‘Residence time is ‘the duration of persistence of a substance in an absorbed, suspended or dissolved state’
— Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016)
In April-May 2021, Yewande 103 was commissioned to make a work with the entire Third Year BA students from Northern School of Contemporary Dance. We worked together on an image-based score that centred embodied multiplicity. This resulted in the film work ‘An Anatomy of a Phoenix’.
The An Anatomy of a Phoenix is an intricate improvisation score calling upon cycles of repair for processes of returning to intimacy. The score cycles through four stages: descent, burning, rising and flight, holding tensions between beginnings, endings and transformation.
The score calls upon dancing as a process of making sense to ourselves, as active witnessing and listening. Phoenix’s live for 500 years, beyond human time…more like nature time, geological time, a reassuring amount of time in terms of personal growth, the processing of trauma and of time taken to heal, surface courage and processes of recovery.
Together we also made a group interactive publication centring multi-disciplinary practice through felt-level engagement across choreography, improvisation, text and advocacy. Please visit here for more info.
Choreography and Creative Direction: Alexandrina Hemsley
Production: Nancy May Roberts
Filming: David Lindsay
Filming Assistance: Jemma Stein, Luke Hodkinson
Editing: Katarzyna Perlak
Sound score: Xana with ‘Embers’ poetry by Alexandrina Hemsley (2016-2019)
Guitar composition: David Archer
Additional Texts by Tammy Tsang, Yasmina Patel and Isla Hurst
Support Work: David Archer
Captions: Katarzyna Perlak and Yewande 103
Audio description: Alexandrina Hemsley
With support from Joseph Mercier and staff at Northern School of Contemporary Dance
Dance Artists:
Nora Ellevold Aas
Vár Bech Árting
Cameron Bennett
George Bishop
Amber Bosteels
Lisa Chearles
Caitlin Kai Lin Chiang
Naomi Chockler
Puté Chomchan
Chiara de Craene
Denise Dannii Tan
Luis Dunn
Kieron Donohoe-Faller
Grace Ford
Alexander Gosmore
Jamie Reynolds Granner
Martine Grolid
Rickay Hewitt-Martin
Luke Hodkinson
Kate Hooley
Isla Hurst
Angharad Jones-Young
Niamh Keady
Harriet Leaf
Yu Ting Lee
Zara Lee
Kamal Macdonald
Alice Marriott
Maya Marsh
Sarah McCann
Alexandra McPherson
Neema Mwande
Isobel Moloney
Thomas Noble
Yasmina Patel
Syanindita Prameswari
Fay Reilly
Gianna Rotkvich
Harry Rule
Shahada Nantaba Sekajja
Jemma Stein
Cushla Sutherland
Marina Tubau Burción
Ayça Turgut
Tammy Tsang
Sophie Thomas
Kieran West
Imogen Wright
Brannon Yau
Holly Yu