A Durational Conversation 2020
Temitope Ajose-Cutting, Shivaangee Agrawal, Karen Callaghan, Iris Yi Po Chan, Katye Coe, J N Harrington, Amrita Hepi, Rosemary Lee, elena rose light, Else Tunemyr, Jay Yule & Katie Vickers
Image: coworkers 2020 in online lockdown discursive rehearsals across UK, USA, Belgium, Hong Kong, Australia, Sweden.
This durational conversation was a live-streamed event that took place on Sunday 15 November 2020. The live gallery presentation Satelliser: a dance for the gallery by J N Harrington & coworkers was originally due to be performed at BALTIC, Gateshead on Sat 14 & Sun 15 November 2020. As a result of local and national lockdowns it was not able to take place.
A durational conversation, taking as a starting point the format of online discursive rehearsal sessions by the group, was be streamed live between 10am – 5pm on Sun 15 Nov for audience members to experience this developing work and hear from the co-working artists as they navigate the online space, at the time they would have navigated the live gallery space.
Images: Screenshots of Satelliser online discursive rehearsals 2020-21 with coworkers and SDS team: Rosemary Lee, J N Harrington, Sally Rose, Karen Callaghan, Rohanne Udall, Shivaangee Agrawal, Jonny Goode, Iris Yi Po Chan, Else Tunemyr, Temitope Ajose Cutting, Jay Yule, Katye Coe, Bonni Bogya, Arabella Stanger, Ngozi Oparah, elena rose light, Louise Tanoto, Sri Louise, Mia Quimpo Gourlay, Zarina Rossheart, Amaara Raheem, Christine Bramwell, Amanda Thompson, Amrita Hepi
Image: Katja Illner
Temitope Ajose Cutting (she/her)
Bonnie Bird Choreography Award winner (2005) Temitope Ajose Cutting has created and staged works for venues such as Royal Opera House and ROH2. She has been commissioned by The Place Prize Bloomberg, and exciting dance producer Eckhard Thiemann at Woking Dance. Her works have been performed at DanceXchange, RichMix, Dance base in Edinburgh, Swindon Dance and the Soho Joyce (New York). As a dancer Temitope has worked with Punchdrunk, director Carrie Cracknell at The Gate Theatre and very recently at The National Theatre, director Amy Hodge, Theo Clinkard and Protein Dance Company, Darcy Wallace at the V&A, Lea Anderson, Joe Moran, Sue Maclaine and Seke Chimutengwende. In addition to this she has been part of the performance team restaging Joan Jonas retrospective at the Tate Modern, working with choreographer and curator Nefeli Skarmea for artist Megan Rooney at the Serpentine Pavilion and now working closely with Megan Rooney for her solo show at Kunsthalle and most recently the Lyon Bianale.
Temitope continues to make her own work producing a show at The southbank ‘My name is my own’ with director Jo Tyabji working and writer Jay Bernard on the politics of public speaking with an extraordinary cast.
Image: Yasmin Centeno
Shivaangee Agrawal (she/they)
Shivaangee Agrawal is a dance artist with a practice that concerns choreography, writing and advocacy. Having trained in Bharatanatyam in both London and Bangalore, Shivaangee has worked with a range of choreographers including Shane Shambhu, Nina Rajarani, Rosie Kay, Sonia Sabri, Seeta Patel, Jo Tyabji and Suba Subramaniam. Shivaangee makes work that is informed by collectivity, rhythmic structures and disorientation. She is supported by Arts Council England, Siobhan Davies Dance, Akademi, Kala Sangam, Blue Elephant Theatre and Streatham Space Project. This year she is a Choreodrome artist at The Place.
Image: Alessa Davison
Karen Callaghan (she/her)
Karen began her contemporary dance career in Ireland in the 1970’s. She went on to work in New York in the 1980’s performing with Jane Comfort, Ellen Cornfield and Wendy Perron amongst others. She trained as a Dance Movement Psychotherapist in London and worked in that capacity for over 20 years, predominantly in the human rights field. She returned to performing in 2011 and has worked with Rosana Antoli, Fevered Sleep, J N Harrington, Rosemary Lee, Isabel Lewis, Tino Sehgal, Alice Tatge, Darcy Wallace and Sam Williams amongst others.
Image: J N Harrington
Iris Yi Po Chan (she/her)
Iris is a London-based dancer, performer, and producer from Hong Kong. For over 10 years she has been working in the UK dance sector with a range of choreographers, artists, and organisations. Iris has performed in galleries, museums, theatres and site-specific contexts, and has worked with Jo Fong, J N Harrington, Zadie Xa, Laura Wilson, Robert Clark, Florence Peake, Pablo Bronstein, Evangelia Kolyra, and Moi Tran amongst others. She has performed at festivals such as EAREYE in Malmö (2020), Dance International Glasgow (2019), Art Night in London (2019), Venice Biennale (2019), Prague Quadrennial (2019), SPILL festival (2018), Block Universe (2018), and Do Disturb at Palais de Tokyo (2018).
Katye Coe (she/her)
Katye is a performer, dancer, rehearsal director, facilitator, writer and teacher based in the UK. She has more than 2 decades of experience in dancing and is currently also developing her practices through a 3 year study programme in Somatic Experiencing. Prior to returning to a full time freelance dancer practice in 2016, Katye was course director for Dance at Coventry University and the Artistic Director of Summer Dancing festival and Decoda.
As a dancer, Katye has worked and continues to work closely with the following choreographers/ companies: Jonathan Burrows and Matthias Fargion; Joe Moran; Florence Peake; Station House Opera (Julian. Maynard Smith); Stefan Jovanovic; Sirens Crossing (Carolyn Deby); Matthias Sperling; Roberta Jean; Charlie Morrissey; Amy Voris; Keira Greene; Frank Bock; Laura Van Hulle; J N Harrington. Her own creative work, with a particular focus on the specific information that a dancer performer accesses, has been recently supported by Dance4, Siobhan Davies Dance Studios, Burrows and Fargion, Wainsgate Dances and Sadlers Wells Theatre.
Image: Christa Holka
J N Harrington (she/her)
J N Harrington is an artist whose work includes writing, dance & choreography, drawing, video, installation, costume and space design. She works mainly in gallery and non-stage spaces where her work prioritises explorations around access, play, agency, confrontation by times/scales beyond the human, neuroqueer experiences of information processing: mishearing, equational-images, listening, ways of tethering attention in movement... Her recent works include Screensaver Series (2018), storage for future sunsets (2021, Scottish Dance Theatre & V&A Dundee), good luck dinosaur (2020) , believe/ been video essay (2020), UNFRIENDING (2021), never closer to midnight (2019) and leading the Satelliser project.
Harrington’s educational background is in visual arts, psychology and dance. As a performer she has worked within museum and gallery contexts across Europe. She is a board member of Chisenhale Dance Space in London and was involved with Engagement Arts Belgium 2017/18. She works to support other artists with access through grant-writing, and mentors around neurodiversity in dance.
Image: Amelia J Dowd
Amrita Hepi (she/her)
Amrita Hepi (b.1989, Townsville of Bundjulung/Ngapuhi territories) is an artist working with dance and choreography through video, the social function of performance spaces, installation and objects. Utilising hybridity and the extension of choreographic or performative practices, Hepi creates work that considers the body’s relationship to personal histories and the archive.
Her practice engages in a wide range of themes including the ourbouros, the “itness” of a thing, violence, magpies, magic, touch, doom, spectacle, the idea of “make-believe” and the uncanny. In 2020 she has joined Rising's (formerly Melbourne Festival) Council of good ideas as an artistic advisor, is a Gertrude Contemporary artist in residence and is currently working with Kaldor projects/Serpentine UK as a participating DOit artist. Amrita trained at NAISDA and Alvin Ailey NYC.
Image : Steve Tanner
Rosemary Lee (she/her)
Known for working in a variety of contexts and media, Rosemary creates large-scale site-specific works with cross-generational casts, solos for herself and other performers, video installations and short films. Her work is characterised by an interest in creating a moving portraiture of the performing individuals and communities she brings together, whilst also exploring and highlighting our relationship with our environment.
Rosemary’s work is produced by Artsadmin. She is currently a Work Place affiliate artist, Senior Research Fellow at C-DaRE Coventry University, and holds an Honorary Doctorate from Roehampton University, and an Honorary Fellowship from Trinity Laban.
elena rose light (they/them)
elena rose light is a choreographer and performer originally from Southern California (Micqanaqa’n). Their work is rooted in the potential for somatic empathy to reorganize systems of thought and governance, and has been presented by Abrons Arts Center, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, The Current Sessions, and Movement Research at Judson Church, among other venues. Elena has also performed in the work of Ursula Eagly, Bouchra Ouizguen, Tino Sehgal, Asad Raza, and others. They studied art history and French literature at Yale University, where they first became enamoured with experimental performance.
Image: Mattias Malm
Else Tunemyr (she/her)
Else Tunemyr (b. 1984 Sweden) lives in Malmö, Sweden. She works in different and changing collaborations and directions, dividing her time between dancing, performing, choreographing, doing dramaturgical work and teaching. Her practice has evolved around the topics of physical tiredness and presences of passivity, which also included reflections about the process of rehearsing and exhaustion in general. She studied for a BA in Dance Theatre at Laban, London, and a MA in Choreography and Performance at the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies, Giessen. Else aims for an interplay between speculative and embodied knowledge, most recently exploring the transgressive potential of touching practices. Questions that persist in her work are “is there a specificity to dance that can resist the logic of progress? And how would a choreographic process support this?
Else was an emerging Dance Artist in Residency at the Southbank Centre London, where she developed work shown at the Southbank Centre, Chisenhale Dance Space and Sadler’s Well’s Theatre. Parallell to her own choreographic work Else works as a dramaturg and performer and have been performing and collaborating with, Anta Helena Recke, Andrew Hardwidge, Benjamin van Bebber, Carolina Mendonça, Catalina Insignares, Les Trucs, Lygia Clark, Mårten Spångberg, Jamila Johnson-Small, J N Harrington, Mike Kelley, Simone Forti, Tino Sehgal, Xavier Le Roy and others.
Image: Henry Curtis
Jay Yule (she/her)
Jay Yule works as a dance performer and maker. She works regularly with artists Jo Fong, J N Harrington and Sarah Fahie as well as Theo Clinkard, Heidi Rustgaard and Luca Silvestrini. She has performed throughout the UK, France, Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands and in disciplines across puppetry, opera and immersive theatre. Her practice draws from the experience of queerness, works from an intersectional feminist perspective and is of an existential nature. Jay tries to foster an inclusivity into the way she creates, making art which can be viewed by anyone with the hope of imparting a sense of activism from watching.
Image: Albert Quesada
Katie Vickers (she/her)
Katie is an American artist, a graduate of PARTS and The Ohio State University. She has danced for Daniel Linehan (USA), Martin Nachbar (GE), Benjamin Vandewalle (BE), Vera Tussing (GE), Rósa Omarsdóttir (IS), Thierry de May (BE), David Gordon (US), and as a guest artist for the Cullberg Ballet’s ‘Figure a Sea’, by Deborah Hay. Her own work questions the use of the body to find the unfamiliar in the familiar. In 2014, Katie created ‘Slogan for Modern Times’ with Inga Huld Hakonardottir, following that, she created ‘5 Seasons’ (2016) with Benjamin Pohlig. She premiered ‘We Will Have Had Darker Futures’ (2017) with Inga Huld Hakondottir and Rebecka Stillman. These pieces were performed and premiered in the festival Bouge B in deSingel and supported by institutions such as Dommelhof TAKT, Vooruit, School Van Gaasbeek, STUK, wpZimmer, Uferstudios, and Schloss Bröllin.She finished ‘The home of Dance’, a research project on rethinking the theatre home (supported by Flanders government). Currently, Katie is receiving her MFA at University of the Arts in Philadelphia.