Katye Coe Research Artist Residency 2018 - 2019

Katye Coe spent time as a Research Artist with us between 2018 and 2019. Her research focused on the unique information that a dancer holds while and immediately after dancing.

This presented itself through a series of monthly open classes, sharings with local dance communities, and conversations with those involved with caring for women giving birth and those offering care at the end of life. Katye spent time with staff at Nottinghamshire Hospice in January 2019, questioning support and daily experience through simple body-based tasks. Katye’s open class explored her interests in the potential of dancing and what happens when we move together.

We invited Katye to reflect on this journey and she shares some words to bring us into the knowledge and experiences found in this time.

These words emerge from some research that Katye undertake through two parallel research opportunities during 2018, at Siobhan Davies Dance Studios as their first Torchlight artist and with Dance4 as a Research Artist 2018/2019.

I send these words in July 2020 when the act of care has been hugely transformed for every body because of the global events that continue to resonate through our daily lives and cause care to happen with greater consciousness and as a more explicitly political act too, in my view.

And so in considering my research today in the Summer of 2020, I am beginning to understand this deep intelligence and care as erotic in essence.

Feminist, activist, and writer Audre Lorde considers the erotic. She said; “When I speak of the erotic, then, I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives”.

Katye Coe