Research Dialogue

LIVE EDITIONS includes a behind-the-scenes research strand involving four artists which provides paid, albeit limited, time for the artists and programme director/curator to meet, share thoughts, go on site visits and explore project ideas that require more resourcing and co-presenting partnerships than are viable in the first year of public programming.

These aren’t commissions but opportunities for peer dialogue and exploration—spaces to imagine and consider the shape projects could take, and how and where they might meet audiences - the kind of exchanges that are vital and happen all the time before projects are developed and fully realised but which mostly go both under the radar and unpaid on the freelancer’s side.

I’m delighted to be working in this exploratory and open-ended way with artists Jean Abreu & Michael Johnson, Claudia Kappenberg, and Anna Maria Nabirye as well as Margarita Zafrilla-Olayo in summer and autumn 2026.

Margarita and I will be meeting up to figure out how – and in what form – her work TiLTING VERTICALITIES might manifest in Eastbourne. TiLTING VERTICALITIES nurtures and expands a collective embodied holding—a choreographic space, process, and immersive experience which explores notions of grounding, interdependence, tension, rest, subtle movement, care, peace and support. It involves a simple ‘score’, or instruction, which is to experiment with moving within a large loop of stretch fabric with another person.

Held and supported by the fabric, this work becomes about communicating through movement itself – how to stand, how to balance and how to play with structural tension, inclinations and orientations, moving and being moved in direct relation to each other and sharing ground. For those watching, the work offers sculptural and poignant images as the participants negotiate interdependence, cooperation, harmony, affect, change, anchoring and support.

TiLTING VERTICALITIES has been presented in spaces across Europe including 58th Venice Art Biennale, Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome, Tate Britain Archive, Bauhaus University Weimar, The School of Hope Margate, Sutton STEAMs Ahead & London Cancer Hub, and Independent Dance’s International Festival of Learning (2021), London.