![Romany Dear smiling and in mid laugh. She holds a pen in her right hand and wears a black t-shirt.]](https://independentdance.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/x-1-artist-profile-image-headshot-vanessa-marino-2024-683x1024.jpg)
Romany Dear is an interdisciplinary artist, body-based practitioner, researcher and educator, who defines her practice as a ‘spilling’. Romany is also the Co-Director of a temporary MA programme, Monstrous Futurities: Practices of (un)learning, (un )doing and (un)making, at The Sandberg Institution (Amsterdam). The programme engages with situated and speculative transdisciplinary practices that focus on process-led, embodied learning that centres collectivity, access and crip temporalities within education.
This workshop draws on Romany’s work – Constellations of Together-mess, rehearsing ways of being together across soma-erotic touching/s, telepathic proximities, queer intimacy and temporary support structures. For Romany, dance is a practice of thinking in action, a continuous responsiveness to what it means to be a body in relation to others, an ongoing practice of keeping company and of constant change.
During this workshop, you will work with configurations of threes, both as a metaphor and methodology to develop movement responses and proposals that enquire into interdependency, reciprocity and the possibilities for coexistence within movement. You will move through a series of speculative, somatic and improvisational body-based scores alongside some more conversational, word-based practices.
The workshop will run from 11am – 4.30pm (with breaks) and an informal social from 4.30pm – 5.30pm.
Then from 5.30pm – 6.30pm, Romany will invite you into a conversational and collective reading of her practice. Romany will be spilling some words around the themes of:
- Horizontal penetrations: practising pedagogies and pedagogies as practice
- Temporary Lodgings: Proposals of and for – being- together
- Constellations of together-mess: Practices for grounding, charging and connecting
In Romany’s words:
‘This workshop is aimed at all those who are curious to move and be moved – together. Departing from the knowing, that we are all experts at moving, no prior experience (other than the many lives that all our bodies have already lived) is required for this workshop. I invite participants to bring the questions that are currently keeping you company within your own practices to the workshop space. The workshop will propose some touch-based practices, as well as exercises that propose witnessing and being witnessed. Everything is an invitation, and alternative translations will always be given. Shy dancers are very welcome.’
We welcome disabled, blind/visually impaired, d/Deaf, neuro-divergent and non-disabled artists working in dance and trans-disciplinary practices to join us. If you require BSL, please let us know.
We are offering four bursary places for disabled, d/Deaf, neurodivergent participants and those with long term health conditions.
To register your interest, please email info@independentdance.co.uk by Monday 1 December. This can simply be a statement of interest and confirmation that you meet one of the bursary categories. No details or proof needed. Places will be allocated via a random lottery process and everyone who expresses interest will be informed of the outcome by Thursday 4 December.
Romany Dear (she/they) is an Irish-British interdisciplinary artist, body-based practitioner, researcher and educator. Born at the end of the 80’s in the North of the UK, under a gemini sun – Romany defines her practice as a spilling. An overflow-ing/s of words, gestures and actions that encompass speculative and critical performance practice/s, somatic-erotic touching/s, movement research, facilitation, access-led organising and experimental writing/s.
Romany has recently been working on a research and development project called, “Constellations of together-mess” through two supported residencies, at Tramway and Cove Park (Scotland). Romany also recently presented as part of “Unsettling Care and Institutional Change” at The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where Romany works as one of Co-Directors of the Masters Program: Monstrous Futurities: Practices of (un)learning, (un )doing and (un)making, at The Sandberg Institution.
Over the last 10 + years, Romany has performed and worked internationally including: with Germinal (Bolivia), The Judson Church & The Movement Research Centre (NYC), Organizmo, La Casa de Meria, La Compañía, Con Cuerpos & Mapa Teatro (Colombia), Encuentros (Brazil), Siobhan Davies Studies & The Swiss Church (London), XOXO Curatorial Projects & The Volksbuhne Theatre (Berlin) & with G.O.D.S, with The CCA, Arika, The WorkRoom, DCA & Market Gallery (Scotland). Romany has an MA in Interdisciplinary Live Arts, with major electives in Crip Feminist Theory, from the National University of Bogota, Colombia. (2021)