We will be sharing a work in progress which extends from our personal and collaborative endeavour to discover how words arise from movement and movement gives life to text. At present this episodic work exists as separate semi-improvised explorations which play between movement, voice and poetry.
Scott Thurston is a poet, mover and educator working in higher education in Manchester, UK. He has published fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, including three full-length collections with Shearsman: Hold (2006), Momentum (2008) and Internal Rhyme (2010). More recent work includes Poems for the Dance (Aquifer, 2017), Draft Vicinity (Knives Forks and Spoons, 2018) and We Must Betray Our Potential (The Red Ceilings, 2018). Scott is founding co-editor of open access Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry and co-organized the long-running poetry reading series The Other Room in Manchester (2008-2018). Since 2004, he has been developing a poetics integrating dance and poetry which has seen him collaborating with dancers in Berlin and New York as well as in the UK.
Gemma Collard-Stokes is an independent dance artist making work of an interdisciplinary nature. Her artistic enquiry explores social interaction and the social history of places through a combination of environmentally responsive movement practice, creative writing and physical theatre. This extends from her PhD, ‘Dissolving Borders: the integration of writing into a movement practice’ (2017), an exploration of how movement improvisation principles can be applied to acts of writing in order to reveal the suchness of our lived experience of dance. In her academic role as Research Fellow at the University of Derby, she works within the field of Health and Social Care in the context of Arts in Health and Creative Expressive Arts for Wellbeing with a specific specialist focus on therapeutic applications of dance and somatic movement.