MOVERS SHAKERS MAKERS

Anders  Duckworth is a British/Swedish choreographer. With training in both design and dance, their work blurs movement, fashion and visual arts. Constantly seeking new collaborations, they have choreographed for short film, installations, and theatrical pieces.  Anders was selected as a Work Place Artist at The Place in London until 2026.

In this interview, Anders and Emma talk about their new piece, Mapping Gender, how to rehearse in an 18th century dress, working with an olfactory artist and why it's impossible for a map to be unbiased.

Mapping Gender  premieres at London's The Place on 28 September, 2022, and will tour to Cambridge Junctions and Worthing Theatres and Museum.

www.andersduckworth.com

Jerry Brotton's A History of the World in Twelve Maps

The dress from the V&A collection.


The 3 Questions...

Piece that changed everything?
Hussein Chalayan ready to wear, fall, 2000

Piece that you don’t like but think has value?
'Whaam!', Roy Lichtenstein (1963)

Who/what should we know about that we may not?
Maresa von Stockert, Alethia Antonia, Elinor Lewis (and her company Plue).

Nicholas Thayer is a London-born, Netherlands-based composer, producer and inter-disciplinary artist.  His electronic and new classical work has been composed for dance pieces, gallery installations and site specific work.

He and Emma discuss Entropy, a lockdown collaboration for Ballet Zurich that has finally been performed live on stage and the album it lead to: Tetramer, out now. They also talk about  adolescent musical tastes, how Glenn Gould revolutionised the recording studio and that time Mötley Crüe's Tommy Lee sent Nicholas an email...

 The 3 Questions...

Was there a piece of art that changed everything for you? 

'Appetite for Destruction', Guns‘n Roses, 

Was there a piece of art that you think has value but don’t necessarily like?

N/A! If he thinks a piece of art has value, he must therefore like it.

What/who should we check out that we may not know about?... 

The documentary film Sisters with Transistors

Thoughts and lectures of Brian Eno

The work of Ryoji Ikeda

Yann Seabra is a stage designer whose work has been sought after by companies such as The Royal Opera House, San Francisco Ballet, Circa, Ballet Black and Protein Dance company.

He and Emma discuss the tutu he designed with 5000 Swarovski crystals on it for Cira Robinson, why he loves a 70s silhouette, his long time collaboration with choreographer Arthur Pita and his new work for Mthuthuzeli November's piece Wailers at Northern Ballet.

www.yannseabra.com

The 3 Questions...

Was there a piece of art that changed everything for you? 

Alternative Miss World 

Was there a piece of art that you think has value but don’t necessarily like? 

Tate Modern: Surrealism Beyond Borders

What/who should we check out that we may not know about?... 

Dmitri Papapganos and  Katrin Brach 

Alesandra Seutin is an award-winning multidisciplinary performance artist and choreographer who works internationally between Senegal, Belgium and the UK. She leads two international touring dance performance companies: Vocab Dance which she founded 2007 and she is also Co-Artistic Director of the famed École des Sables. Alesandra is an artistic advisor at Sadler’s Wells, where she is also Guest Artistic Director of National Youth Dance Company (NYDC) for the second year running. In 2022 she worked with the young dancers of the current NYDC cohort to create a new show Quartier Paradis. 

In this episode host Emma Lister and she discuss the vital ways movement can be influenced by voice, new dance hierarchies, how French magical realist film, Night of Kings, part inspired her piece for NYDC…and the relevancy of Eurovision Song Contest! 

The 3 Questions...

Was there a piece of art that changed everything for you? 

Dakar Biennale 

Was there a piece of art that you think has value but don’t necessarily like?

Eurotrash pop music

What/who should we check out that we may not know about?... 

 Dushime music maker/actor

Amapiano

Last week’s episode circled around the taboo of motherhood in the dance world, the lack of a full time company in Ireland and the question of why there is comparatively so many women making dance work in Ireland. We’ll be following up and expanding on all these topics in this week’s episode. 

In this series we’ll be interviewing Irish women making dance in a virtual roundtable with MOSHMA host Emma Lister and her regular cohost Zoë Ashe-Browne, winner of the Constance Markievicz Award, 2021.

Ep 3 - Roundtable part 2, Liz Roche, Liv O'Donoghue, Sibéal Davitt

This mini series has been made possible by support from the Arts Council Ireland on behalf of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

REFERENCES

Dance Data Project statistics
NYTimes profile of DDP found Elizabeth Yntema

What do you think of when you think of Ireland? The Emerald Isle, Guinness, Oscar Wilde and Riverdance? What about women making dance? Because this tiny island turns out loads of them--just over 80% of recent dance bursary awardees were for women making work. In a time when the dance world is confronting the predominance of men in roles of leadership, what is Ireland getting right? Is it ahead of the curve?

But where are these makers to go? Ireland does not have one permanent dance company...lots to discuss here!

Over three episodes we’ll be interviewing Irish women making dance in a virtual roundtable with host Emma Lister and her regular cohost Zoë Ashe-Browne, winner of the Constance Markievicz Award, 2021.

Roundtable part 1: Marguerite Donlon, Sarah Reynolds, Roisin Whelan

This mini series has been made possible by support from the Arts Council Ireland on behalf of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

REFERENCES

Dance Data Project Statistics

Gender pay gap in Ireland in the Irish Times
and also here in RTE

Ahead of our first roundtable discussion with six women making dance in Ireland, Emma Lister and cohost Zoë Ashe-Browne give a (tiny) bit of Irish history and pose the driving question of this new mini series: In a time when the conversation in dance often turns to the predominance of men in roles of leadership, why are there so many women choreographing  in Ireland?

Zoë Ashe-Browne  is the winner of the Markievicz Award 2021.

This mini series has been made possible by support from the Arts Council Ireland on behalf of the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media.

REFERENCES
Dance Data Project census 2021

Lecture on Constance Markievicz by Prof Paseta

Dolly Brown is a photographer who specialises in documenting art and artists. She may be best known as her Instagram alterego: @londonlivingdoll. She's worked with The Royal Ballet, Barbican, Tate Modern, Trisha Brown Dance Company, BalletBoyz, Mark Morris Dance Group among many others and has exhibited in the London galleries such as Mother, Plinth, London Institute of Photography and Galerie Norbert Arns in Cologne.

We spoke about one of her favourite shots of all time, why she likes to work on the periphery of her subjects and how Instagram subverted existing power dynamics within the photography industry. 

The 3 Questions...

Is there a piece of art that changed everything or you?
James Joyce - Ulysses
Virginia Woolf - Mrs Dalloway

Is there a piece of art or artist that you don't necessarily like, but you think has value?
Wagner

Tell us about an artist that we may not know about but who we should check out.
Gregory Spears, composer
Jan Svobada, photographer

Kalle Nio is a magician and visual artist based in Finland. He is co-drector/founder of the theatre company WHS and the recipient of numerous awards including the Finnish state prize for Multidisciplinary Art and the Helsinki Cultural Prize.

In this episode he and host Emma Lister discuss Lähtö (Départ), a beautiful, uncategorizable theatre piece which he directs and performs in, as well as the connections between magic and early cinema, why Victorian magicians inspire him most and his 2016 piece, Cutting Edge.

Kalle is another interview in our artist chain after having been nominated by Adrian Berry in the previous episode!

Kallenio.com

Lähtö  trailer
Cutting Edge trailer

The 3 questions...

Was there a piece of art that changed everything for you?
Philippe Genty's Dédale

Was there a piece of art that you didn't like but that you think has value?
Xavier Le Roy's Untitled

Who should the listeners know about who they may not?
Tin Grabnar, theatre director of Somewhere Else

In the final episode of our three part miniseries, we zoom in to meet three dancers. They are all at different stages of their careers and their lives have been affected in different ways by the pandemic:

GEAROID: 18 months into his professional career he is leaving his company job in Zurich. But, with the pandemic looming it is not the ideal time to go job hunting…

TIA: A mid career freelancer, Tia is days away from opening night of AWDC performance at Sadler’s Wells when the UK gets its stay at home orders…

MINTY: At a point in her career where she is dancing her dream roles, Minty can’t shake the feeling that there’s  another direction she should explore. Then Covid hit…

In this episode we will also zoom out, looking at the larger picture of how dancers, whose performing years are so limited, have had their careers particularly altered by the pandemic.

REFERENCES:

Theresa Ruth Howard, companies sending dance floor to dancers in their homes, humanizes dancers.

Freelancers Make Theatre Work analysis of challenges faced by performing arts sector freelancers

NYTimes reports on artists losing health care coverage from unions

NYTimes says 35 is average retirement age for dancers