- Clee, May 2021

In joining Third Bite Dance, I didn’t really know what I was letting myself in for, but I was curious about the initial project, learning how to develop and devise movement, and the filmmaking process. As an artist, I’ve been experimenting with dance and movement within my own sculptural practice for the last few years, though feeling mainly at sea. I saw this as an opportunity to challenge my performance fears and to become part of a new collaboration.

The developing film content involved a to-ing and fro-ing during the devising process – we threw work between ourselves, each time it being changed or refined, emerging into a piece that belonged to us all. We generated movement from words, we moved, we wrote again. My piece was based on my arrangement of other people’s prose, overlaid with my own meaning in the dance, before letting the words go - a sort of morphing between me and the group from my perspective.

A favourite session included working with the virtual contents of someone else’s room. I’m familiar with moving my body around spatial objects and I easily got into my flow. Lucy’s fond description of us in this task as ‘waning roboticists’ (from a line in a group member’s writing) was not what I imagined for my dance style! But watching the recording, the comical picture inspired me to create a stop-motion animation of my dance - trying not to always take myself too seriously, though preferring to think of myself as ‘Unwaning’:

The filming days were a joy, meeting everyone in the flesh - again or for the first time - and Aaron was both unobtrusive and facilitative with his filming. I’m glad to have cut my teeth with such a great team throughout the project, and I’m looking forward to benefiting from what I now know for the next one.

My biggest challenge throughout was about tempering my performance fears and I was reminded of the same vulnerability nearly three decades ago when I began exhibiting art. Is the work saying what I want? What do people think of it? Am I making a fool of myself? Just because I joined a performance company doesn’t mean I’m not terrified. But I’m repeatedly drawn to use my body to express my art and, in this project, to visibilise older bodies moving – eek!