The Place announces Choreodrome 2023 artists

This summer, The Place, London’s leading centre for dance and performance, welcomes the 2023 cohort of Choreodrome artists to its building.

Choreodrome is one of the most important dance development programmes in the UK, enabling artists to explore new territories and have access to tailored support. It’s part of The Place’s range of development opportunities designed to nurture talent and facilitate the growth of independent artists’ creativity and sustainability.

Speaking of the programme, Eddie Nixon Artistic Director of The Place says: “Creating something new and surprising takes time and resources. Choreodrome is where we make room for artists to explore their ideas without any pressure to arrive at answers. It’s a place for choreographers to discover the right questions.”

This year, The Place is launching two new partnerships with East London Dance, who will be hosting the Hip Hop residency, and with AΦE (AE), a Kent based dance company founded by Aoi Nakamura and Esteban Lecoq who will be hosting a VR residency in their studio in Chatham. Lydia Cottrell will be developing an immersive, digital experience during the VR residency, and Lula Mebrahtu and Chaldon Williams will work with East London Dance to develop ideas rooted in hip hop and street dance.

Commenting on the partnership, Aoi & Esteban say: “We are delighted to partner with The Place to host the VR residency for Choreodrome, where we started our journey of making ourselves. Use of digital tools is becoming more popular, yet it is challenging for the choreographers to fully integrate into the performance. We are excited for Lydia’s idea and look forward to support her project and strengthen the bond of digital and dance.”

Kate Scanlan, Joint Creative Director and Chief Executive at East London Dance says: “We’re delighted to be working in partnership with The Place on Choreodrome in order to create more opportunities for Hip Hop artists to create the work they want to share with the world, by offering dedicated studio time and producer support to help them to explore their ideas.”

To all Choreodrome artists, The Place offers a package of support which includes:

• 1-2 weeks of studio time
• Two producing support meetings
• Creative feedback
• Networking and introduction opportunities for new partners

The artists who were awarded this year’s Choreodrome Research Residencies are:

Louise Ahl – a UK-based choreographer and performer originally from Sweden, making solo and collaborative multi-art-form performance and installation work using movement, vocals, writing and sound. Louise will be working on Skunk without k is Sun, a scented solo opera, working with audio description as operatic sung material.

J Neve Harrington – prioritises explorations around access, play, agency, confrontation by times/scales beyond the human and neurodivergent information processing. FIVES will be a new work for young audiences exploring the ways we can show and ask for affection based on the 5 love languages of gifting, words of affirmation, acts of service, quality time and touch combined with the 5 primary senses: touch, sight, sound, smell and taste.

Simeon Qysea – award winning film writer, director, choreographer & founder of BirdGang Ltd. will be exploring techno music’s relation to Detroit and the black, working and middle class experience, inspired by Jenn Nikuru’s ‘Black to Techno’,

Bakani Pick-Up – Zimbawean born Yorkshire based Choreographer & Improvisation Practitioner, will research the discourse of the Black Dancing body, exploring how improvisation contextualises Blackness – how autonomy may be exercised through performance.

Neus Gil Cortes – dancer with Hofesh Shechter, NDCWales and Dance Works Rotterdam, formed Nua Dance in 2015 and has worked in circus, theatre TV and film. Their Choreodrome work will use optical illusions to question perceived realities and prove our bias, shaking our expectations.

Lydia Cottrell – a Leeds-based artist creating multi-disciplinary performance that interrogates culture and technology. As part of the VR residency she will be developing an immersive, digital experience of “Brightside”, a part dance theatre part spin class performance, that explores the modern condition and the millennial psyche.

Ching Ying Chien – dancer and choreographer from Taiwan, won a National Dance Award for her performance in Until the Lions by Akram Khan Company. Her latest choreography work, Vulture, was performed at the Lilian Baylis Studio and has also been selected as one of 20 pieces in Aerowaves 2023. She will use her residency to research the nature of dream states/humor/the abstract and surrealism, exploring physical elasticity, tension and release in both mental and physical ways.

Seke Chimutengwende –choreographer, performer, movement director and teacher. He is currently working as a performer with Forced Entertainment and teaching improvisation and choreography at London Contemporary Dance School. Seke is researching a quartet exploring the tension between the desire for change and the desire for permanence using choreographic scores.

Chaldon Williams – multi disciplined artist who creates intricate and unique work, and has worked with brands and artists such as Nike, Adidas and Beyonce. His Choreodrome project is based on black royalty and UK culture, touching on men’s mental health, relationships and spirituality.

Lula Mebrahtu – aka LULA.XYZ is a multidisciplinary artist at the intersection of art, music and tech. She is working on a modular series about first generation imMigrant Lula Berhane as she navigates the duality of two cultures, her Habesha (Eritrean/Ethiopian) heritage and British identity. OommoO (an acronym for One-of–many-many-of-One) interweaves language and customs with innovative HighTech storytelling tools; it unpacks life through an Afro-Futuristic East African lens. Lula is an early adopter and pioneering practitioner of the MiMu Gloves (midi-gestural-controller).

Louise Orwin – award-winning multidisciplinary artist making provocative, political, pop-culture-infused performance projects across text, performance and video. FAMEHUNGRY is a show about fame, the future and the sneaking suspicion that social media is distracting us from the apocalypse. Working alongside TikTok stars, the show explores the attention economy, what it’s like to be the star of your own perpetual broadcast, and what one fame-hungry performance artist can learn from fame-hungry TikTokkers about the future

Esme Benjamin (KWAM Collective) – movement artist, somatic practitioner and Co-Director of KWAM Collective, a group of independent artists from the fields of dance theatre, live performance, digital art and therapeutic bodily practices. Esme has a deep interest in the relationship between body, language and liberation which combined with KWAM’s research into the body, its place in society, and its potential for creative expression, explores a methodology that challenges hierarchical structures.

Ella Tighe – Bradford based dancer, maker, teacher, and mentor, who started out as a Disco Freestyle dancer before a contemporary dance, improvisation & somatic based training. Disco Queen is an autobiographical dance theatre work that delves into the world of Freestyle Dancing.

Sababa Co. (Bar Groisman) – a contemporary dance theatre company creating physical and theatrical dance works that push the boundaries between movement, text, music, and set. They will use Choredrome to continue researching ‘Coiled Up’, a new contemporary dance theatre work exploring the reality of having a womb.

More information about the artists at The Place can be found here: theplace.org.uk/choreodrome-artists-2023-2