Artist Raquel Meseguer Zafe and I are carrying out studio-based collaborative research to develop dance practices by and for chronic pain bodies. Our collaboration has sprung from our individual experiences of chronic pain and a mutual interest in working creatively with pain through dance and performance.

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Link to a public talk on the research - an Exchange Talk at Royal Conservatoire of Scotland 2021.

 

I have published about our research - see Publication page for details.

 

Funded by Creative Scotland, Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and Carnegie Trust, we have carried out residencies at Trinity Centre (Bristol) and RCS to explore the tacit knowledge of chronic pain experience and how that knowledge can be translated and explored through creative practice. How do we turn towards our pain? How do we work creatively with it? What creative practices emerge when chronic pain knowledge underpins the form, structure and aesthetic of how we dance and the performances we make?

 

Raquel is a UK based dance theatre practitioner and co-artistic director of  the leading disabled dance company, Candoco Dance. She acknowledges 'crip' as an artistic tool, and 'rest' as a creative impulse. Raquel is also the artistic director of Unchartered Collective, a live art and performance company she founded to create work that explores the lived experience of chronic pain. She is also a Lost Dog Associate Artist, and a Pervasive Media Studios Resident. She advocates for a Resting Spaces Network and Horizontal

www.uncharteredcollective.com