This Eliot Institute winter retreat is a wonderful way to spend four days between Christmas and New Year's Day and a great way to celebrate the start of the new year! (Learn more about Eliot Institute retreats here.)

The featured presenter for the 2025 Winter Eliot is Melanie DeMore is a three-time Grammy nominated singer/composer, choral conductor, music director and vocal activist who believes in the power of voices raised together. In her presentations, DeMore beautifully brings her participants together through her music and commentary, facilitating vocal and stick pounding workshops across the U.S, Canada and beyond.

During this four-day retreat at the beautiful Seabeck Conference Center on Hood Canal, we will learn the basics of Gullah Stick Pounding. We will create a foot stomping, hand-clapping rhythmic community and combine it with singing spirituals and songs of protest and peace. Participants will learn about Gullah/Geechee culture through its dynamic music and rhythmic heart. We will create and affirm our common agreed upon language through the making of sticks and sharing our stories and those of our ancestors. We will, as a community, turn the whole place into a living, breathing drum.