Where do you draw inspiration from for your work, both in terms of creation and performance?
I think that we are always influenced by our environment and that working with my body is a project of tuning into this in more and more detail. I don’t consciously seek to draw inspiration from any particular source, I just follow an intuitive process that I trust will speak back to my context through the nature of the body and the creative process.
Conversations with friends, reflections on personal experience, lines from songs I feel moved by, references to films I am into, questions people have asked me all might show up in my work, but if I were to try to answer the question of where I take inspiration from directly, I would say the relational experience of being in the world and my desire to question and challenge the often invisible movements of power and domination that can be subconsciously wrapped up in our gestures, architectures and relational behaviours. I find the knowledge, wisdom and sensitivity that our bodies carry to be inspiring, if we choose to listen.
What do you find special about the collaboration you have with the composer of your work?
I think long term collaborative relationships are amazing and very special. I feel very grateful for having these relationships in my life.
Josh Anio Grigg, who makes the sound for a lot of my work, and I have worked together since 2016. What feels special to me is the feeling that we have created something together; a world and a way of working and communicating, that feels good and is continually growing and transforming in ways that feel exciting.
I think it’s a gift to get to connect, enjoy and play with people we work with. It can feel lonely to work as an artist, travelling around to different places, places where you don’t really know anyone and you don’t have much time to get to know the place or any people because you spend your days in the darkness of the theatre trying to find the right constellation of elements to conjure the feeling for the performance…
The way that I/we work means that we are always adjusting to the different spaces we find ourselves in, trying to tune the architecture, acoustics, tech and culture of a space in order to best pitch our offering, having someone to be in dialogue with about the details whose opinion and sensitivity you trust is invaluable.
What can the wider arts community do to get more people involved in dance, movement and choreographic practice?
One of the things I love about dancing is that any body can do it and that it is something we (humans) just do. It is a wild thing, full of joy and despair and conjuring and release, and a professional arts industry isn’t needed to keep people dancing.
We are all engaged in movement and choreographic practices just by being alive and navigating the world. I think it would be great if more attention was perhaps placed on this – on the ways that we each move and are moved by each other, by institutions, the social structures and norms, and on how this movement shapes who we become, how we feel and how and what we see.
In the arts community I feel there can be some rhetoric around dance not being an accessible medium and I feel like this idea helps to perpetuate the fantasy that audiences need support in order to ‘understand’ a dance work. To me, this relates to a general disconnection and alienation from our bodies that the ways we live in the UK, the so-called west, the global north, invites, and I think that this disconnect creates fear and anxiety around being with embodied practices, being with our bodies and being with ourselves.
IV-Here & Now Showcase, Assembly @ Dance Base, 19-24 Aug, 3:50pm