I have just finished four weeks working with BA2 and BA3 students at the University of Stavanger. Two weeks with the third years, then two weeks with everyone together — thirty dancers in a studio. I am still processing what happened. This is a reflection, offered a little aimlessly, in the hope that something useful emerges.
Starting from anger
I came in, as I try to these days, without a fixed agenda. The approach I am developing — trying to make the creative process more democratic, more responsive, more genuinely open to what people actually bring — was shaped partly by a residency I did with Teatro al Vacio in Argentina earlier this year. I arrived there with blank arms, really, just curious about what meeting new people would make possible. I wanted to carry that forward into Stavanger.
So in the first week, I asked the BA3 students to respond to the current state of the world. Each student found their own way in. But one moment stood out. A student said she felt angry — but she did not know how to express it. That became the starting point. That unresolved feeling, sitting in the body with nowhere to go, felt like exactly the right place to begin.
We spent the first two weeks exploring what anger means physically. What does it feel like when it moves? How can we abstract it so that we can deal under management? How does it settle or erupt in different formations — a solo, a duet, a trio? Each dancer built their own material from that internal place, and what emerged was specific, grounded, real.
The sticks
The other central element I introduced was material — literally. I brought in two-metre long wooden dowels, and we started playing. What do sticks want to do? What games emerge? How do they function within a group, versus in the hands of one person? Sticks as tools for expression, for tension, for structural design, for metaphor.
"Materiality sets the tone. It allows us to move, respond, own the movement — and from owning it, to really feel it."
There is a distinction I keep returning to, between material and materiality. The object itself is one thing — something to explore, to create new relationships with. But materiality is something else: the quality, the tone, the texture of how the body inhabits movement because of the object's “voices”. The stick asked us to move in particular ways. The ways it asked turned out to be surprisingly powerful.
Managing thirty people
When the BA2 students joined in week three, the space transformed. I had never worked with thirty dancers before. It was genuinely exciting, and also — I will be honest — my mind was fully occupied with the question of how to make the process meaningful for every single person in the room, so that no one was left out, no time was wasted, and the choreographic logic remained clear.
What I had not fully anticipated was the sheer drama of thirty bodies sharing a studio. The weight of it. The emotional charge. There is something that happens when a space fills like that — it can get very physical, very quickly. I loved it. I loved the energy, the scale, the visual impact of geometric formations shifting and reforming across the floor. The drama was not incidental; it was the material.
What we made
By the end, we had a piece lasting around thirty minutes. It moved from interior states — anger, anxiety, frustration — toward something more collective, celebratory and transcending. The dramatic arc felt genuinely earned, I think, because it was built from things these young dancers had actually felt and embodied rather than performed from the outside in.
Towards the end of the piece, during a peak of geometric formation and individual solos, the sticks were raised. The gate opened. Audience members were invited into the space. And we danced together.
I love audience participation for reasons that are almost political. The training dancers receive is, rightly, designed to impress — to create an uplifting experience for the people watching. But that also creates a boundary. A hierarchy. And sometimes what feels most important is to dissolve that boundary, to bring everyone down to where the dancing actually belongs, which is to all of us. The ending became a kind of free-flowing celebration, a counterweight to the anger that had generated the whole process.
What I am taking forward
Two things became clearer for me through this residency. The first is that I really care about authenticity — about movement that is honest rather than performed, that speaks from the body rather than illustrating a concept. Any time something felt forced or artificial, I wanted to find a way back to what was true. That truthfulness matters to me as much as a unified aesthetic.
The second is something I am only beginning to articulate: the presence of my own body history in the work. Some of the scenes looked, unexpectedly, like martial art. Like Kabuki. Like something informed by moving from the Hara — the source of power just below the navel — that I grew up with in Japanese culture. I did not plan for that. It arrived through the material, through the contact work, through the attention to gravity and counterbalance.
Why not lean into that more directly? That is a question I am sitting with. The work looked Japanese in certain moments — not because I imposed it, but because it came from somewhere in the body that has always been there. Moving forward, I think I want to explore what it means to bring more of that body history consciously into the space.
The students gave me a lot. Thirty people in a room was a gift, allowing me to learn how to hold it.