Hosts
Sarah Whatley
Sarah is Professor of Dance and Director of the Centre for Dance Research (C-DaRE) at Coventry University. Her research focuses on the discourses that emerge through the body as a site of knowledge and expressive communication. Her projects and publications focus on creative reuse of digital dance content, intangible cultural heritage, inclusive dance practices and somatic dance practice and pedagogy. She is a REF panelist (D33), member of the AHRC peer review college (strategic reviewer), the Practice Research Advisory Group, and is an evaluator for the European Research Council.
Helen Weedon
Helen is a Senior Investment Manager in the Creative Industries Team with the Arts and Humanities Research Council. She has over 30 years’ experience in the arts and cultural sector across a range of public sector roles embracing festivals, theatres, museums and galleries. Helen began her career teaching dance and performing arts in the state education system and has remained a passionate advocate for the value of academic dance study and research.
Curators
Kate Marsh
Kate Marsh is a disabled dance artist with over 20 years of experience in performing, teaching and making. Her interests are centred around perceptions of the body in the arts and notions of corporeal aesthetics. Specifically, she is interested in each of our lived experiences of our bodies, and how this does (or doesn’t) inform our artistic practice. Her PhD focussed on leadership in the context of dance and disability and draws strongly on the voices of artists to interrogate questions around notions of leadership, perceptions and the body.
Lily Hayward-Smith
Lily is a Research Assistant at C-DaRE, an editor for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and events curator. Lily completed a Masters in Dance Making and Performance in 2009 at Coventry University. She was co-director for Decoda until 2017. Lily’s dance and research interests include practice research, somatic practices and philosophy and since lockdown sourdough bread making!
*Click on each panel to read the panellists biographies*
Panel 1 – Dance research: how do we evidence value and the public benefit of dance research?
Chair: Ruth Gibson
Panellists: Dan Daw and Kate Marsh, Rosa Cisneros, Rosemary Lee, Emma Redding
Panel 2 – Why practice matters – if practice is part of dance research, then what needs to change to reflect the value of practice as an epistemic system?
Chair: Susanne Foellmer
Panellists: Jonathan Burrows, Simon Ellis, Funmi Adewole, Efrosini Protapapa
In Conversation
Professor Christopher Smith
Christopher is the Executive Chair of the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) and International Champion for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). He has been Professor of Ancient History at the University of St Andrews since 2002, and he was also Dean of Arts (2002-2006), Dean of Graduate Studies (2006-2009), and Vice-Principal (2007-2009), before being seconded as Director of the British School at Rome, the UK’s leading humanities and creative arts research institute overseas, from 2009 to 2017.
From 2017 to 2020 he was a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellow, with a project on The Roman Kings: A Study in Power. He held visiting positions in Erfurt, Princeton, Otago, Pavia, Milan, Siena, Aarhus and Paris Panthéon-Sorbonne.
Professor Smith’s research explores constitutionalism and state formation with a particular emphasis on the development of Rome as a political and social community, using archaeological, historical and anthropological approaches. He is the author or editor of over 20 books from textual editions to museum studies. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries Scotland, the Royal Historical Society, the Society of Antiquaries of London, the Royal Society of Arts and a Member of the Academia Europaea.
Baroness Deborah Bull
Deborah joined King’s in 2012 following a long and successful career in the arts as performer, writer, broadcaster, creative leader and commentator. She danced with The Royal Ballet for twenty years before joining the Royal Opera House Executive to develop and implement strategies for developing new art, new artists and new audiences. For over a decade she devised and presented programmes on television and radio, including the award-winning Dancer’s Body. She has published four books, written for a range of newspapers and journals and has served on the boards of Arts Council England, the BBC and the Arts & Humanities Research Council. She was awarded a CBE in 1998 and joined the House of Lords in July 2018 where she is a member of the Select Committee on Communications.
Panel 3 – Dance research beyond borders
Chair: Charlotte Waelde
Panellists: Kate Elswit, Siobhan Davies, Scott deLahunta, Timmy de Laet, Rachel Krische
Panel 4 – Research futures – PGRs and the research pathway, emerging fields.
Chair: Victoria Thoms
Panellists: Tia-Monique Uzor, Kat Hawkins, Mira Gokul, Paul Hughes, Vip Artpradid, Vida Midgelow