Research Abstract This research has been a process of staying-with the melt, of listening to what disappears even as it lingers. By working with ice, tarpaulin, and bodies in co-composition, I have come to understand choreography not as the arrangement of movement, but as an ecological practice of attention. It is a practice of care, reciprocity, and grief: a way of holding on while letting go. The ice taught us time. It refused to be rushed, it slipped away from control, it offered a tempo that was slow, fragile, and relentless. This sharing of time made space for fleeting collaboration. Highlighting the transient, and dissolving qualities of choreography. The dancers, soaked and shivering, became both witnesses to and participants in this transformation. The melting of ice mirrored their own exhaustion, their leaking skins, their disappearing shapes. Together, they formed a landscape where nothing could be held permanently, only encountered and then released.
I learnt to make with conditions that ceased to be replicated and dance with bodies that vanish. The composition emerged not from dictation but form surrender. To inhabit the in-between— my practice became melty and responsive to Barad’s intra-action (Barad K. 2007 p. 33), where boundaries blurred and new agencies arose. It is to sense the porousness of self, opening us to the trembling of matter and the inevitability of change. What has unfolded is less a piece of choreography than a rehearsal for living with loss. An invitation to slow down, to notice and share time with what is vanishing. It asks us to remember that death and transformation are not endpoints but continuations, that in the disappearance of ice, something else begins. This project does not close but continues to leak—through memory, through sensation, through the small traces left on skin and page. To dance with ice is to enter into kinship with ephemerality itself: a choreography of becoming-with, of dissolving-with, of disappearing together. Performed at The Riley Theater (Leeds) as part of Masters Reseach at Northern School of Contempoary Dance
'Putting Shadows To Rest' (2025)
Program Note A ritual of resistance. A Crip Time Lullaby.
The work invites you into a slowed temporality a space where nrest in not weekness but riesistiace. Through swift, deliberate movments and tender gesture, Putting Shadows to Rest becomes a collage of grief, hope and embodied truth. 'I catach myself in gravity. Not the fall, but the sensation of being held
Held by lineage, perhaps a shadow itself. Held by rythm that refuses urgency.
We lay down besides shadows , not in defeat, but in Kinship. We collage them into memory, into motion, into light. ' Putting Shadows to rest (2025)
Performed at Hessisches Staatstheater Wiesbaden as part of Wiesbaden Biennale Commissioned by Touretteshero