Creative & dance journal – Page 2

Feeling and Sensation Diptychs

At the start of July 2025, I had begun to arrange photographs which I created with my Rolleicord film camera in pairs – diptychs. The black and white photos were sensuous. I was intrigued by how they modified each other: complementing or contrasting, creating a relation between them and of them.

Dance & Movement Research 2024: dance and poetry workshop

The poet Francis Boua join me, dancer Jo Dyer and photographer Hugh Pryor at the Old Fire Station dance studio in Oxford on Friday 19 January 2024 for a dance and poetry workshop. Here’s a film clip from it. And yes, it took me more than a year to obtain the permissions for the use of the film so I might create this post!

Sketches from Skiing On Skin 2025 (Contact Improvisation Festival Finland)

I attended a week long dance festival called Skiing On Skin 2025 (Contact Improvisation Festival Finland) at the Vierumäki sports institute near Helsinki in February 2025. For one of the workshops, I draw sketches which are presented here.

Residuals #10 Light

In January 2025 – a year after starting the Residuals series, I used performance and long exposure photography to record light – its reflection from the surfaces of moving bodies, as a residual – including darkness and shadow too! Here are presented these ‘light graphs’ from the session at Goldsmiths CI at Goldsmiths, University of London on Saturday 18 January.

Residuals #9 Circle in the Hayslip

On 24 September 2024, I returned to Schumacher College, Dartington to harvest the potatoes from the crop trial which I started there in summer 2024. It was part of my Integrated Research Practice. After the performance, a circle of charcoal remained in the soil: an archaeological art work and residuals in my body as memory.

Residuals #8 Apple picking

The apple harvest of 2024 was one of the most prodigious I’ve known. Dancer Jo Dyer and I performed a dance to celebrate the apple harvest on 12 September 2024 . We picked apples using them as a movement and drawing construct. Not unlike the dancing/dance drawing with potatoes in Residuals #4, and Residuals #7 but now apples. (Pomme rather than pomme de terre!)

Residuals #7 Draw Potato Harvest

In 2024, I conducted a crop trial of potatoes and bio-char (charcoal) in my allotment garden in Oxford, UK. In September, it was time to harvest the potatoes and entact a performance: drawing the produce from the soil through dance and movement; and creating a drawing – a potato drawing. The performance was with the Unknown Performer – a person who prefers not to be named, from 19 August 2024 and other days in August/September 2024.

Residuals #6 Shadow Mirror

The Residual series #1 – #5, had all used charcoal on paper for mark-making, or as we might otherwise say, charcoal was used for marking the performance!

In Residuals #6 then shadow was the mark-making element. It was performed at OVADA, Osney Mead, Oxford on Tuesday 13 August 2024. The idea of a mirror dance is partly based on the notion that individuals in social relations naturally mirror each other resulting in symmetric patterns. It’s also such a simple dance that it hardly seems like a dance at all – which it is!

Residuals #5 Blocking & Exclusion

Like all of the residuals performances, Residuals #5 was co-created – but this time with an artist who prefers not to be named, and who I’ll address in this article as the Unknown Artist. The idea of blocking movement – which in the visual arts would be ‘masking’ – also has a social narrative too. This performance was at OVADA, Osney Mead, Oxford on Tuesday 6 August 2024.

Residuals #4 – Integrated Research Practice

On Sunday June 2, working with students and volunteers in their community garden at Schumacher College, Dartington, I combined planting potatoes for research into potato yields with the residuals practice of dance making and mark-making. I call this an ‘integrated research practice’ as the residuals practice is a research too.