Project

Sarie Mairs Slee, a trained musician and dancer, has been working in the messy territories between dance and theatre for the last fifteen years. She is a Lecturer in Dance at the University of Salford and works as an artist/academic across choreography, devising and writing. From 2010-2013, her work has focused on collaboration with Studio Matejka, a performance laboratory ensemble in permanent residence at the Grotowksi Institute in Wroclaw, Poland.

Since 2013, her creative work has delved into interdisciplinary collaboration, working with a range of writers, composers, designers and performers to the performative possibilities of the body in creative action.

Scott Thurston has been writing and publishing poetry for over two decades and, in the last six years, has explored the possibilities of poetry and movement in work with national and international artists. His last four poetry publications, Draft Vicinity (2018), Poems for the Dance (2017), Figure Detached Figure Impermanent (2014) and Reverses Heart’s Reassembly (2011), draw on these rich experiences. Scott was recently interviewed on Radio 3’s The Verb on a special programme exploring ‘The Language of Dance’.

Clarissa Smith is a dancer artist and facilitator. She has a growing interest in the inner workings of dance and performance arts projects, and the way dance can assist people with neurogenic communication disorders. She aims to work as a dance producer and dance movement psychotherapist. Clarissa studied Dance at the University of Salford and during this time worked as administrator for Kapow Dance. It was from this experience that led her to delve deeper into what you don’t see as an audience member, the hard work put in to make everything happen.

Kate Adams is a dramaturg, performance maker, and university lecturer. She works between performance art, dance, poetry and theatre, but common to all is an interest in working across languages and in the interstices of the personal and political. In her recent solo work, she addresses grief and loss in And by the Way the Cat is Dead, and misunderstandings across languages and cultures in Μα Ποια Πάπια (or I’m not a Pheasant Plucker). Both works use humour and fragments of autobiographical stories to create a shared experience with the audience defined by trust, intimacy and vulnerability. As a researcher, Kate’s central interest is in how hospitable vulnerability on stage can be a means of engaging the audience as witness or participant. She has also collaborated for the past five years with choreographer, Medie Megas, most recently for the site specific work, Trapped, at the National Theatre of Greece.

Oren Lieberman has developed a wide-ranging practice as an architect, teacher, exhibitor, initiator and curator of events and symposia as well as exhibitions, and as a writer and publisher. Within the broad area of critical spatial practices, he focuses particularly on performative practices which entangle knowledge, methodologies and techniques from various disciplines, including architecture, performance (particularly choreography, devising, and improvisation), geography, anthropology, and sociology. In this area there are various ‘matters of concern’, including the role architecture and its processes of production plays in the construction of political practices and the establishment of the ‘common’; the both/and of relationality/contingency and the durability of things; critical pedagogy through embodied practices and a focus on an individual’s development; and research as intraventional. His research and teaching attends to our ability, as academics, practitioners, and students, to transform and produce space – sites, events, encounters – bodily and materially: we make a difference, we transform.