May 22, 2023
Lizzi Kew Ross was awarded a Professional Development Grant from the Educators’ Trust in 2021. It helped document the rehearsal and performance of a dance piece to “enable learning movement material more effectively”. She has updated us on further developments.
Lizzi Kew Ross writes:
I was awarded the Educators Trust Grant for Professional Development in December 2021 to contribute to my project for a dance and video performance for Durham Cathedral at Easter of the following year. I had been offered a fellowship at St Johns College in Durham University for the summer term April 25th- June 27th, 2022.
Three performances of Stations of the Crossing with five dancers and the video artist Mark Dean took place on Easter Monday, which was also World Heritage Day in Durham, so the audiences were varied and eclectic as well as local.
There was a great deal of ‘in kind’ support for these performances from St Johns and an anonymous donation that helped with dancers’ rehearsals and performances fees. I formed a relationship with Dance City, an educational and community dance exchange in Newcastle and we were able to lead a public open rehearsal there before the performances.
The Educators Trust’s Professional Development Grant helped enormously towards funding the documentation of the process, rehearsal and performance. This is proving to be a significant element to the ongoing impact of the project, opening new ways that I can develop as an artist and educator: my ongoing research at Trinity Laban is in interrelated arts practice and the relationship between poetry, film, and choreographic practice.
Documenting performance is a necessary part of dance performance as this builds up both a legacy for online documentation and other ways in which performing arts can be experienced again. Practically, it also provides a vital and needed resource when changing casts and learning movement material more effectively.
An exhibition of dance videos by the video artist Mark Dean and Lizzi Kew Ross & Co
was shown at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in April 2023 titled:
Process. Rehearsal. Performance
London. Newcastle. Durham
The videos can be found on www.tailbiter.com under collaborations.
Above are stills from the performances in Durham Cathedral 2023.
Choreographer: Lizzi Kew Ross, co-devised with
Dance artists: Henry Montes, Sonia Rafferty, Alessandra Ruggeri, Dave Waring, Alice Sara
Costume designer: Suzie Holmes
Video artist: Mark Dean
The Educators’ Trust is incorporated under the Charities Act 2011 as Charitable Incorporated Organisation 1179353