Bio

Inter-disciplinary artist and choreographer creating work in an expanded field that includes performance, video, writing, drawing, conversations and participatory public art. Through the choreographing of relational processes particular to each project, I aim to quieten the individual self to make way for modes of collective sensing that extend to audiences and the material world. These processes often operate through qualities of attention and perception and aim to open spaces for a quiet and radical politics of being, acting and producing together through the event of relations.

Work has been presented nationally and internationally including at Tramway Glasgow, Nottdance Festival Nottingham, Het Veem Theatre, Amsterdam; KARST Gallery, Plymouth; Konteksty International Festival of Ephemeral Art, Sokolovsko, Poland; Siobhan Davies Studio, London; Nightingale Theatre, Brighton; Art Claims Impulse Gallery, Berlin; Exeter International Short Film Festival and Drake Circus Shopping Centre, Plymouth.

Commissions include from: GIFT 2020 – MANIFESTOS from times of CRISIS; Tramway – Breath Pieces; Dance4 – Ah kissing and Gifts for the future; Siobhan Davies Dance and Independent Dance  – surface/sphere (with Katrina Brown). I’ve received funding awards from Creative Scotland, Arts Council England and Arts and Humanities Research Council.

I’ve taught extensively in education and community contexts including as Part-time Lecturer Choreography at Dartington College of Arts, Associate Lecturer Education at Plymouth University and currently as Artistic and Writing Coach on MA Choreography at COMMA with Codarts University of the Arts in Rotterdam and Fontys School of Fine and Performing Arts in Tilburg.

I gained a PhD from Middlesex University undertaken while research artist at Dance4 and previously an MA from Dartington College of Arts. The PhD draws on French philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s critique of representational thinking in western philosophy to address Dance4’s programming of European conceptual dance in their Nottdance Festival and my own choreographic practice to propose a ‘non-representational poetics’ of choreography.

A bit of background
I grew up in Glasgow as a second generation Irish immigrant, somehow got myself to Amsterdam where I trained at School for New Dance Development (SNDO), lived and presented my work in New York and then London. During this earlier period (when I was known as Liz Irvine) I was co-artistic director with Martin Coles of Mobile Image Construction and danced with Rosemary Butcher Dance Company. I later lived in Devon in the south west of England, bringing up my children, and working in education and community dance before returning to art making. I’ve trained extensively in Ki-Aikido (2nd Dan), am a qualified shiatsu practitioner and have an ongoing practice of yoga. These experiences inform my approach to making. From this background the work I make has become increasingly interdisciplinary.