Souvenir (2020) was directed via audio-recordings sent to an intergenerational group of twelve independent dance artists who were geographically dispersed across the UK and in one case in Portugal, during the March -September 2020, UK-wide Covid 19 lockdown.

Each audio-recording delivered an improvisational score that guided dancers into a specific approach to exploring an outdoor location that they had themselves, selected. The scores guided them through tasks that aimed to cultivate an interior/exterior landscape dialogue that, for example in audio-one, directed the dancers in tuning their awareness to the feeling quality of moving in a reciprocal relationship with the movement of traffic or passers-by.

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At intermittent points in each audio, the dancers were asked to capture sections of their dancing on video that they subsequently sent to me, the choreographer, in order to release the next set of instructions. Once I had received this material from all the participants, I edited it into one of four films that as a collection, make-up the site-based screen dance work, Souvenir.

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The use of audio-recordings to direct Souvenir shifted the focus of my practice to processes that engendered and supported dancers in discovering their own agency in relation to outdoor spaces. By responding to the demands of the Covid 19 lockdown, working in this way at the time enabled a wide participatory group and made good use of opportunities provided by disruptions in normal routines of living to engage dancers in a project that investigated alternative ways of being with the exterior landscape.  Furthermore, the structure of the project reflected my interest in choreographing body-site reciprocities wherein human/space relations are de-hierarchised (Kloetzel, 2014) and human-centric perspectives decentred to reveal dancing as a dialogue between phenomena.

This established correspondences (Ingold, 2013) in choreographic forms that aimed to bring dancing into a dynamic and on-going negotiation or dialogue, with the sites visited. The intention underpinning this approach, was to generate situations that enabled phenomenologically inspired explorations into how to articulate and capture multiple perspectives and a body-space coequality (Massey, 2005).

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Professional film works by Becky Edmunds (2009), Charlotte Prodger (2019), and Chris Maeker (1983) informed my practice for Souvenir, whilst writing by Karen Pearlman (2009) on editing as an empathetic process that embodies the rhythm, time and atmosphere of the material being cut, inspired me to consider the documentation captured by the dancers through both a phenomenological lens and as a souvenir of a particular time and place. The resulting videos compose the dancers body-site encounters as an interior/exterior landscape dialogue.

The Souvenir films premiered at the University of Chichester (September, 2020), and have been show at Depot cinema, Lewes, Sussex (June, 2021), Body IQ , Berlin (November, 2021), and at the Dance and Somatic Practices Conference, University of Coventry (July, 2023).