Statement of Claim : A Definition of My (Contemporary) Dance

I treat improvisation as a rigorous choreographic craft: a willful act of composing choreography in performance by spontaneously re-associating, remembering, and regenerating movement material in response to external stimuli and internal impulses.

I improvise choreography in performance in a post modern idiom. I collaborate, direct, research, teach, and write. I devise and craft abstract art for performance in collaboration with other artists. I take ordinary everyday gesture and hybridise it with movement vocabularies from many other different physical disciplines.

My work rests up against a continual questioning of its own mores: What is the function of contemporary dance? What are my outcomes? Where am I going with these processes? There is also an ongoing interrogation of form: movement, gesture, composition, aesthetics, relationship, humour, truth, etc.

My practice is a constantly mutating physical / intellectual / emotional response to every day life.

My dance is inseparable from ballet and modern dance in that I consistently define my work against those two art forms.


I'm of the opinion that the phrase "dance is a universal language" is as clumsy as saying that "words are a universal language". In dance the dialects and languages are endless, its the act of dancing itself that is universal.

In my experience the fundamental function of all dance is to provide a point of unification. At an individual level (functional integration, expression sexuality and sensuality, pleasure of movement etc) and at a group level, (competition, performance, ritual, an event where community can be experienced, expressed and strengthened).

I'm part of the privileged underclass...I dance and stuff.