Following a studio-based sharing of Last Shelter, Candoco Dance Company dancers Anna Seymour, Annie Edwards, Ben Ash, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Laura Weston, Jane Mason, Sean Murray and Artistic Director Charlotte Darbyshire, share more about how the work was created. They discuss the choreographic approach, collaborative dynamics and personal narratives that have shaped this captivating piece.
Choreographed by Jeanine Durning, Last Shelter is a performance experiment exploring the enduring human desire to build something together. Working with precise materials within variable scores, Last Shelter unfolds uniquely for each performance, ever shifting, teetering at the edge of what could be, somewhere between individual agency and collective will. With rigour and care, the dancers surrender to and grapple with time, place and fate, finding temporary balance in provisional structures and makeshift meanings.
Jeanine began her research with Candoco in much the same way she has begun most projects in the last decade, with a practice called nonstopping. At its core, nonstopping is a process of undoing through, paradoxically, nonstop doing. It works with uncensoring movement and speech as acts of freedom and imperative force and change.
This talk was part of dance it, dance it, ID’s year-long programme conceived by Heni Hale and Nikki Tomlinson which aims to support disabled, neurodivergent and d/Deaf artists as leaders. Partner organisations on different strands of the programme include Candoco Dance Company, Sadler’s Wells and Dance Umbrella. This programme is supported through public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.
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Candoco is a world-leading professional dance company. Bridging the mainstream and the experimental, our bold approach and powerful collaborations create distinctive performances and far-reaching learning experiences. We celebrate different ways of seeing, of being and of making art, putting us at the forefront of conversation around dance and disability and continually expanding perceptions of #whatdancecanbe.
Jeanine Durning is an Alpert Award winning choreographer and performer from New York whose work has been described by The New Yorker as having both “the potential for philosophical revelation and theatrical disaster.”
Durning is interested in choreography as a ways and means to mobilize questions about how our basic need for connection and communication aligns, and often misaligns, with how our thinking and feeling come to form and action. She has an ongoing practice, nonstopping, which has yielded several performance works, including her solo inging (based on nonstop speaking). She has performed inging more than 50 times across the US, in Europe and Canada. In support of project Dark Matters, Durning has received residencies at Seoul Dance Center, the Rauschenberg Foundation, MANCC, and at DNK in Sofia, Bulgaria.
Adapted from artist bios published in 2023.
