Moving Kinship at Queer Britain

Moving Kinship creates dance with and for individuals, families and communities

 

Moving Kinship is a transdisciplinary project that takes place in UK and international participatory ecologies hubs located in arts centres, museums, hospitals and grass roots organisations. Created by Beatrice Allegranti in 2016, the project involves making bespoke and trauma-informed live and digital performances with and for audiences as a way of engaging ethically with the many complex and intersecting challenges we are confronted with in our troubled world. Working  across forms (choreographic, film, conversational, illustration, writing, capoeira, music), the aim of the bespoke hubs is to activate modes of collaboration, collectivity and nurture cultures of multiple belongings and care. The hubs give rise to micro-performances as well as full scale artistic works. To date, Beatrice and her team have worked intergenerationally with families affected by rare early onset dementia, youth environmental activists, LGBTQI+ communities and activists, as well as artists and scientists in the UK, Norway, the Netherlands and Japan.

 

Supported by Arts Council England, Surrey Arts/Dance 21 and Public Health, the participatory project is led by Beatrice Allegranti Company and in partnership with public and grass roots organisations across the arts, health and science sectors and academic partners.

This page documents our Moving Kinship hub in collaboration with LGBTQ+ International Music Study Group and Queer Britain, the UK’s first dedicated LGBTQI+ museum. The hub and the collaborative performance brought together three dance artists and five composers to embody and embed responses of vulnerability, the plurality of One, and the queering of the human and different modes of kinship with the more-than-human.

A short film from our Moving Kinship Hub at Queer Britain can be viewed here.

Read Mat Klotz’s blogpost on their experience of participating in this Moving Kinship hub here.

 

Dancer: Orrow Bell

 

It was wonderful. Beautiful. It was interesting to see the reflection of my own story as a queer person.

Audience member

 

Dancers: Rudzani Moleya & Luke Birch

 

[I] have this incredible pride in being able to be involved in creating something that I don’t feel complete ownership of, but yet have this sort of just have played a part in, and that everybody’s work came together to play a part in something that’s kind of bigger than all the individual pieces.

Participant

 

Dancers: Rudzani Moleya & Orrow Bell

 

I was surprised at how much it reached me on a body level that I can’t quite put into words, but also resonates with my experience living with LGBTQ identity.

Audience member

 

Dancer: Rudzani Moleya

 

[T]here’s something that has come out of this project that I think really explores kinship and relation, not just across the human, but to our environments. When we really think about or listen to the environment, it does kind of displace the human a little bit. Itmoves. We become more.

Participant

 

 

Artistic Direction and Choreography with Dance Artists

Beatrice Allegranti

 

Dance Artists

Orrow Bell

Luke Birch

Rudzani Moleya

 

Sonic Responses

Francesco Venturi (Quietly Vulnerable; Inside our Body)

Tianyu Jiang (Quietly Vulnerable; We are Cold)

Mathew Klotz (Irregular Pulse)

Eleanor Ryan (Quietly Vulnerable; We are Cold)

Dong Zhou (Inside our Body; A Political Gesture of Self-Love)

 

Filming & Edit

Jason Read

 

Illustration Capture

Neil Max Emmanuel

 

Production Support

Sanjini Kedia

 

Funding & partnerships

Arts Council England

LGBTQ Music Study Group

Public Health England

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Public Health England

University of Cambridge

 

Publications

A forthcoming publication about the work will appear in Beatrice Allegranti’s new book Moving Kinship: A Feminist Transdiciplinary Practice (Routledge 2023).

  

 

 

Photos: Beatrice Allegranti