about

Dani Abulhawa
I am a senior lecturer in performance at Sheffield Hallam University and an ambassador for skateboarding charity SkatePal. I co-founded Accumulations: a network for experimental and site-based movement, dance and performance artists, and I am an organiser of the academic strand of Pushing Boarders – the first international skateboarding conference. Much of my work is inspired by my history of involvement with skateboarding culture. A persistent strand of my practice reflects on my Palestinian heritage, through explorations of the cultural and social aspects of the Palestine-Israel conflict. I am the author of Skateboarding and Femininity: gender, space-making and expressive movement (2020), I have published articles and book chapters on spatial politics and power dynamics, artist interruptions of space, and the creative-research process. I have produced commissioned artworks, including most recently Free Time in the City (audio work, Migration Matters festival, 2019), The Slide (short film, Helena Kennedy Centre for Human Rights, 2018), and Looking After Freedom (residency and series of works created in Cape Town, funded by the British Council, 2017).

James Buchanan
James plays several instruments including piano, saxophone and guitar amongst others. His passion is music composition and he works in a number of genres, including folk, death metal, jazz and contemporary classical. He studied Music at Goldsmiths, University of London and is currently studying part-time to complete his doctoral thesis in computer-assisted composition. In collaboration with Amy, he has created electronic scores for several dance works that have been performed in London and abroad.

Hannah Buckley
Hannah Buckley is a dancer and choreographer based in Leeds. Her practice is process driven often with long, spacious processes. Generally, she works on multiple projects that are distinct yet somehow interconnected. She is interested in the tension and skill of crafting art works whilst simultaneously letting things emerge. The primary concern of her work is to question existing social structures, with a focus on female experience. Her work is quietly political and she aims to create processes and art that are spaces / forms of both critique and care.

Katye Coe
Katye Coe is a dancer and activist based in the UK. Her work as a performer spans over 20 years of international performance practice and as a dancer she collaborates currently with Joe Moran, Florence Peake, Jonathan Burrows and Matteo Fargion, Keira Greene, Charlie Morrissey, Stefan Jovanović, Matthias Sperling and Carolyn Deby (Sirens Crossing). Between 2008 and 2016 Katye was the founder artistic director of Summer Dancing and Decoda. She was course director for BA (Hons) Dance at Coventry University between 2010 and 2016. Katye teaches independently across the UK and internationally and her teaching practice is an extension of her performance practice. Katye is a certified Skinner Releasing Technique teacher and has worked extensively with Helen Poynor through the Walk of Life Training. She guest teaches regularly at London Contemporary Dance School and at Independent Dance. Katye was the first Torchlight Artist at Siobhan Davies Dance (2018/2019); is a research artist at Dance4; was a member of the Sadlers Wells Summer University Cohort (2015 – 2018).
No How Generator by Matthias Sperling, photographer Rocio Chacon

Jennifer-Lynn Crawford
A transatlantic transplant, Jennifer-Lynn Crawford trained in Canada at Quinte Ballet School and the School of Toronto Dance Theatre before gaining her Pg-Dip and M.A. at London Contemporary Dance School. She completed her Rolfing training at the European Rolfing Association in Munich and continues her study through ongoing workshops in both Rolfing and other modalities. She has a long-standing involvement in the UK’s conservatoire system for HE dance training and was on faculty at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance 2007-2016. She has taught and performed throughout the UK and internationally, working with choreographers such as Charlotte Spencer, Hagit Yakira and Hofesh Shechter.

Cath Cullinane
Cath is currently a freelance lighting designer and theatre technician based in the northwest of England. She works regularly at Storyhouse (Chester), Unity Theatre (Liverpool) and The Arts Centre (Edge Hill University) as well as a lighting designer for national and international projects in dance, performance and installation. Cath has a particular passion for working with dance improvisation in relation to non-traditional sources of light. ‘I have a fascination for the moving body as it splinters into the shapes of light — this evokes and delights my senses simultaneously.’

Noémie Farcy-Michel
Noémie is an anthropologist; her research is driven by an interest in gender, embodiment, and performance arts. She sees the body as a source of knowledge in itself, and explores alternative forms of knowledge representation beyond the written word within academia. Currently enrolled in a Masters in Visual Anthropology at the University of Manchester, she experiments with visual media and creative-practice as research method as ways to create and represent knowledge.

Bridget Fiske
Bridget Fiske is a multifaceted dance-artist with a twenty-year portfolio working in the areas of performance, choreography, movement direction, interdisciplinary collaboration, facilitation and producing. Across all areas, her practice aims to generate strategies for embodied empowerment and change-making which is specific and meaningful to the people involved. The work takes place on various scales, from touring with Belarus Free Theatre as choreographic and rehearsal director, to creating and performing works for public space festivals and galleries, to facilitating ways for young people and communities to develop their creative practice, to delivering artist-development training. As both an Australian and British citizen, Bridget lives and works between both homes and across continents. She aims to utilise her status as an international artist to foster opportunities for artists, communities and audiences to exchange and learn from one another.

Meghan Flanigan
I am a multi-disciplinary artist, teacher and thinker. My background is in dance and choreography but my work keeps evolving and I can now say I am also a visual artist who works in video and performance. I currently live in Bogota, Colombia with my family where my creative practice has expanded into the intricacies of motherhood and into the intensities of running a restaurant with my husband Mario.

Marguerite Caruana Galizia is a contemporary dance choreographer and artist-researcher, whose hybrid installation and performance works challenge performance frames and disciplinary boundaries. Her work has been commissioned/supported by Dance City, Yorkshire Dance, The Place, Chisenhale Dance Space, dancedigital and live@LICA. Key works include: Total Relaxation (2016), in collaboration with electronics musician Tom Richards; Where am I? (2014), in collaboration with coder/composer Simon Katan; and the recursive video-installation This is a Square (2012). Awards include the LUTSF award (2016 & 2011), Marion North Award (BBCF, 2005) and the Deutsche Bank Pyramid Award (2003).

Natalie Garrett Brown
Natalie Garrett Brown is a dance-practitioner, researcher and leader in higher education and a founding member of enter & inhabit, a site-responsive collaborative project. Her practice-research interests are theoretically situated within feminist understandings of embodied subjectivity and the ways in which somatic and reflective practices can inform education, performance-making, creativity, writing and digital cultural practices. She was one of the co-investigators on the three-year UK Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded research project Sensing the City: An Embodied Documentation and Mapping of the Changing Uses and Tempers of Urban Place (2017-2020). She is also a Somatic Movement Educator in Body-Mind Centering (BMC)®, a qualified coach and mentor (CMI) and is currently the Dean for the Faculty of Arts, Science and Technology at Northampton University.

Tom Goodwin
Tom Goodwin is a dance and movement practitioner based on the Isle of Bute, Scotland, working as a performer, facilitator, teacher and rehearsal director in professional and community settings in the UK and sometimes further afield. His training and influences include Bartenieff Fundamentals, various release-based and floor work contemporary dance styles, Body Weather, Ido Portal Method, Tai Chi, and deep ecology practices. He focuses his practice on how easeful collaborative processes facilitate welcoming dynamic exchange in formal, informal, designated and wayward settings. These collaborations often involve landscape, other species and movement-practicing humans. He has a keen interest in wildness, in our inner and outer nature. This has taken root in projects such as the seasonal roaming Kinship Workshop and scored improvisational performance contexts with artists such as Charlie Morrissey, Meytal Blanaru, Joan Clevillé and most recently with collaborators Amy Voris and Jennifer-Lynn Crawford. Wildness and nature-connection practice support finding his place in creative, choreographic and landscape ecologies. In the crossover of livelihood and life, he has an ongoing practice of embodiment, community-building, allyship, nature connection, straight-talking and diving into the heart of the matter.

Christian Kipp
Christian is a photographer based in Essex. He enjoys working with a small number of dance artists in long term collaborations, mostly photographing process with occasional forays into performance photography. His work with other artists is balanced and often merges with a love of natural landscapes, which for the past few years has focussed on discovering and photographing the coastal landscapes of the west highlands of Scotland.

Anna Macdonald
Anna Macdonald is an artist and scholar who focuses on the relationship of body, time and affect. Most of her artworks involve movement on screen and use film to expose the resonance of simple movements, such as moving from ‘here to there’, ‘holding’, or ‘getting slower’. She specialises in participatory practice and enjoys making work with and for people in different public spaces. For the last ten years, she has been interested in how we experience time in the body, particularly the role movement plays in our conceptualisations of time. Her work is regularly exhibited in both festival and gallery settings and has generated interdisciplinary findings in the fields of health, science and law, within large-scale projects funded by the AHRC, Arts Council England and the Wellcome Trust. She currently works part-time as a PhD Supervisor and Course Leader for MA Performance: Society at UAL: Central St Martins, London.

Emma Meehan
Emma Meehan is Assistant Professor in dance at Coventry University’s Centre for Dance Research, UK. Recurring themes in her work recently include site dance practice, the senses in creative participatory projects and Irish cultural heritage. A common thread is understanding how to host dialogues with audiences and participants, through conversation, movement and sharing food. From 2017-2020, she joined the enter & inhabit collective which undertook site dance in Coventry as part of Sensing the City with Amy Voris, Natalie Garrett Brown and Christian Kipp funded by AHRC. Emma has also been involved in food-based creative events in Coventry: Invisible Irish cookalongs with members of the Irish community devised with Carol Breen and Carmen Wong (2018); and Cooking Connections Coventry which involved delivery of food boxes and sensory activities to older people during the pandemic in collaboration with Nese Tosun and Elaine O’Sullivan (2020). She presented an exhibit called Home Practice in 2016 about Irish womens’ work in the home as part of shrine to women’s work group exhibition at Hope Mill Studios, Manchester curated by Amy Voris. In 2016-2017, she directed Live Archive, an exhibition and performances exploring the archives of Dublin Contemporary Dance Theatre’s, Ireland’s first contemporary dance company, supported by Arts Council of Ireland.

Zoe Robertson
Zoe Roberton’s artistic practice explores the visual and physical relationship between objects, body and space. The physicality of the objects is important and materials that evoke a sensory response play an important part in the vocabulary for her creative decisions. She enjoys working collaboratively and this interdisciplinary approach enables her to create experiential and immersive environments which invite audience interaction and participation. Her artwork is exhibited within an international arena. Zoe is also the cofounder of Dual Works a three dimensional design studio based in the city of 1000 trades, Birmingham,UK. As multi- material makers Dual Works specialise in the design, fabrication and installation of a wide variety of projects. Working in partnership with Steve Snell, this design duo are highly skilled designer makers with over 50 years of combined expertise across a broad range of materials, techniques and processes. Their design expertise spans products, furniture, interior and exhibition design whereby they undertake both residential and commercial projects. They enjoy working collaboratively and pride themselves in providing a personalised design service to develop strong working relationships with clients.

Caroline Salem
A choreographer, researcher, mentor and dramaturg, Caroline Salem has been committed to questioning ‘the choreographic’ for over thirty years. In collaboration with architect Ed Frith, she has developed a series of writings, exhibitions and lecture presentations on choreography and architecture. Having designed and built their own live / work studios Hackney, Caroline launched Space Clarence Mews in 2003, a programme which offers independent performance makers studio space, exchange, work in progress events and mentorship. Caroline has taught extensively in higher education in both dance and architecture departments and has an established career in movement direction for theatre. Since 2010, Caroline has been researching into a movement practice called the Heart Line Scores which overlays visualisation, sensing and conjuring of energy change with geometric precision, embracing the infinitesimal and the infinite, the internal and the external. Amy Voris has been a key collaborator throughout. Most recently, Caroline has reconnected with the writing and practice of Nancy Topf with whom she studied in New York (between 1988-91) and whose work informs how she works with dancers, actors, architects and non-dancers.

Sara Spies
Sarah Spies (born in Cape Town, South Africa) is a choreographer, performance curator and lecturer in contemporary dance and performance. Her choreographic and curatorial work focuses on the unfolding affective dimensions of choreography as a frame for collaborative curatorial practice and she often works within research-based public programmes. She has created performative work within international gallery settings and has published on time-based performance within exhibition settings. She is part of ICI (Independent Curators International) and the international artists exchange programme MAHALA/Temporary Occupations and AFiRIperFOMA Biennial. She is a practice-based PhD researcher as part of the Research Platform for Curatorial and Cross-disciplinary Cultural Studies between the University of Reading (UK) and the University if the Arts/ZHdK (Zurich).

Regula Voegelin
Regula Voegelin is a performer, choreographer and therapist. She trained initially as a speech therapist at Universitaet Freiburg, Switzerland before completing a Professional Diploma in Dance Studies and a Postgraduate Diploma in Dance and Movement Therapy from Laban. She is a founding member of Carole Meier Compagnie in Bern, Switzerland with whom she danced from 1997-2002. Regula has also danced for choreographers Ioanna Portolou and Manuela Imperatori. With Susannah Schneider, she established Switzerland’s first country-wide community dance festival and founded Bewegrund, a Bern-based integrated dance company which now receives regular funding. Regula works as a speech / movement therapist in schools and in hospitals. The artistic and life philosophy of Butoh dance resonates strongly with her as an artist. Regula has studied Butoh with Kim Itoh, Yumiko Yoshioka, Atsushi Takenouchi, Yuko Kawamoto, Anzu Furukawa, Tadashi Endo, Masaki Iwana and Katsura Kan.