Meet our first Dance Diagonal resident artist

SED: Can you tell us a bit about your practice please Sarah?

SH: Yes, my practice is informed by Somatics, Authentic Movement, disability dance, ecological movement, body focusing, live art, my training in contemporary performance, and ideas around ‘cripping’ choreography. 

I make solo, collaborative and participatory choreographic performances, often working with diverse collaborators including children and adults, trained and non-trained dancers, disabled and non-disabled performers, artists from different disciplines, and materials/objects. 

I approach choreography and performance-making as a way to ask questions in response to both my lived experiences and wider issues, and as a practice of being in the unknown and the complexities of those questions. 

SED: Your practice is underpinned by crip politics. Can you explain what you mean by that?

SH: Crip politics approaches disability as a valid and valuable way of life. I use the term 'crip' in a similar way to other disabled activist-artists: a political approach that embraces and celebrates disabled bodies as knowledgeable and skilful. 

I create dance and performance to challenge narratives of disability as tragedy, dejection, and victim. My artistic approach is also philosophically based in ecological thinking that acknowledges human's unavoidable entanglements in nonhuman life (this was the focus of my practice-led PhD). 

My intention is to practice a crip politics and ecological philosophy through how and what I create. As a researcher, I regularly publish across ecological performance and disability dance.

SED: Where might we have seen your work being performed?

SH: I've toured my work nationally and internationally, including to Made In Scotland, Dance Base, Summerhall, Tramway, The Place, Roundhouse, Battersea Arts Centre, ArtFart (Iceland), and Festival Quartier Danses (Canada). 

SED: What are your plans for your Dance Diagonal residency here at The Dance Space?

SH: I will begin work on a new performance project about the connections between chronic pain and ecological pain. By exploring and developing my approach to movement that embraces the limits and possibilities of my chronic pain body, I will explore what living in a damaged body can reveal about living on a damaged planet.

I am asking: What do choreographic practices that care for chronic pain bodies, reveal about the wider choreography of caring about ecology?

Find out more about Sarah's work at www.sarahhopfinger.org.uk