The Research in Dance Award (RiDA) is an artist residency programme based at Birmingham Botanical Gardens, offering time, space, and support for dance artists to explore research-led practice.
The programme is designed for artists with an established body of work who are interested in developing research approaches within their practice. It supports artists to investigate new ideas, test methodologies, and deepen their engagement with dance as a site of enquiry.
The residency focuses on practices connected to EcoSomatics, site-responsive work, and expanded approaches to dance. Artists are encouraged to engage with the Gardens as a living environment, responding to its ecology, histories, and spatial qualities as part of their research.
Alongside the development of their work, artists are invited to participate in and contribute to ongoing dialogue, sharing insights, questions, and learning that emerge through the residency process.
The selection panel was made up of representatives from Fabric, Birmingham Botanical Gardens and Birmingham City University
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Mary Savva
Residency: Intergenerational/Intercultural Botanical Embodiment
Mary Savva’s Intergenerational/Intercultural Botanical Embodiment unfolds within Birmingham Botanical Gardens, tracing the subtle relationships that arise when human bodies come into proximity with rooted, adaptive plant life. It explores what becomes possible when the moving body meets these living systems, sensing the botanical traces within us through motion, stillness, yielding, and shared presence.
The Gardens hold rare and endangered species requiring care and attention. Humans arrive in varied states and rhythms, and quiet curiosity lingers around what grounding or connection might unfold beside breathing, living plant structures. To sit in proximity to a flora when you are finding your own ground is to be among species that have been relocated, reestablished, and continually adapted, surviving and thriving through changing environments.
When our own biodiversity comes into proximity with the Gardens’ living systems, questions surface about how shared biological structures shape such encounters, and what grounded knowledge might emerge from here when ‘truth’ feels increasingly uncertain. This residency invites human companions to recognise themselves as part of a wider living system.
About Mary
Mary Savva is a UK-based dance artist, educator, and somatic practitioner working across community dance-making, performance art, and embodied research. She develops work primarily with children, adolescents, and vulnerable communities across varied social sites, continually re-appraising what dance is and can be. Holding an MA in Dance Pedagogy from Middlesex University, Mary contributed to (Re)Claiming Ballet (ed. Dr Adesola Akinleye). Trained in non-stylised environmental movement with Helen Poynor, her practice is rooted in the belief that movement links the physical and emotional self a vital force for communication and social change. Her latest work, The Anatomy of Unravelling (2026), is an installation bearing witness to women facing the injustice of family courts while systems look the other way.
