Knotty Stories is my primary project, using unusual and custom-made sets and apparatus to weave tales that defy gravity, and create images unlike any other. Drawing on my skills in movement, theatre and lighting I create portable miniature worlds that can be shared in a range of environments and not be tethered to a theatre. In fact, tethering is not really part of the game. I like my stories to fly!
Knotty Stories is a collection of 30 – 40 minute works of aerial storytelling that can be performed as stand-alone pieces or in pairs to create a full length show with a short interval. The sets are designed to be used in non-traditional performance spaces such as village halls, barns, churches, or outdoors.
Dreamcatcher
An aerial hoop becomes a web trapping the imaginings of the restless.
Created during lock-down (UK 2020), this piece reimagined the aerial hoop at a low height using elasticated webbing. Drawing on a sense of uncertainty, restlessness and entrapment this short film presents a fantastical imagining of the covid-limited-aerialist.
5 Seconds
2023
A game of consequences.
Over the period of a month I recorded 5 seconds of movement on dance trapeze, each day adding on to what had gone before. With no plan, no pathway and no expectations, the result is an honest account of a creative aerial practice – the good days, the bad days, the days that are inspired, spinny, faffy, full of fatigue or just plain silly.
When in Knots …
2023
A performance of entanglement.
This 20 minute aerial fabric work explores the relationships between knots, entanglement, and creative exploration.
Drawing on the new materialist ideas of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway, as well as the anthropological perspectives and meanderings of Tim Ingold, this performance offers a tactile and visual representation of the process of research and creative exploration.
“It matters what knots knot knots, and it matters how I knot knots.”
Photography by Mike B Designs.
FILAMENT
2023
This short film reimagines a 2022 live work using dance trapeze and head torch.
“In search of balance, electricity seeks the path of least resistance”
Photography & Filming by Mike B Designs