I was delighted to be selected to be one of Dance North’s Regional Artists. This programme offers funding and producer support for artists working in the North and West of Scotland.

Please see promotional video here

What stood out most for this programme was the flexibility and support from Dance North and their freelance producer, Charlotte Mountford.

The inspiration for my new work was looking at oil and landscape and how do the two intersect. I decided to work with professional dancer Katie Armstrong and music and video producer Bo Morgan. We had a week residency together with support from Shetland Arts, at their cultural hub, Mareel.

It means a lot to be able to make choreography here in Shetland, and we were delighted to share the week’s work in progress with an audience of 40.

I wanted to play with audience perception and therefore we performed the piece in the round, dancers getting close to the audience members and playing with holding their gaze. The piece began slowly, in a hypnotic state, with dancers placed on chairs as the audience entered. We then fell to the the ground, the state overwhelming us. It was great fun to play with audience reaction and it really felt that they were part of the piece with us.

If I get chance to explore this again, I would love to play with viewing the piece from above, something the Mareel auditorium is very well set up to do. The projection is on the dancers most of the time, obscuring their view and the audience’s view of us.

The projection was made up of images from the landscape as well as oil and plastic production. What is really going on all around us?