For three decades, Jo Parkes has practiced internationally as a community dance artist working with co-creative dance processes. She creates installations, encounters, performances and videos. She is the founder and artistic director of Mobile Dance e.V. Mobile Dance offers art projects at the intersection of artistic and socio-political concerns. Mobile Dance has created projects that have engaged hundreds of artists and reached thousands of participants in Germany and the UK. She co-wrote and now leads the MA Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism at London Contemporary Dance School.
Jo received a Fulbright Scholarship to study her MFA in Choreography in the USA and in 2019, she won the Honorary Award in the German Dance Prize for her contribution to establishing Community Dance in Germany. Her BA is in English Literature and German from Oxford University (first class). In 2021, The Walking Project was awarded the IKARUS Prize (DE). From 2019 - 2021 Jo was on the board of Aktion Tanz (the national association for collaborative and participatory dance in Germany) where she was an associate artist in 2022. From 2020 - 2022 she was a guest professor at the Inter-University Center for Dance (HZT) in Berlin (UdK/Ernst Busch).
Jo understands artistic co-creative processes with communities as research into how we live together: a laboratory in which diverse groups of people can investigate issues relevant to them. She is passionate about the potential of collective dance-making to help us imagine alternative ways of being together and creating opportunities for dance artists to expand and challenge their practice in exchange with communities.
Currently working on:
- The Walking Project (2020 – 2026). The project emerged in the pandemic and explored connection with another person who is close by, but without the possibility of touch; exploring rhythmic and spatial tuning to a “walking companion” as a bridge to embodied connection with that person and then a larger group. In the second chapter, I am expanding the distance from two feet to thousands of miles. Working with methodologies developed over the three years of co-creating and teaching on MA Dance: Participation, Communities, Activism, I am rehearsing embodied connections between people who live at geographical distance from each other. The proposal meanders through radical walking, mapping and place-making practices and co-creative dance-making. Outcomes will be a series of practice scores and an international participatory sound walk.
- Applying co-creative dance-making methodologies to the creation and leadership of innovative educational models: making space for collective creativity, emergence and disruption inside of established institutional structures.
I am interested in PhD proposals and research collaborations in the following areas:
- Practice research in community/activist dance growing sustainable social structures
- Collaborative artistic practices with communities at geographical distance
- The relationship between leading in educational settings and leading in artistic practice
Publications:
- The Walking Project (2020 and 2022), Mobile Dance and FELD Theatre, Berlin.
- JUNCTION (2018 – 2022), Mobile Dance in partnership with Berlin Mondiale and Uferstudios, Berlin.
- Linked #1 and #2 (2017 and 2019), Mobile Dance, Berlin and Munich.