Wonder as a Motivating Force
Captured moment from Florence Peake’s residency, Reciprocal Creative Practices.
I don’t know where the first three and a half months of this year have gone! Yet when I pause and reflect so much has happened in this time, some of which I will attempt to explore here.
Performed the duet, Catching Sight of My Reflection, with collaborator Hannah Sullivan at Arnolfini.
Submitted an Arts Council R&D application to take my work out of the studio and develop live, body-centred performance work.
Applied for the Pavilion Dance Residency, offering a week’s residency in one of their studios this July.
Took part in a three day residency, Reciprocal Creative Practices, with artist Florence Peake.
Started an intensive seven month coaching training programme in ‘The Power of Embodied Transformation’. Taught by the world’s leading somatic coaches and teachers, as well as leading voices in neuroscience, trauma-work, and leadership development.
Joined movement teacher, director and performer Helen Poynor for Spring Tides. A beautiful two day workshop in Devon moving in the changing landscapes of chalk and flint cliffs and the constantly shifting shoreline.
Catching Sight of my Reflection
There’s something amazing about being sixty. In many ways feeling the most energised I can remember. The sense of excitement, possibility and don’t give a fuck-ness. Embracing the possibility. Riding the rough and wallowing in the smooth. Relishing my existence. Of course I’m drained every morning after constant waking, night sweats and sensitivity to the minutest of disturbances. But I can soon shift that once I start moving.
Kamina
In 2023, on celebrating my 60th birthday, interdisciplinary artist Hannah Sullivan, who had just celebrated her 35th birthday, invited me to start a regular writing exchange. After more than a year of writing to one another about our individual experiences of ageing we came together and started to explore what it might feel and look like to adopt this text to develop a shared improvised movement practice.
Following conversations with Phil Owen at Arnolfini we were invited to share the work in progress with a live audience in their theatre space. Our themes of ageing, grief and loss connected with Emma Talbot’s exhibition Everything is Energy and Phil recognised the synergy there. We were interested in offering a durational piece spanning 90 minutes, where the audience could come and go as they pleased, viewing the exhibition alongside this live work. We wanted to find out how the structure of a set text, combined with improvised movement, might produce a reflective, creative space to consider ageing together.
This week I’ve been dancing on a rooftop. I go up a red fire escape on the side of a block of flats. It takes me to a flat rooftop, with a low wall around it. From here I can see a city of white buildings sprawling into the surrounding mountains. I can see the sky. And in the evenings bats swoop between the apartment blocks. Up here, I have been practicing a kind of dancing, usually at dusk, that I have been calling ‘dances of attention’, and it feels a bit like disappearing and appearing at the same time.
Hannah
The performance felt like a breakthrough for me. Overcoming my fear of performing in front of an audience I felt present, connected, vulnerable and strong, and I was surprisingly grounded throughout. I loved that Hannah and I really immersed ourselves in the moments when we came together, and that these moments were really varied - some tender, some unexpected, and others playful. When I look at the wonderful photos that Khourie Allen took for us I remember the experience in my body. I now have greater clarity around what I want to do next and a strong sense of how I might achieve that.
“That was astonishing. Beautiful, tender, vulnerable, intimate, trusting, generous, exquisite. I could have lived in that world for so much longer.”
Arnolfini audience member, February 2026
“I was so touched. It was such a beautiful piece. I was especially touched by the relationship between the two of you, seeing the care, the kindness. What a beautiful, simple concept and what a delight to be let into your relationship.”
Arnolfini audience member, February 2026
Reciprocal Creative Practices
At some point last year I became aware of the work of Florence Peake. I was working with clay for the first time since my Art Foundation course back in the early 1980s and, for some reason, her project Your Meaning Not Your Materiality (YMNYM) suddenly became visible to me. I had a strong desire to find a way of embodying the materials that I was working with. “By casting a permanent physical form of something intangible, Peake is attempting to make solid something that isn’t there.” Then I read about Florence’s three day residency at West Dean College at the end of February and decided to invest my performance fee from Arnolfini to secure my place.
Traces from our collective movement drawing.
In the summer of 2025, while taking part in the Glitter Heart project, I was interested in whether it might be possible to move and mark-make simultaneously: to extend and re-present the performing body in two-dimensional form, taking up space on another plane. Florence’s workshop created a much freer opportunity to work in this way, while also exploring materials in relation to my moving body in three dimensional space.
On the final day we repurposed a huge collaborative movement drawing we’d made. The night before I’d had a strong desire to create a dress with an arm extended beyond my body. Working with my two collaborators I managed to realise this idea and we improvised a short performance combining spoken text and movement. The experience increased my desire to work with scale and costume while evolving my solo work around ageing and visibility. This is a core aspiration for my Arts Council R&D application.
Mark making into movement.
Spring Tides
“When I am alone in nature everything falls into place,
I know who I am and where I belong. ”
Spring Tides was one of a number of annual offerings from internationally recognised movement teacher, director and performer Helen Poynor. Helen specialises in movement in natural environments and her practice has evolved over forty years. This workshop moved from a village hall in the mornings to the chalk and flints cliffs and ever changing waterline of Beer in Devon in the afternoons. We were invited to connect deeply with our environment, the elements, the sounds and with the rocks. In reflecting on the experience I realise that I’m continually drawn towards space to move, to connecting with others through that moving, to stepping away from the know and embracing the unexpected.
On the second day we were invited to find a habitat on the shoreline. Not to over-think it but see where we were pulled with no need to understand why. I found myself in a tight crevice between two areas of rock at the foot of the cliff. I wedged my body into the space and barely moved for well over an hour. Great battle was done between my body and my mind over that time. The mind urging me to move, to play, to respond. The body forthrightly refusing, willing me to endure the stillness, to embrace submitting to that habitat, that rock formation, the elements surrounding me. When my body was moving with rock on the first afternoon it became many things. Soft, heavy, pliable, vulnerable, resistant, responsive, melded. At moments the rock was my moving partner; giving, responding, directing then following. When I chose it as my habitat it consumed me. Skin and bone. Blood and warmth. I gave myself to that rock and it enfolded me and we were briefly one.
I had heard about Helen’s work earlier in the year, but think I was drawn to it now as it resonated with my somatic coaching training, thinking deeply about our bodies’ connection with our thinking and our context. Reflecting on the weekend’s experience I am left with a series of questions. If these spring tides and April winds of change are clearing the way for new beginnings where might these be leading me? What might be opening up before me? I am open, I am listening, I am always learning, but where might this be taking me? What is the change I want to be?
Drawings made immediately after the movement scores: 1. Rock dancing 2. Habitat
“As long as you’re dancing, you can
break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just
extending the rules.
Sometimes there are no rules.”
