Festival Organisers

Jenna Hubbard is a West Midlands based dance artist and a recent graduate from Coventry University. Jenna has an interest in site specific dance performance and has developed several community pieces in Coventry and Kent. She is a member of Spilt Milk Dance Company and of the Wednesday Group. She currently teaches creative dance to children in Oxford Youth Dance and to adults on the undergraduate degree course at Coventry University. She is also working within the Institute for Creative Enterprise as a project manager.

Lily Hayward-Smith, Lily is a dance artist based in the West Midlands. She is currently a post graduate student (Dance making and performing) and is currently studying under Miranda Tufnell and Polly Hudson.
She is a member of Spilt Milk Dance Company and recently performed in Endings by Joe Moran. Lily is interested in making through Improvisation and Somatic Practices.

Herbert Series

Eva Karczag is an independent dance artist, teaching, and performing solo and collaborative work internationally. Many of her collaborations have involved links across the arts. Her teaching and performance is particularly concerned with improvisation. She has been a member of several leading companies in the field of experimental dance, including the Trisha Brown Company, was a faculty member of EDDC, Arnhem, The Netherlands, and received her MFA from Bennington College, VT, USA.

Chris Crickmay is an installation artist, teacher and writer with a particular interest in improvisation and in creating environments for performance. He works mainly in collaboration with dancers. He has also worked extensively in Higher Education, including several years as Head of Art and Design at Dartington. He has co-written two books with Miranda Tufnell: Body Space Image: notes towards improvisation and performance (1990) and A Widening Field: journeys in body and imagination (2004).

Polly Hudson is a dancer, artist, teacher and curator. She makes performance and moving image works (often combining the two) that are underpinned by somatic practise.

Polly trained at London Contemporary Dance School (1988-1991) and danced with their forth year performance company whilst still in her 3rd year of training.

Polly danced with Jo Blowers and Simon Whitehead (‘No Mean Feat’) for a number of years as well as with many other dance artists including Gregory Nash, Gaby Agis, Tracey West, Florence Peake, Joe Moran and Kayte Coe.

Polly has taught at many of the major dance institutions in the UK and is currently Associate Senior Lecturer in Dance at Coventry University.

Recent works include let me count the ways shown in San Francisco; a commission to make a physical response to the Richard Deacon exhibition at Birmingham's Ikon gallery where the subsequent live and video pieces were shown; the installation piece Multiple Body which was commissioned by the Fracture Dance and Moving Image festival; and the single screen Multiple Body, a continent of skin, shown at Ismeta Festival New York, at Brighton Screen Dance Festival and at the International VideoDanz Festival in Lisbon.

Florence Peake  (curator of Herbert Series) is an interdisciplinary dance artist whose work has been performed nationally and internationally. Most recently Paper Portraits (National Portrait Gallery), The Bird Trilogy (Prague Festival),Eight Moments Wake Me (Laban, London; San Francisco) and Ghost Dress (New York). As a performer, Florence has worked with a wide and varied range of choreographers, filmmakers and performance artists including Gaby Agis, Jane Turner, Gary Stevens and Miranda Pennell.

Teaching Faculty

Lucia Walker (teacher and workshop facilitator) has been practicing and teaching Contact Improvisation since 1986. She first encountered the form in workshops with Steve Paxton, Nancy Stark-Smith and Kirstie Simson. In 1987 Lucia qualified as a teacher of Alexander Technique and teaches the technique to individuals, groups and on teacher training programmes in England, Germany, US and Japan.

Lucia worked for many years with Jointwork Dance Group exploring improvised performance and continued this research with Telling Times International Theatre project. She also works on performance collaborations with other artists and dancers Attention, vitality and curiosity are central to her work as a teacher and a performer.

Dr. Sarah Whatley. Her initial training was principally in ballet and modern dance at Laine Theatre Arts. She then went to Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) to complete her degree in Performing Arts (Dance) where she was privileged to work within a community of postmodern dance artists, theatre practitioners and contemporary composers.
She then went on to perform and choreograph with touring dance companies and artists in the 1980s and 1990s, including the Gregory Nash Group, touring nationally and internationally to small and middle-scale venues. As a performer and choreographer she is influenced by release approaches to movement and explores playful, indeterminate compositional structures.

Joe Moran is a dance artist and Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation. He creates dance and video works that are presented in theatres, galleries and public spaces; most recently, All Clear! at Chelsea & Westminster Hospital and In Land at Toynbee Studios. As a dancer, he has worked with a number of distinguished choreographers including Gaby Agis, Kate Brown, Siobhan Davies (Bank project), Christopher House (Toronto Dance Theatre), Florence Peake and Stephanie Skura (improvisation project).

Founder and Artistic Director of Dance Art Foundation, Joe has extensive curatorial experience in artist development, independent dance, public art and dance-in-health. He has presented the work of seminal international dance artists Gaby Agis, Jennifer Monson, Yvonne Rainer and Stephanie Skura in London, and curated dance events in many of the capital’s landmark public spaces: Canary Wharf tube station, Evelina Children’s Hospital, the National Portrait Gallery, Siobhan Davies Studios and South London Gallery. Joe is the recipient of a number of awards including a 2009 Rebecca Skelton Fund Award and a 2005 Lisa Ullmann Travelling Scholarship. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Council for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices (Intellect publications) and an Artistic Associate of Tamasha Theatre Company.

Dr Natalie Garrett is currently a Principle Lecturer in Dance at Coventry University, UK where she is Course Director for MA Dance Making and Performance and Post-graduate Programme Manager for Performing Arts. She is Associate Editor for the Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices and on the editorial board for Dancelines, Research in Dance Education.

Natalie’s training and education is principally in the area of Contemporary Dance. She gained her BA in Dance Theatre (1991-94) and MA in Dance Studies (1994-96) at the Laban Centre, London. She studied for a further year at London Contemporary Dance School (1997-98) gaining a certificate in performance studies. Natalie completed her PhD research at Roehampton University in 2007. Her research is theoretically situated within Feminist understandings of embodied subjectivity and is focused on the ways in which Somatic practices such as the Alexander Technique, Body Mind Centering and Skinner Releasing Technique can inform performance making, creativity and writing.