Dance & Performance
Researching, creating and performing dance
Academic Research
Presence and embodiment in dance practices
My research on dance asks how presence, skill and agency emerge in the moving body. Combining ethnography, phenomenology and cognitive science, I study dance as an ecological practice in which bodies, environments and communities shape one another.
Stage presence
How does presence emerge in dance? My research develops a cognitive ecological approach to stage presence across three dance forms, understanding presence as plural and distributed across performers, audiences and environments, rather than as an individual quality.
Key works:
Dancing Presence: Ecologies of Embodiment in Contemporary Dance Practices (Routledge, forthcoming)
“Cognitive ecologies of presence(s) in three different dance forms”, Nordic Journal of Dance, 2023
Skill, agency and attunement
I investigate how dancers develop skill, perception and embodied knowledge, from interkinaesthetic attunement and shared agency in Contact Improvisation and Body Weather to the transmission of choreographic knowledge in contemporary ballet.
Key works:
“Skilled performance in Contact Improvisation: The importance of interkinaesthetic embodied sense of agency” (with C. Deans), Synthese, 2022
“On the edge of undoing: Ecologies of agency in Body Weather”, in Collaborative Embodied Performance: Ecologies of Skill (Bloomsbury, 2022)
“Transmitting Passione: Emio Greco and the Ballet National de Marseille” (with J. Sutton), in The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Ballet (OUP, 2021)
Choreography
Original works for stage and screen
Since 2005, I have created choreographic works for stage and screen, from early performances and dance videos in Italy, France and Belgium to the screendance series INFINITO and Karen’s shoes (2022), created with the SDU students dance company.
Dance Performance
Selected performances as a professional dancer
Selected performances from my career as a professional contemporary dancer, including works by William Forsythe, Angelin Preljocaj and Carolyn Carlson. My training took me from the professional training course at Aterballetto to the École Supérieure de Danse de Cannes Rosella Hightower and the D.A.N.C.E. programme.