Meet LCDS's new course leaders

London Contemporary Dance School is embarking on some exciting developments when it comes to its postgraduate offering, recently appointing three new course leaders to lead the world’s only MA Screendance and offering new courses MA Dance: Performance and MA Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism. These courses sit alongside LCDS’s existing MA course Expanded Dance Practice, which was redeveloped last year and is led by visionary, longstanding course leader Hilary Stainsby.

To learn more about the new lecturers and courses, we speak to new course leaders, Katrina McPherson, Tom Afiyan-English and Jo Parkes on why they are excited to be at London Contemporary Dance School.

Jo Parkes is an award-winning participatory dance artist and founder and artistic director of Mobile Dance e.V. a company working on socially engaged projects.

Q: What’s your connection to The Place?

Jo: My relationship with The Place goes back a few years to when I was a student at Oxford studying English Literature and Modern Languages. I would come down to London to do evening classes and that’s where I really discovered contemporary dance. For me, The Place was my bridge into this world, and I am delighted to be back here as part of the LCDS faculty.

I think my own personal experience of meeting contemporary dance much later is part of my drive around inclusion and reducing barriers to access.

Q: The new course MA Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism has three parts. What’s so exciting about this?

Jo: Every protest has a choreography, and every protest is about the organisation of people in time and space to communicate something. In the times we are living in this relationship between activism, participation and community dance is important. More and more early, mid and late career artists are wanting to expand their practice to be engaged in making social change, positioning themselves as dancer-citizens.

Activism can be an act of resistance. It can also be a co-building of something. Participatory and community danc create encounters between individuals which foster the development of everyone involved in the process. Equally, if we pay attention to the context of the work, these creative processes havethe potential to create systemic change.– can This course offers the potential for artists from the fields of community dance, participation and activism to come together and learn from each other in a very intimate MA context.As well as leading the MA, I also lead a unit on the BA programme, so students at The Place start taking part in community dance practice from the get-go.

TomAfiyan-English is an established lecturer, dance scientist and emerging artistic director from the UK, and is the founder of movement research collective Ferus Animi // Terra Nova.

Q: What has led you to this role at The Place?

Tom: As a performer I trained at both Rambert and LCDS for my bachelor's degree, and after graduating embarked on a ten-year international career as a performing artist, working extensively with companies such as Punchdrunk, Ultima Vez, English National Ballet and AΦE.

It was during this time that I founded Ferus Animi // Terra Nova, a movement research collective dedicated to disseminating the most up-to-date research in art and performance science from the fields of neuroscience, physiology, psychology and biomechanics. Through this work as a collective we began developing research-led training methodologies for performers and sportspersons, which ultimately led to my own further study in the form of a MSc degree in Dance Science from Trinity Laban, specialising in performance psychology and training environments.

Q: Why is this MA course important?

Tom: The main focus of this course will be supporting dancers in optimising their approach to performance; to really try and dig into the details and understand relevant factors such as physiological development, motivational climates, the psychology of human connection, and the differing approaches required for different performance mediums. In the current professional climate, there is an abundance of different approaches to performance, and therefore we will look to facilitate students in cultivating a flexible, adaptive and detailed approach to their craft.

What’s more, it’s key to provide artists with the skills to build sustainable careers. The historical model of training and then spending one's career with a repertory company is becoming much rarer. Performing artists are now often developing their own portfolios of work, with a necessity for transdisciplinary expertise and the appropriate organisational skills for freelance work. We will look to impart those skills as part of a holistic approach to preparing students for the necessities of the industry both in and out of the rehearsal room, and both on and off the ‘stage’.

This course, therefore, will give students the skills and rigour to have longevity as performing artists and will help them navigate the evolving professional landscape for dance performance. This focus on longevity will be sown into the fabric of the course, to help create practitioners, craftspeople and artists who have something to say, an instrument with which to say it, and who aren't discouraged when falling at the first hurdle.

KatrinaMcPherson is a is a director and award-winning screendance artist, whose creative, scholarly, and educational work is at the forefront of the international field. She is a much sought after teacher, lecturer and mentor and the author of Making Video Dance (Routledge, 2018)

Q: Why are you excited to join LCDS?

A: LCDS’s MA Screendance is a vibrant course that is contributing to screendance on a global scale. The course has already had a had a significant impact in the field and beyond. I’ve been very aware of the work done so far by the faculty and students, and I really look forward to building on that start and developing the course into the future.

Q: What’s so exciting about screendance as a genre?

A: Screendance is at an important place at the moment. There’s so much more awareness of it being a site for dance and performance across different genres.

Screendance is exciting an interdisciplinary artform that is constantly evolving and changing. With the advent of certain technologies such as smart phones, the platforms on which we can create and engage have grown so much and become far more expanded. There are many different ways to access dance on screen, and screendance can be all dance, on all screens, anywhere. Therefore, for those people making the work there are so many ways to think about it and develop it.

Working in the field of screendance can take you in so many different directions; whether that’s working on commercial commissions; producing artistic projects; or working in an academic capacity. I’ve been very fortunate to make work for the BBC in a more commercial role and have also been able to develop my artistic practice and writing at the same time. This just goes to show the amount of variety there is when you’re working in the field of screendance.