The Dance Collector: Stories about people who can dance, people who aren't me.

Abstract

The project is an ongoing exploration into the process of sharing memories, anecdotes and dance moves as a means of bringing communities together and engendering the possibilities for richer immersive performance experiences.
Through the process of gathering, documenting and responding to these garnered evocations, my research considers the shifting levels of audience engagement and participation and the significance of site and location. As an integral part of this participatory art project, I adopt the role of the ‘Dance Collector’: I will try to learn your moves and will teach you mine. I cannot dance, but you can watch me try.
I am particularly interested in documenting and performatively curating the experience of people whose reflections on special first meetings or of falling in love are accompanied by the excitement of dance movement. I seek to elicit memories of the intimacy, excitement, exhilaration of those dances at weddings, school discos, village halls and football stands. I want to collect these instances of social dance, interweaving them into an ongoing processual performance that transforms the testimony of others into an embodied archive.
The work shown here has evolved through interactions and residencies that have taken place at various community settings including: Crewe Community Centre, Hunt & Darton’s Café (Manchester & Preston), Preston Market and The Birley Studios in Preston.