I have been dancing as a central and professional, part of my life for around 40 years. I have been teaching, performing and creating internationally for many years.

I am based in Derry in Northern Ireland where I am the artistic director of Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company. The company creates a wide programme of productions, touring, participation projects, classes, workshops and artistic collaborations. We work with a wide range of people including all ages from babies to old folk and those with all kinds of disability as well as with experienced and professional dancers and other performing artists. Part of our programme takes place in our own studios on Derry’s historic city walls. The rest involves various forms of outreach into different local, national and international communities.

 My family moved to Northern Ireland from England when I was 12 and I grew up there in the 1970’s. It was a turbulent time, with ever present political tension and violence, even in the relatively quiet area that I lived in. I left after school to study in England. I got a degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics from Oxford University, but by the time I finished there my life had become devoted to movement and dance. I spent three years in full time study to be a teacher of The Alexander Technique. I’ve been a certified teacher of The Alexander Technique since 1987.

After creating companies and projects in both England and Netherlands I set up Echo Echo Dance Theatre Company, in Amsterdam, with Swiss dance artist Ursula Laeubli in 1991. We created performances and projects all over Europe, particularly in the countries of post-communist Eastern Europe. We moved the company to Derry in 1997, near the beginning of a “peace process” that has now been going on for over 25 years. Ursula died in 2011 and I have been the artistic director of the company on my own since then.

My work is concerned with proposing an alternative to both the hyper-objectivising attitude typical of much dance training and to the hyper-subjectivizing attitude typical of somatic alternatives to it.

In one form “the body” as an object, a machine, an instrument, or a tool, is at the centre of the conception of what we do when we dance. In the other “the body” as a location of private subjective experience is at the centre. The second is often a sort of understandable reaction to the inhumanity of the first.

I see dancing differently, from another perspective, outside of this dichotomy.

Briefly:

• I think people dance, not bodies.
• I propose that dancing is real movement in real space and real-time engaged in with poetic intent. It can’t be reduced to feeling, sensation, idea or physical function.
• A dance wants to make sense, in the world, between people. Dancing, in it’s very nature, wants to be seen, to be “read”, just as a poem wants to be read or a piece of music wants to be heard.
• The intent should be to take armour off, not put it on in either it’s hard, aggressive, athletic, form or it’s soft,defensive, absorbent, form. 
• The seed of dancing is in the universal human tendency to be poetic in movement, just as the seeds of poetry are in our everyday language. Dancing is the extension of this tendency as poetry is the extension of our poetic tendency in language.
• The compositional sense, in movement as elsewhere, is intuitive, organic and natural, but so is the desire to educate, refine, tune that intuition through disciplined forms of practice.
• Being in the moment always involves a deep relationship with past and future – memory and imagination.
• Improvisation and composition are more like two perspectives on any phenomenon rather than two different things to “do”.

In my movement practice, as artist and teacher, I explore the way that conceptual and practical analytical processes are embraced by, and influence, the intuitive creative impulse to compose. The intuition suggests analytical processes and welcomes the results of them back into itself. I’m exploring presence, space and time through (among other things) explorations of tonus, effort, addressing levels, disposition, vertical journeys, proximity, meter, pulse, rhythm, phrasing. I think my dancing is more deeply influenced by literature and by music and theatre theory and practice than by the theory and practice of concert/art dance. However, the dance work that has deeply moved me includes Goldberg Variations by Steve Paxton, PART by Lisa Nelson and Steve Paxton, admiring La Argentina by Kazuo Ohno, 1980 by Pina Bausch and Wuppertal Dance Theatre, and the original production of Set and Reset by Trisha Browne. I also love the dancing in the films of Fred Astaire. Recently I’ve become very interested in Irish Traditional Dance where it exists outside a competitive framework”.