People Dancing

A one-day, hands-on practical course for both long time enthusiasts or intrepid explorers looking for a science-themed approach to their work with primary-school age children and exclusive access to the Digital Dance Studio software prototype that offers participants the opportunity to explore the fundamentals of choreographic composition in a 3D Space.

£95 Members/£145 Non-Members (plus £40 online course cost if required)

Spend the day with Alexander Whitley, choreographer and Artistic Director of Alexander Whitley Dance Company (AWDC) and Stacie Lee Bennett-Worth, Artist-Researcher and Digital Education and Engagement Director at AWDC, enjoying an insight into the company’s pioneering practice.

The day will be divided between sharing their educational package for ‘8 Minutes’, which focuses on primary school workshop activities and digital resources inspired by a collaboration with STFC RAL Space - one of the world’s foremost centres for the scientific exploration of the Sun, as well as an introduction to their ground-breaking movement composition software, the Digital Dance Studio which was originally designed for post-16 dance education to address the challenges faced by dance facilitators with limited access to high-quality resources to support their teaching.

The Digital Dance Studio is a cutting-edge digital platform that empowers people to create, visualise, and share digital choreography outside of the rehearsal studio. Whether you're an experienced choreographer or just starting out, this intuitive and user-friendly software makes it easy to experiment with new movements, visualize your work, and collaborate with others.

By taking this course you will:

• Gain insight into to the AWDC company’s journey and approach to working with digital technology, digital composition, cross disciplinary and inclusive approaches
• Gain insight into the solar science research explored by AWDC in collaboration with scientists from STFC RAL Space to develop their performance work ‘8 Minutes’
• Better understand how dance and science themes can be explored together, provide insight into one another other and how creativity is active in both
• Gain hands-on experience of the company’s Digital Dance Studio, its potential impact in education settings and how to use it to create choreography, bringing digital composition into the live space
• Gain confidence in applying all approaches from the day in your own work and knowledge of new networks.

About Alexander Whitley

Alexander is an award-wining London-based choreographer working at the cutting edge of British contemporary dance. Born in 1980 he trained at the Royal Ballet School and began his career at Birmingham Royal Ballet before moving into contemporary dance, with companies including Rambert, Michael Clark Company, Sydney Dance Company and Wayne McGregor Random Dance During this time, he was twice nominated for Outstanding Performance in the Critics' Circle National Dance Awards. His choreography has won him nominations for the 2012 Arts Foundation fellowship, the 2014 Sky Arts Southbank Awards and the 2015 Critics' Circle Awards.

Now as artistic director of Alexander Whitley Dance Company he has developed a reputation for a bold interdisciplinary approach to dance making, producing technologically innovative and thought provoking stage productions as well as exploring the creative possibilities being opened up by new digital platforms. He has also created work for several of the UK's leading companies including the Royal Ballet, Rambert, Balletboyz, Candoco and Birmingham Royal Ballet.

Alexander is a New Wave Associate artist at Sadler's Wells theatre and a former associate of Rambert and the Royal Ballet. He is an Artist Fellow at Queen Mary University of London and a tutor on the Design for Performance and Interaction Masters programme at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL.

Image credit: Alexander Whitley. Photo: Leo Goddard. 

About Stacie Lee Bennett-Worth

Stacie is the Digital Education an Engagement Director at Alexander Whitley Dance Company and is focusing on developing the companies education strand and namely the Digital Dance Studio project. An Artist-Researcher and PhD scholarship candidate at De Montfort University (DMU) in the Institute of Creative Technologies (IoCT), her PhD study focuses on the role of creative digital technologies in post-16 performing arts education and aims to find solutions to the national shortfall in digital performance capabilities of performers entering higher education and industry.

As an artist Stacie’s work sits at the intersection of performance, film, and installation. Her work has been exhibited in a variety of contexts including at Turner Contemporary with two collaborative installations commissioned as part of the Seaside: Photographed exhibition (2019), Big Screen Southend (2018) a tryptic of performance films titled Daphne in Three Movements, and The National Maritime Museum with a collaborative screen dance installation titled Who is the Land (2016) as part of the pioneering places exhibition. In 2018 Stacie produced a digital resource for Physical Acting with Professors Paul Allain and Frank Camilleri titled ‘Physical Actor Training: an online A-Z’ which was published by Methuen Drama Bloomsbury as part of Drama Online.

Image credits: TOP - Alexander Whitley and Digital Dance Studio workshop participants. Photo: Becca Hunt; ABOVE - Stacie Lee Bennett-Worth.