Feed Your Practice Webinars for Professionals
About Feed Your Practice Webinars for Professionals
Webinar Wednesdays, our free, online series for dance professionals, returns this Summer. Each session focuses on skills and questions that may be particularly resonant, practical and nourishing now and that may help us reimagine future realities.
Each webinar will take place on Zoom and will be hosted by The Place's Artist Development Producer Polly Cuthbert and Artist Associate J Neve Harrington. Zoom links will be emailed to everyone who books a place online. Each session will be BSL interpreted.
8 May: 'Celebrating Disco Queens: exploring community engaged practice in an underrepresented dance form' with Ella Tighe
In this webinar Ella Tighe shares her recent experience of engaging with the Disco Freestyle dance community as part of her new show Disco Queen. Disco Queen is a solo contemporary dance-theatre show delving into the world of Disco Freestyle Dance. Using lived experiences it will shed light on and celebrate a dance form mostly practiced by young girls from working class communities, exploring the grit, sacrifice and resilience to compete and succeed.
Using examples from Ella's research, she will explore the following:
- How to engage with a community who are competition focused over collaboration
- Complexities of entering into a community with different values and ideas of success
- Artist needs for the project versus the communities needs - do this group really need your work?
- Building genuine collaborative relationships that can sustain beyond the project
- How to cultivate an exchange of knowledge in a respectful, caring and sensitive way
BSL interpreted by Caroline Ryan and Lauren Lister.
About Ella
Ella Tighe is a dance artist and yoga teacher based in Bradford. She performs, makes, teaches and mentors. Her practice is eclectic. She began dancing as a Disco Freestyle dancer before a contemporary dance, improvisation and somatic based practice training. She has a BA in Dance, Making and Performance (Cov Uni, UK) and an MA in Performance Practices (ArtEZ, NL). She is currently developing a new work Disco Queen, an autobiographical dance-theatre solo that explores her experience as a competitive Disco Freestyle dancer.
Although a solo, it features interview material from young people within the current Freestyle community. Her work has been supported by Choreodrome - The Place, Knowledge Exchange - The Place, Bradford 2025 and Arts Council England. Her previous work Surrender was developed in The Netherlands and toured to small performance nights such as Spill Yer Tea, No Dress Code - Yorkshire Dance, OT301 Amsterdam.
Ella also founded BOLD! Bradford Artist Scratch Night, an artist development initiative in Bradford. She Independently supervises students at Bird College, London. She facilitates Moving Science workshops for Flux Dance.
Follow Ella Tighe on Instagram
ellatighe.com
15 May: 'Autobiography in performance: playing with fiction and destiny' with Amrita Hepi
In this webinar, choreographer and artist Amrita Hepi will lead a discussion on making work from autobiographical elements: history obsessions, documents, dances, or memories. In Amrita's work, she often looks at the gap between lived experience and its representation, and where, in these gaps, we can find meaning. She'll delve into:
- The role of the author, narrator and performer and how to navigate personal poetics
- Intimacy and exposure (what to keep hidden and what to show)
- The limits of performance and theatre
BSL interpreted by Caroline Ryan and Hahna Ahmed.
About Amrita
Amrita Hepi (Bundjulung/Ngapuhi Territories) is a multidisciplinary artist and choreographer based in Naarm (Melbourne) and Bangkok.
Her interest as an artist is in the idea of archive; particularly in relation to the body and how it is organized by ancestry/people/events and environment. By coalescing fact and fiction, memoir and ethnography, the local and the singular into the performance/art work she makes.
Amrita trained at NAISDA and Alvin Ailey NYC. A critically acclaimed artist she has twice been the winner of the people's choice award from the Keir Choreographic Award, was a Forbes 30 under 30 for artist, and has shown and been commissioned nationally and internationally.
At present in 2024 her video work Scripture for a smokescreen: Dolphin House has been acquired by NGV (National Gallery Victoria) and is showing in Wuddha Murra as part of the permanent first nations collection, she is also about to tour her solo performance work RINSE to FTA in Montreal and PS21 in NYC in April/May 2024. Whilst working on two new commissions in her studio in Phra Khanong.
Amrita is a Triad member of performance company APHIDS, on the board of directors and artistic associate for RISING festival and part of the Artistic Associate group for STRUT dance. Her commitment to collaboration and kinship are key tenets to her practice.
22 May: 'Making your own soil & drinking water at home: interdisciplinary collaborations with people and place' with Asad Raza
This webinar will explore the joys and challenges of collaborating with people who work outside of the arts sector.
Asad Raza’s practice often takes local ecosystems and planetary ecologies as a focus. Across his work, there is a strong emphasis on the participatory and the performative aspects of art, as well as an engagement with all of the human senses, emerging out of multipart interdisciplinary dialogues with, for example: soil scientists, horticulturalists, compost specialists, organic farmers, astronomers, physicists, architects, and musicians.
In this webinar, Asad will discuss some techniques for engaging with collaborators outside the arts, and demonstrate how some of the techniques developed in his large-scale practice can be scaled down to the domestic setting - as well as argue for the importance of being able to do such scaling with one's practice.
BSL interpreted by Caroline Ryan and Lauren Lister.
About Asad
Asad Raza conceives of art as a metabolic, active experience. Using actions and processes such as soil-making, tennis, and horticulture, his projects create encounters within and beyond the exhibition setting. They have been realized by institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kaldor Public Art Projects, Sydney; Gropius Bau, Berlin; the Serpentine Galleries, London; Kunsthalle Portikus; Metro Pictures, New York; Urbane Kunst Ruhr, Essen; the Lahore Biennale; Museion, Bolzano; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
29 May: 'Writing care manifestos for your practice' with Bakani Pick-Up
This webinar will focus on recognising everyday acts of care, learning from them, and thinking about how they can be applied to dance practice in community and higher education settings.
We will discuss what may we assimilate in community based practice in order to facilitate for as many people as possible and how what might we learn about our own and others needs. What are the things we as facilitators are responsible for and what are the things we feel responsible for? When do we act and when do we simply acknowledge?
We'll investigate how acts of care can be made a core component of dance practice by devising progressive manifestos which set the rules and ethics applied to our creative process. We will consider how an informed understanding of the sociopolitical landscape can lead to a more inclusive and rigorous practice.
BSL interpreted by Caroline Ryan and Lauren Lister.
About Bakani
Bakani Pick-Up (he/they) is a Zimbabwean born, Leeds based Choreographer, Movement Artist and Improvisation Practitioner. As well as creating their own work they have performed nationally and internationally works by artists such as Theo Clinkard, Anthea Hamilton and Fevered Sleep. With Practice as Research at the core of his work, he explores Decolonisation as Improvisation Practice, Haptic Visuality and Choreographic Composition. Bakani also serves as a Board Member for Chisenhale Dance Space.
5 June: 'Imagining every body in the audience as a partner' with J Neve Harrington
In this webinar J Neve Harrington will talk about the ways she considers audiences across different presentation and viewing conventions in her works for gallery (Satelliser: a dance for the gallery, storage for future sunsets), different theatrical spaces (Screensaver Series, SOME TIMES) and outdoor/unconventional spaces (never closer to midnight, STACK, The Performing Book). She will share how each work considers processes of attention, learning, listening, speaking and taking part through materials of dance, words/conversation, print, costume and space design. She will share where these interests stem from in terms of experiences of access and why clocks and books are constant companions to her thinking and making.
BSL interpreted by Caroline Ryan and Lauren Lister.
About Neve
J Neve Harrington is an interdisciplinary artist whose works include movement, text and conversation, costume and space design. She works mainly in gallery and non-stage spaces where her work prioritises explorations around access, play, agency, confrontation by times/scales beyond the human, neurodivergent experiences of information processing and attention.
Harrington’s educational background is in visual arts, psychology and dance. As a performer she has worked within museum and gallery contexts across Europe including Palais de Tokyo, Fondation Beyeler, Venice Biennale, Het Stedelijk, Kiasma, Fondation Boghossian. She was a board member of Chisenhale Dance Space in London 2020-22 and was involved with Engagement Arts Belgium 2017/18.
She works to support other artists with access through grant-writing, and mentors around neurodiversity in dance. She is Artist Associate with The Place.
Follow J Neve Harrington on Instagram
jnharrington.com
12 June: 'Holding dance: caring for our ecology' with Temitope Ajose, Grace Nicol, Katye Coe and Thomas Goodwin
The Pastoral Care Offer is an egalitarian idea supporting the mental health and wellbeing of dance artists and people in dance processes. We believe that this resides in creating a mutual environment where everyone involved in the process (producer, curator, choreographer, rehearsal director, dancer, marketing and people in dance institutions who employ them) are helped to take equal and mutual responsibility for negotiating a shared environment. We also include funders and other relevant stakeholders who are adjacent to creative processes.
The offer was conceived in 2020 by dance artist Temitope Ajose and choreographer Grace Nicol and has since been developed with artists Katye Coe and Thomas Goodwin. The offer draws on the experience, practices and knowledge of the team to support the processes and practices of dance makers and to bring all stakeholders together through careful practice.
1. What is Pastoral Care?
- Focusing on helping artists to understand definitions of pastoral care and what it can support for them
- Considering distinctions around roles and responsibilities within pastoral work
2. Proper Care takes time
- An understanding of the current circumstances of this care in the ecology of dance and where it could be in the future
- Exploring the importance of pastoral care for our sector and the potential of this work to help create more sustainable and healthier/ braver spaces
3. Wider web
- Interrogating and distilling ideas toward delivering care safely and the importance of supporting those who deliver care centred work speaking to the accountability of everyone in the room
BSL interpreted by Hahna Ahmed and Lauren Lister.
About Temitope, Grace, Katye and Thomas
Temitope Ajose is interested in psychology, myth and magic. Often playing between the sacred and absurd, Temitope’s process is intuitive, idiosyncratic and so very human. Temitope has staged works at venues such as The Royal Opera House, The Place, DanceXchange, RichMix, Dancebase and the Soho Joyce (New York).
As a dancer Temitope has worked with Punchdrunk, Director Carrie Cracknell at The Gate Theatre and The National, Theo Clinkard, Protein Dance Company, Lea Anderson, Joe Moran, Seke Chimutengwende, and Lost Dog to name a few.
Follow Temitope Ajose on Instagram
Grace Nicol is a choreographer, movement director, curator, and activist based in London. Her artistic practice has a particular focus on object-body relations and materiality, investigating juxtapositions and associations of objecthood and bodies to explore movement within socio-political contexts.
Follow Grace Nicol on Instagram
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).
Thomas Goodwin is a mid-career dance practitioner based on the Isle of Bute, Scotland. He has an extensive career as a performer, facilitator, teacher and rehearsal director working in professional and community settings. 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.
