Residency week at Dance Base

MASSIVE thanks to Morag Deyes and Dance Base in Edinburgh for the support of a week long residency 8-12th Jan to reflect and develop And.

I had the pleasure of inviting Jack Webb and Claricia Kruithof to work with me on my solo over the residency week period so big up and thanks to both for their insights during the week!

I arrived in the studio on Monday 8th with massive plans to develop the solo - bagpiping, highland dancing, Scottish-ness. I shared my master plans with Jack on how I could take the solo further but soon realised the best and most productive thing to do was to work with what we already had!

Jack assisted in movement language and movement vocabulary development as he has done many many solo improvisations in the past (which is why I was so keen to work with him as I love his work). We also spoke, found and trialled a lot of different ways of 'listening'.

With CC, we spoke about the performing gender and what this is. I wanted to work with CC as she is involved with the vogue ballroom scene, is part of the House of Revlon and runs Vogue Scotland. I am interested in exploring and discovering what it means for me to be a young white woman and how that impacts / effects society, the world, myself. I am aware of the privileges this may allow me so learning about the voguing scene and doing some femme vogue / runway / face allowed me to tap into my femininity more (which by the way was so scary - I'm not used to 'being a girl' (whatever that means)) - great challenge though, thanks CC.

Let's be clear, I'm definitely not going to start voguing during the solo, I know the work we did will resonate in other aspects of the solo's and my personal development.