Welcome to ArtsCross London 2026: Out of Place, which marks the return of the project to London, where we were based in ArtsCross 2013. This return is different, not only because of the intervening years, but also because the eight choreographers and twenty-eight dancers from Beijing, Hong Kong, Taipei and London will be working and sharing the results in two locations: Regent’s Place and Russell Square. We will be both at The Place and Out of Place.
This year’s focus on outdoor, site-specific creation takes London as its inspiration, a global hub where many dancing cultures intersect. How can dance respond imaginatively to specific places in London, their architecture, history or atmosphere? How might outdoor dance in London interact with public audiences and passers-by?
Over the next three weeks, we will collectively explore the creative potential for dance in London’s public spaces, building on The Place’s sustained focus to perform dance in spaces other than the theatre: we dance in playgrounds, at outdoor festivals, in museums and galleries, in music halls, and on travelators in the back of haulage trucks (see Future Cargo by Requardt & Rosenberg). This enables more people to experience dance in all its richness and diversity, celebrating creativity expressed through the body.
To be out of place is, on the surface, a simple condition: a thing, a body, a person, somewhere it does not normally belong. It can describe something misplaced, a misaligned gesture, a feeling of not fitting — but it might also be exhilarating, a glimpse of a new horizon and for many of the artists gathering this year, a literal, daily fact of being far from home, working in a language, a climate, a rhythm of life that is not their normal habitat.
Of course, the virtually global facts of dance life are the studio and theatre where every dance artist is at home, in whatever part of the globe, so in the urban landscape we all share the out of place experience. In Regent’s Place, a business campus on the Euston Road built and rebuilt across half a century, working people pass through it daily but belong to it briefly — its towers, plazas and public artworks designed for modern, mobile occupants who are comfortable with never being quite at home there. Russell Square, a Georgian garden square laid out for one set of residents over two centuries ago, is now a thoroughfare for students, scholars and travellers who have no knowledge of the dukes whose name it carries. Both places were designed for one kind of life and are now lived in by another: out of place with the history, and entirely at ease with it.
This idea of being out of place has a long Chinese literary lineage in the tradition of zhúchén (逐臣) — celebrated poetry written by officials cast out from the imperial court into wild, unfamiliar southern landscapes. The Song Dynasty poet Su Shi, repeatedly exiled to remote postings, wrote of looking up at the same moon from utterly foreign ground, finding in that shared moon a kind of serene detachment that transformed being out of place into the clarity of poetry.
Perhaps he also felt a heightened awareness of atmosphere — a sensitivity to the mood of a place that can pass unnoticed by those who are at home there. Classical Chinese aesthetics calls this fusion of scene and feeling: yìjìng (意境), sometimes translated as ‘mood-realm’ or ‘artistic conception’. This quality is not found in a place’s physical detail alone but in the resonance between that detail and the perceiving mind, the atmosphere a setting creates when truly attended to. The stranger to a place, lacking comfortable familiarity, often attends to it more closely: the play of light through Triton Square, the particular quiet of Russell Square’s plane trees against the traffic beyond, the specific texture of a London evening in early summer. To be out of place can sharpen attention — turning unfamiliar surroundings into yìjìng, felt rather than merely seen. And distance can sharpen sight: it is often only away from home, against the friction of unfamiliar water and soil, that we come to see home clearly — all its textures, its rhythms, we took for granted and then the invisible becomes visible.
And yet there is one place dance artists never truly leave: the body. Even when the ground underfoot is unfamiliar an embodied awareness travels in and with us, the one place we are never out of place. It is the fundamental vehicle for being and for expressing our human existence, both physical and metaphysical, carried intact across borders, languages and time zones, grounded and available to be danced in a business plaza in Euston or a Georgian garden square in Bloomsbury — dancing is a homecoming, even when everything around it is foreign.
To be out of place, but at home in dance — a way of being and feeling, in the body, present now in ArtsCross London 2026.
Lise Uytterhoeven and Chris Bannerman
ArtsCross/Danscross London 2026