Reflections

Sep

2024

SPLASH! UK Tour press release

So excited that SPLASH! is touring the UK with the support of ACE funding. We have Fall dates including Birmingham, Oxford, and London then in the Spring you can see SPLASH! in Leeds, Bristol, and Kent. Lots of great performances and workshops. (We also have an exhibit of the paintings, drawings, dance scores, and photographs generated in the making of the work. The exhibit will be at the Greater Denton Arts Council gallery TX USA from October 2024 to December 2024.)

Here is our press release for the UK Tour – Hope to see you at one of the performances 🙂

Dive into the Fun with “SPLASH!” – A Captivating Children’s Dance Theatre Performance

We are thrilled to present “SPLASH!”, an exciting children’s dance -theatre production that promises to be a magical experience for young audiences and their families. The show revolves around the theme of water cycles, taking audience members on a journey from spring to river to ocean. This is a delightfully whimsical introduction to dance-theatre with lots of immersive moments when young audience members are invited to join in with the dance and music.

“SPLASH!” merges music, visual light and colour immersion, and dance. Directed by the talented duo Adesola Akinleye & Helen Kindred, this original dance-theatre work features a cast of three dancers and musicians.

“We are incredibly proud of “SPLASH!”. It is the fifth dance theatre work that has been made specifically for children and their families, coming from our commitment to bring high-quality dance experiences to young audiences,” said Helen “This production is a vibrant and engaging dance-story that encourages children to think about and celebrate clean water and nature’s water cycles. The work was made after collaboration with Global Water Dance’s new children’s curriculum.”

“Our work is sometimes the first time a young audience member has seen a live dance in a theatre. We cherish the privilege of introducing dance to families, we have seen how this fosters a lifelong love and sense of belonging in the arts for children and the adults they become” said Adesola.

Nov

2023

Black British Ballet project

So excited to see this project that Dr Sandie Bourne has been working on with her team for a number of years. Their website is launched. It has interviews with lots of dancers, many old friends and colleagues.

Here is the link

Aug

2023

SPLASH! R&D

We have just finished final R&D for DancingStrong Movement Lab’s Gallery interactive work for young audiences – SPLASH!. We were able to finish the work and have some performances with support from an Arts Council Grant. It has been really fun making SPLASH! which draw on all our workshops dancing at the River Thames and drawing with Andrew and Mary. It was also informed by different experiences celebrating Global water Dances over the few years. SPLASH! is scheduled to start touring in the new year (2024).

Jun

2023

Archiving with Bare Feet: archiving the performance work ‘Truth & Transparency’ – Siobhan Davies Studios

This project involves me archiving a work I created in 2007. It is part of a programme designed by Siobhan Davies Studios that explores archiving, whose work is archived and how we archive dance.

I will be archiving ‘Truth & Transparency’ (2007) is a performance work for three: two performers and one dancer manipulating an image projected onto the performance space using a mirror. The work was inspired by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ and my reflections on bringing-up my own children at the time. The original piece researched Step and Crumping dance forms and foreshadowed new technology using projection in real-time to manipulate the audience’s perception of dancers and space.

Link to Siobhan Davies Studios further information: https://www.siobhandavies.com/artist-archive/23-24/

Archiving with Bare Feet: archiving the performance work ‘Truth & Transparency’ (2023)

An interactive digital archive using original footage and the creation of a responding new work. The original 2007 work manipulated projected images onto live dancers inspired by Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’, the work of Olafur Eliuasson , and Ingo Maurer as well as my experiences as a mother of two Black youth living in the UK. The original piece foreshadowed new technology using projection in real-time. This was to manipulate the audience’s perception of dancers and the space in order to investigate how identity is projected onto Black youth.

With new online technology and my young children now in their late 20s, the ‘archiving’ process takes the form of a new choreographic response to the first work reflecting the precarity of safety for Black identities in the UK 15 years on. The digital space will include both first and second renditions of the piece along with interactive choreographic prompts for visitors to the site. The site will hosted by Siobhan Davis Dance for two years. The project asks: what it mean to archive outside the mainstream canon? How do Western dance archiving traditions render Black dancing bodies visible and un-visible?

Jan

2023

Ivor Guest Research Grant Recipient 2022 Society For Dance Research

I was so honoured to be a recipient of the Ivor Guest Research Grant from the Society for Dance Research grant in 2022. It allowed me to do some pilot choreographic studies at the Immersion Lab. MIT towards the Space+Dance+Digital (S+D2) Augmented Reality (AR) project that is in development.

I talked about this project in IMMERSED IN: contemporary dance in September 2022.

I have been asking – What does it mean artistically and politically for dance to take advantage of the boundary between physical and digital space?

In the Immersion Lab, I have been tracking movement in space without capturing the dancer’s body shape. This creates an artwork of ‘movement’ without many of the social and political constructs that seeing the body that is producing the movement would impose on the meaning of the movement. This work also allows the AR audience member to step into the movement, be present in and contribute to the choreography. This research explores collaborative place-making and new ways of artistic and political togetherness through the digital and the dance space.

The Society for Dance research writes: ‘S+D2 is a dance project creating choreography accessed through the immersive digital platform of AR. AR allows the performance experience to be shared and responded to by people digitally coming together across geographic, political, language and social barriers. Part of the research impetus is to ask what does it mean artistically for dance to take advantage of the physical boundary crossing of digital space? The project develops preliminary research by Akinleye and Preciado-Azanza’

Nov

2022

PILOT III – Rights, Care and Future

I really enjoyed workshopping and discussing with members of PILOT last month. PILOT is an online course for artists and creative people to pursue arts and learning differently, through issues of rights, care and future. Now in its third year, PILOT is an intergenerational learning space for collective exchange and individual mentoring, bringing together practitioners from different places and walks of life.

The course is led by Ali Eisa and Alberto Duman. You can read more about it here https://autograph.org.uk/events/pilot-iii-rights-care-and-future

Nov

2022

‘Altogether’ podcast recording (Nov 22)

‘This year, the 4th Cohort of New Architecture Writers, hosted a live broadcast event inspired by pirate radio, a radical part of multicultural London, exploring spatial injustice and environmental racism. In this segment, New Architecture Writer Mahika Gautam speaks to Dr Adesola Akinleye about dance, architecture, and climate justice.

New Architecture Writers is a free programme for emerging design writers, developing the journalistic skill, editorial connections and critical voice of its participants. N.A.W. focuses on people of colour who are under-represented across design journalism and curation. A series of evening workshops, talks, and writing briefs form the core of N.A.W.’s programme with one-to-one mentoring from experienced design critics and editors throughout. New Architecture Writers was founded in 2017 by Phineas Harper and Tom Wilkinson with the Architecture Foundation and Architectural Review.’

Below is the podcast edited by Mahika Gautam. It was live streamed on November 2nd 2022

Jun

2022

reflection on attention

Ten philosophers and ten dancers walk into a room in London…

Curated by Laura Cull Ó Maoilearca and Heni Hale, on November 29th and 30th 2019, we came together at ID to share a series of workshops and discussions that focused around the notion of attention: ‘On Attention: A Performance Philosophy Workshop’. The event resonated with and addressed how we pay attention to each other – how do we share practices and across practices? How do interdisciplinary approaches make spaces for the multiple threads that different practices offer an idea?

I wrote a reflection on this event for the whole post please click this Link

Feb

2022

joyful ballet class music

Music

This is the music Brittany Padilla worked with me to create for ballet at TWU. Brittany plays live for the class her she has recorded them so students can practice with the same atmosphere as the class. We are using protest songs. Some tempos etc have been adapted in order to fit the ballet class they go along with.

plies

tendu

dégagé

frappe

fondue

grand battement

center practice

faster pirouette

adagio

slower pirouette

petit allegro

grand allegro

plies

tendu

dégagé

frappe

fondue

grand battement

center practice

faster pirouette

adagio

slower pirouette

petit allegro

grand allegro

Aug

2021

first thoughts

Welcome to Reflections: my space for ideas, thoughts, works in progress – a blog for sharing and airing general and/or specific contemplations, considerations and speculations…