A talk, a sharing of traces, an invitation to reflect together on dance, touch, land & weather, the futures in the past… Sharing a recent re-turn to early practice; on the influence of the Llyn peninsula, on bodied inheritance, on ‘How did I get here? From there?’The somatic Ecologies at the University of Chichester are artists led forums for discussion and sharing ideas that are closely linked to the Experiencing environments group
Thank you to all who came along on the 31 January. It was a warm and generous occasion and it felt so good to be sharing this work in the public realm after 3 years… Talks, performance, participatory scores, touch and food! Thanks to: Carl Lavery, Jo Young, Saffy Setohy, Kevin Leomo and Mark Banks at Dear Green Bothy, Casi Dylan at ARC, plus SGSAH & Department of Theatre Studies University of Glasgow Read More
Stitching soft matter is an artist book featuring performances of touch, drawing, sewing, photography, pandemic touch journals, pull-out scores and a short essay on touch touching itself. This project continued throughout the pandemic and the book has become a place to share all the materials and relationships developed during this time. It feels good to have something to share and hand to people in the physical world… Book launch on 31 January at ARC, University of Read More
The Re-pair videos are now available on youtube, 3 short films with dance artists Amaara Raheem and Joanna Young, Simon Ellis and Saffy Setohy, Jennifer Monson and Neil Callaghan. Made during lockdown in March and April 2021 the films provide a window into the dancers lives and their attempts to perform touch together in all the awkwardness, beauty and sadness of the times.
…I found a way for my finger tips to make a connection with one another, like a shell with one hand completing the other, restoring for me a sense of wholeness, reassuring and comforting.
Re-pair As a way of experimenting with how dance can re-pair itself, this project asks 6 dancers from different parts of the world to pair with each other in order to re-think the analogue in the digital. Each dancer will be sent a score, emerging from the stitched gloves that I am making for the soft matter project (http://simonwhitehead.net/2020/05/07/soft-matter-process/) and asked to improvise with the objects that they will then share with the dancer they are paired with. Read More