Movement has always been a big part of my life. According to my mum it starts with walking at 10months and then not ever sitting still since. We would walk everywhere as we didn’t have a car - helping carry the shopping, buying sandwiches and going for picnics, and getting lost on the North Yorkshire Moors. This would be punctuated with dancing in the kitchen and singing along to Gloria Estefan discovering the difference between merengue and salsa. Eventually my fairy godmother (we all have one) would gift me with classes in ballet and tap going with her daughter and we’d perform with blue eyeliner on in the small church hall. As a teenager I would add acro and jazz to that repertoire of dance classes and daydream of a future in dance. This would not happen because of my knees: a perfect storm of bad dance training and genetic hyper-mobility. The Dr advised against training to be a dancer but was encouraging when I asked about whether my body could handle being a choreographer. During this time I had physio, retrained how I walked and started dabbling in pilates and yoga.
Alongside my love of dance is a love of theatre that comes more from reading about the theatre in Noel Streatfeild’s books (my favourite is Dancing Shoes) than actually seeing performances live. Her books inspired me to attempt to learn more about Shakespeare and Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare was where I learned most of the plots of his plays. At college books would be where I would discover different approaches to acting and making theatre the books on Laban and Lecoq would inspire me to explore how to bring my movement practices to my approach to acting. This inquisitiveness would carry me through my time at the University of Glasgow encountering different performance theories and analysis whilst discovering new movement practices like capoeira and contact improvisation.
My major steps towards movement direction were performing with Seadog Theatre on Sea of Stories (2013) helping create the physicality of the sea creatures through playing with how they moved and related to each other and choreographing Freya’s journey to the underworld. Not long after I would start working towards my 200Hrs Yoga Teacher Training certificate with Abby Hoffmann Yoga. There was something in these two experiences I wanted to explore further and so I applied for the MA Movement: Directing and Teaching course at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Doing the course at Central allowed me to dedicate time and space to ask questions of my practice and to think about how to be able to approach and shape actor movement.
Each project I work on is a new chance to explore, play and share the joy of movement.
Sea of Stories (2013)
Photo Ele Slade