoga and meditation apps that add to our to-do lists. From feeling somewhat shaman-like on stage, Charlotte Church moves to meditative rituals
and sound baths. In a sense, she’s providing two extremes of therapy: the ecstasy and col- lective outpouring of emotions through live music overload, and the quiet contemplation of the retreat. She claims there’s something even “prayer-like” in both gatherings.
Much of Church’s early career involved re- ligious music and before then, engagements at Llandaff Cathedral. Her trajectory to fame began in 1997, with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Pie Jesu sung over the phone to Richard and Judy, and in 2001, she reached new audiences by joining Josh Groban on The Prayer. I ask if there’s any religious meaning to what she does now, but her spiritual references are more eso- teric and wellbeing-centred these days. “We’re all complex beings who need both things,” she explains, talking about raucous pop music versus peaceful musical meditation. “If we can traverse that terrain of peaks and troughs, we become better able to deal with the world. We should be focusing not on emotional resilience but on emotional agility.”
An important aim of The Dreaming is to bring together people who might not usually con- vene. In response to preventative financial barriers, there will be both a sliding scale of payment and pay-as-you-can space on every
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