Artist Archive is a new annual programme from Siobhan Davies Studios dedicated to the revival and rehoming of existing works, in place of the pressure to constantly innovate and increase output.
Artist Archive aims to give precedence to artists and their past works that:
- were unfunded or underfunded
- had few opportunities to be presented
- might otherwise be lost or forgotten
- resist the mainstream
We’re interested in how the transient nature of dance is remembered, and in revisiting works completed or unfinished, however rough and ready.
Find out about our 2022/23 selection process here.
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Material Archive
Valerie Ebuwa
Jemima Hoadley in collaboration with Camilla Greenwell
Live Archive
June Yuen Ting
Kate Brown with Nicholas Ridout
Entelechy Arts
Digital Archive
Laura Doehler and Exit Map
Corali with Mark Beldan & Claire Undy
— Material Archive
Valerie Ebuwa | ValUE
Valerie Ebuwa is a dance artist, activist, writer and model from London. Amongst others she’s recently worked with; Clod Ensemble and Jamie xx. As a maker, she has choreographed and curated ValUE, a multi-layered project created in order to offer multiple perspectives on the black female image. Her writing has been featured in The Stage Magazine and is a regular contributor to I am Hip Hop magazine. Her work has been featured in Crack Magazine.
The title ValUE refers to the project’s themes and the initials Valerie Uchechukwu Ebuwa. ValUE explores censorship and reclaiming the black female nude, which historically has been used to objectify and exotify black women. Historical stereotypes continue to reinforce racism, framing the way black bodies are viewed, and excluding black women from art and media. Through photography and mixed media, in collaboration with Henry Gorse and others, Ebuwa presents the notion of the Muse as an autonomous artist.
Image credits: Henry Gorse
Jemima Hoadley in collaboration with Camilla Greenwell | I Am Not Static
Jemima Hoadley is a freelance dance maker, performer and teacher with extensive experience in collaborating with deaf and disabled artists. Camilla Greenwell is an artist and photographer living and working in London, specialising in performance and portraiture.
I Am Not Static is an exploration of falling and recovery, using movement, photography, conversation and video as storytelling. The work archives Jemima – as she enters peri-menopause – intrigued and repelled by her own form, curious with the strangeness of the rebound of her flesh as she repeatedly falls. Through the archive Jemima is in dialogue with her body, with time, moving with her 10-year-old daughter (just on the cusp of puberty) and in conversation with a childhood friend. This is a time capsule of 2020-2021 and the process of ageing during global lockdown. At a time of being physically static, time was not standing still – a cycle of falling and rising, from ashes, to ashes.
Image credits: Camilla Greenwell
— Live Archive
June Yuen Ting | Abolitionist Kinaesthetics
How can movement practice be a method through which we body forth a world without prison and police? Abolitionist Kinaesthetics is a movement research that began with a desire to learn and practice collective care, mutual aid, community accountability and transformative justice — to build relationships that make prison and police obsolete. We invite you to experience this work anew through a meditation room, an abolitionist picnic and a movement workshop. Click here to find out more about this Live Archive taking place on 2 June 2022.
June Yuen Ting dreams of another world that is already here — a world, or worlds that are so expansive, so abundant and so immanent that the confines of colonial capitalist modernity cannot hold. June dances, organises, agitates and grieves. They wake up everyday yearning for transformation — for rematriation, redistribution and revolution. They want so deeply for all those who survived European imperial violence a chance of loving one another against the colonial imperative of heteropatriarchy.
Images credits:
– courtesy of June Yuen Ting
– Scanned collage made by an incarcerated person submitted to Abolitionist Kinaesthetics. Received via Photo Requests from Solitary, organised by Laurie Jo Reynolds, Jean Casella and Jeanine Oleson.
– courtesy of June Yuen Ting
Kate Brown with Nicholas Ridout | # nine
Kate Brown has been making dance pieces since 1990, choreographing for theatre and opera, performing with improvisation collectives and dancing in other artists’ work. In 1992 she began collaborating with writer Nicholas Ridout, presenting work in London and New York City ranging from Over Two Legs (1993) for 23 dancers and footballers to # nine (1998) for themselves. She is currently experimenting with film, including in What’s up Buttercup? (London 2020) and during a Wainsgate Artist’s Residency (Hebden Bridge 2021).
# nine was created for “Ripe Nights at Union Chapel” in June 1998.
Do they remember what happened, then?
Original notebooks inform and instruct – “test the edge at which narrative begins to appear” and “use the body as space; send information travelling through it”.
Glitchy fuzzy videos bring words and moves to a new life on screen, meeting dancer and writer in the present, 24 years later.
What will happen, now?
Image credits: Kate Brown.
Entelechy Arts | Ambient Jam Collective
Entelechy Arts‘ Ambient Jam Collective is a vibrant ensemble of differently abled artists who bring multi-sensory improvisation out of hiding into engagement with the public. Improvisations are sensitive to site and locality, multi-textural, mindful, profound, playful and often wondrously messy; open to the unexpected and non-verbally led. The collective has grown from a 30-year collaboration of weekly improvisations between people with profound, complex and learning disabilities (PMLD) and dance/music/sculpture artists.
This Artist Archive will further unhide Ambient Jam‘s history and activism alive in the present, foregrounding the contribution by our members who have PMLD towards a way of being together that is uncompromisingly honest and which can playfully hold opposites. Through a durational multi-sensory improvisation, we will share an embodied heritage, an archive held in the long-term relationships, trust and care between people – a community forged through the repetition of weekly improvisations over 30 years.
Image credits:
– Phillip Polglaze 1995, from Moving Visions in Community Dance.
– Roswither Chesher, 2019, Ambient Jam.
– Roswither Chesher, 2019, Ambient Jam.
— Digital Archives
Laura Doehler and Exit Map | Moving On
Laura’s practice with Exit Map, is to keep moving on, to make time and space to engage with what is around and inside of us, to come back to and deepen a state of presence with others and environment. With Moving On, Openly Spaced Out and the Shared Practice formats are available for dancers and the public alike to perceive, as practitioners and witnesses, an inherent mobility as we negotiate physical, social and environmental connectivity.
Artist Archive will allow Exit Map to share the evolution of and ideas behind Moving On, an audio project and somatic movement practice that Laura initiated to support her teaching during lockdown. In this community run practice, dancers and local community came and moved together, evoking and reaffirming connections – socially, bodily and to the environment – for a renewed sense of togetherness.
Image credits: Laura Doehler
Corali with Mark Beldan and Claire Undy | Archive
Corali creates exciting live performances and film. Our practice is rooted in collaboration; we explore the relationship between dancers who identify as learning-disabled and those who do not, between dance and other art forms, and between professional and participatory artwork. We align our work with the most inspiring dance, art and performance being made in the UK today and develop key partnerships with other organisations and companies, such as Tate gallery, and dance duo Thick & Tight.
For Artist Archive, Corali will collaborate with three artists, Mark Beldan, Claire Undy, and Jon Archdeacon to showcase the ‘making of’ choice works from our 33-year history: featuring gallery, site-specific, film, digital, and partnership work. We will also share creative tasks from our archive to make it accessible for others and so that people can have a go at recreating our performances for themselves.
Image credits:
– Film still from Digital Dance Toolkit, 2021.
– Photo of ‘1n 24 Hours’ for opening of the Jubilee Line, 2000.
– Photo of ’Diary of a Dead Artist’ Cafe Gallery (now Southwark Park Galleries), 1996.