Artistic interests

My Photo
Cornwall, United Kingdom
My practice often involves the tools of improvisation, attention to imagery and sensation, and text/writing. I am concerned with the relationship between the audience and the performer, and the politics of the performance space. The themes in my work are often exploring what it means to be human, the tensions and relations between individual and collective identity, and the embodied self in relation to our lived environment. I have an ongoing curiosity around notions of absence and presence, memory, intimacy and states of transition or 'in-between-ness'. Lately my performances have taken place outside of the theatre space, being in the form of installations and site-based works. As an educator I enjoy facilitating people to find their own modes of expression, and to find efficiency, dynamism and ease of movement with a sense of the embodied and whole self. I am currently an ‘emerging artist in residence’ at the Southbank Centre London, and I am working on a durational installation entitled Soliloquy. I am an associate lecturer at Plymouth University and a guest lecturer at University College Falmouth.

Towards Stillness

Reworked version performed and filmed at Arnolfini, Bristol 2010. Premiered at Dancekiosk Hamburg 2009, and performed since at venues and events including Outlet Festival Germany, Salisbury Arts Centre,Abundance Festival Sweden. Towards Stillness integrates structured improvisational dance with live sound and video to create an immersive installation. The audience experience the performance in the same space as the performance action, and are invited to witness, and become influential in, the emergent properties of the installation. A study on ideas around transformation and collectivity, the work provides an opportunity for audience and performer roles to become more fluid, a meditation on what it means to be a part of something bigger than ourselves. This project has been supported at various stages by the Lisa Ullman Travelling Scholarship Fund, London Metropolitan University, the European Commission Culture Programme through Dance Beyond Borders, Laban, Penryn College and Creative Skills.

Between Stone and Star- Shunt Theatre 16th October

Performance/choreography: Saffy Setohy Video/Sound: Rainer Hutber. Inspired by the poem Evening by Rainer Maria Rilke, Stone and Star takes as a starting point the notion of being left alone in an ‘in-between’ space, a place full of possibilities and without certainties. Created especially for the second level space in the Shunt Lounge, which has a glass floor and ceiling, the piece also revisits a common theme of the artists' work together: the influences of architecture and environment on thought, behaviour and movement. A structured improvisation, the performance took place over a thirty minute duration. Audience members were free to walk in and out of the performance space, and to stand or sit where they pleased in relation to the performers.

Towards Stillness (Image: Uwe Brodmann)

Towards Stillness (Image: Uwe Brodmann)
A performance at Outlet Festival, Germany 2009

Entropy (2008)