The invitation across this week from Yewande 103, is to hold one another in our watching and our changing. To allow the detail of dancing, the hum and thud of heartbeats, the gentle transformations and development of constellations both bodily and cosmic.
Drawing from the company’s new work ‘Many Lifetimes’, Yewande 103 founder – Alexandrina Yewande Hemsley, has invited the dance collaborators currently involved in the creative process to share elements from their own practices across this week. Central enquiries include into change, loss and bearing witness.
Each class will be relaxed in nature. Participants can come and go as they need and there will be places to sit, pause and rest within the roof studio.
Please bring writing materials, for example a notebook, tablet, voice memo tech etc.
Monday 17th March – Alexandrina Yewande Hemsley
Tuesday 18th March – Rudzani Moleya
Wednesday 19th March – Rickay Hewitt-Martin and Greta Mendez
Thursday 20th March – Alice Tatge
Friday 21st March – Pierre Babbage
Access
Independent Dance is resident at Siobhan Davies Studios. To find out more about accessibility and the amenities available within the building please see here.
If you have any questions about the accessibility of our programme and would like to discuss any specific access requirements, please feel free to reach out to us via email info@independentdance.co.uk or by phone on 0207 091 9665, to speak directly to a member of the Independent Dance team. Alternatively, you may phone the main reception at Siobhan Davies Studios on 0207 091 9650.
During class, all participants are welcome to take breaks, observe, exit and enter the space as they wish. Lounge areas are available on the first and ground floors of the building. Yoga mats, blocks, cushions and ear defenders are available for use. We also welcome you being in contact if you would like to discuss the option of bringing your access support worker. Please speak to a member of the ID team if you require any assistance.
Cancellations and refunds
Prices for classes are kept very low and are subsidised by ID in order to support artists to attend. To keep admin manageable for our small team, we don’t offer refunds if you cancel or can’t attend a class, and we can’t transfer your booking to a different class/event. We hope this is understandable. If a class is cancelled or changed by ID however, we do offer refunds/transfers to everyone who has booked.
Founder Alexandrina Hemsley (she/they) started Yewande 103 in 2020 as a container for their established creative practice and to formalise and expand their values of care, support and connection.
Yewande is Alexandrina’s middle name. It means, ‘mother has returned’. There is a tender determination and commitment to both uphold and further understand intergenerational, cyclical patterns of expression and repair. The company’s ethos blooms around an evolving central question of how to return to intimacy within continual, systemic harms.
Through the connective tissues of dance, writing, film, collage and poetry, Yewande 103 enables Alexandrina to resource, process, explore, share and advocate for multiple ways of embodied being. She sees her company as a canopy under which lived experience is the guide for making. There is an interdisciplinary approach that underpins what she creates, be that performances, texts, workshops or other holding spaces. Hers is a lifelong work, forever shaped by profound processing and the seeking out of reparative, embodied alternatives after/alongside violences of racism, misogyny, inadequate care and institutional failings of arts and healthcare sectors.
Alexandrina works in close partnership with Producer’s Nancy May Roberts & Elsabet Yonas, Metal & Water, reflecting the sensibilities of our overlapping practices. We are driven to enliven choreographic spaces, develop discourse and create atmospheres for movement based, access-led practice across dance, arts and mental health.
Pierre (they/them) is a dance artist and movement director based in London. Working around themes of queer history and ancestry, rejection, sexualization and hope. Their practice focuses on dance, using movement to explore these themes, questions and experiences. They implore elements of contemporary dance, Paraguayan dance and their own movement language.
Influenced by poetry, surrealism, 00’s action movies and old diary entries. Their work has been shown across the UK, including presentations at the ICA, V&A Lates, Somerset House, Wellcome Collection Reading Room, The Yard, CCA Goldsmiths Gallery, Ugly Duck & The Place.
They have established a performance practice collaborating, sharing knowledge and performing for international artists Anthea Hamilton, Adham Faramawy, Ava Kouchak, Jose Funnell, Sam Williams, Wet Mess, Zoë Marden. They co-curate queer dance platform + party MIND UR HEAD.
Rickay is a Midlands based dance artist and a recent graduate therapist (DMP). And the founder of Vehdance and movement, which is a contemporary dance company based in Derby. Her training began with ACE Dance and Music youth company and was a student on the CAT programme. She then went on to study at Northern School of Contemporary Dance where she gained a first-class (BAHons) degree in 2021. Rickae continued her studies and completed a Masters degree in Dance Movement Psychotherapy 2023. She is a dancer for Yewande103 company since 2021. And is an inclusive dance practitioner/ support artist in the East-Midlands, working for SENSE and Impaca cic.
Rudzani Moleya (she/they) is a multi/interdisciplinary performing artist, movement director and facilitator from South Africa. She graduated from the Cape Academy of Performing Arts , with a distinction and has been working as a freelance artist since.
Layered in her practice is how we define identity, in relation to self and others. Other, in relation to people, objects and nature. She uses movement, which is informed by water, somatics and improvisational movement. Rudzani is in currently exploring the body as a living archive and how movement can be used as a porthole for healing.
Alice Tatge is a choreographer, dancer and live-artist working in the field of combined arts since 2004.
Of Italian-American and Eastern European descent, Alice moved to the UK from Italy in 2001.
Her practice is deeply rooted in her ongoing investigation of sense perception via a plethora of multimedia disciplines, somatic practices and dance techniques, exploring the politics of the body, questions of gender and cultural identity.
Her work has been exhibited at Hayward Gallery, Southbank, Tate Modern, Barbican, ICA, London U.K., as well as internationally across Europe and the US. Artists she has collaborated with include: Tino Sehgal, Meg Stuart, Xavier Le Roy, Mårten Spångberg, Project O, Lundahl & Seitl, Serafine 1369, Punchdrunk, Dazzle1919.
Trinidadian-born Mendez is a veteran in the arts. She has worked as a dancer, choreographer, theatre director, performance art artist, tutor, carnivalist and filmmaker. As a performance artist, Greta has performed on the streets of Delhi, Kashmir, Yunnan province in China, her creative teaching has taken her to Italy, Greece, China, Los Angeles. Her prize-winning films Kashmir’s Ophelia and Ah! Hard Rain, have been screened internationally. Mendez has created prize-winning Carnival bands for Notting Hill Carnival. Artistic Director of MAAS Movers, Movement Director on plays from Shakespeare to Soyinka.