Alexandrina Hemsley

Residency: Many Lifetimes

This residency will host Alexandrina Hemsley and their company Yewande 103 whilst they develop their new group work.

“I am offering a collective moment to witness solos pass between performers. An invitation to hold one another in our watching and our changing. To allow the detail of dancing, the hum and thud of heartbeats, the gentle transformations, the developing of constellations both bodily and cosmic.

Many Lifetimes is a new live work in the round by Yewande 103 building on our body of work exploring dynamic cycles of loss and healing through watery symbolism. All under a melting canopy.

Creative Direction: Alexandrina Hemsley

Production: Metal & Water

Dance Movement Collaborators: Alice Tatge, Rudzani Moleya, Rickay Hewitt-Martin

More About Yewande 103

Founder Alexandrina Hemsley started Yewande 103 in 2020 as a container for their established creative practice and to formalise and expand their values of care, support and connection.

Yewande is Alexandrina’s middle name. It means, ‘mother has returned’. There is a tender determination and commitment to both uphold and further understand intergenerational, cyclical patterns of expression and repair. The company’s ethos blooms around an evolving central question of how to return to intimacy within continual, systemic harms.

Through the connective tissues of dance, writing, film, collage and poetry, Yewande 103 enables Alexandrina to resource, process, explore, share and advocate for multiple ways of embodied being. She sees her company as a canopy under which lived experience is the guide for making. There is an interdisciplinary approach that underpins what she creates, be that performances, texts, workshops or other holding spaces. Hers is a lifelong work, forever shaped by profound processing and the seeking out of reparative, embodied alternatives after/alongside violences of racism, misogyny, inadequate care and institutional failings of arts and healthcare sectors.

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