I’ve had a writing practice as long as I can remember. I formalised it by co-editing BELLYFLOP Magazine (2010-15) and The Shrinking Violets with Amanda Prince-Lubawy (2011-2014). Between 2012-2018 I wrote on my blog Feminist Shakedown. Below are more recent writings and a selection from Feminist Shakedown.
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Letter to Arts Council England
Dear Arts Council England Executive Board and National Council, I am writing to you from my position as an independent artist, board member of an independent dance organisation and as an arts participant and attendee more broadly. I sincerely welcome the emergency funding available for arts organisations and individuals who will need it during this Coronavirus crisis. Thank you for…
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Embers III
III How can I harness the displacing I did as a younger me into the displacement of falling? Of falling through time? What if the space of a fall is one of dissonance and disconnect? Outsider anger streams and mingles with my own. Fractured into many knots, now surfacing unshakable. Base chakra healing in the key of D Dead pelvis.…
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Embers II
II Sitting with the small fact about me that I used to want blonde hair and blue eyes So it was. A glitch. Can you see her? This blonde woman with blue eyes. Desiring her is a young act of falling away from myself. When I catch my reflection in a window in Deptford market, I shudder. These moments are…
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Embers I
I The world is burning up while we are burning out, tumbling in an extended exhale after a gasp that started decades ago. Driftwood marks where coastal land has washed out to sea. Trees arc under the weight of infinite years. Forests are close to giving up. And yet…. Our future looks like midnight; all caresses, dreams and tensions. An…
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50:50 Dance Programming – is it time for quotas in dance?
I have been thinking of instances where experiences have been rendered invisible. Not by those who embody and experience them – they are to them, very visible…life-alteringly daily, hourly, visible. The vanishing of experience (which leads to the absences key to this discussion about equality for all genders within the dance sector), seems to happen when people witness or relate…
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There Has Never Been A Mantra For This
without myself i swim to the horizon in search of misty, grey-blue safety, to listen to gut-voices. Questions arise. How to handle softly – still handle smoothly? Endure my body’s noise? Withstand the self-shouting-ragin’, dis-together un-integrated, non-collective of bone-muscle, energy and emotion? In the many of life’s aftermaths, i encounter, internalised ponds of splitting from oneself dealing-leaning (amidst…
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CONTOUR
2018, I thought of something to remember…some instruction…but I also knew it wouldn’t last, the instruction, the memory would vanish and transform. Movement never lost…. Sweet-smelling wood, wet from the rain the mist rises. My spirit is gambling, my cells are opening up. The lines on our bodies shine, where time has left silver marks. Our revealing coaxes…
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#
Hashtags tearing across in opposition And. And. Fight. Flight. Lost now. How do you amplify silence? How to speak after silence? I tell friends who do not hear I lie with men who hurt Being silenced By power And hashtags Divides deepen The aftermath is more enforced silence Puzzling And at once Unsurprising But Stinging…
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Two Dances
Written in response to Free Falling Double Bill by Hagit Yakira waiting to see what is in front of these two dances sifting between bound, built muscle and fine porcelain that breathes through cells like the sound of the sea heard through conches pressed against trusting ears rotating arms, extending necks and twisting hips to fold into the underneath which reveals the…