BIOGRAPHY

Jacky Lansley’s career as a choreographer and dancer has spanned four decades. She forged her unique style from a training in both classical work with the Royal Ballet Company and in the radical worlds of Performance Art and New Dance with collaborators including the film-maker Sally Potter, with whom she created Limited Dance Company in the 1970s, Rose English, Richard Alston (as a member of Strider), Barry Flanagan, David Medalla, Fergus Early, Anna Furse, Vincent Meehan, Paul Burwell, Di Davies, Sylvia Hallett,  Mary Fulkerson and with numerous groups and companies including: Helen Jives, Welfare State, London Film-Makers’ Co-op, The London Musicians’ Collective, Dance Organisation, John Bull Puncture Repair Kit, the Feminist Improvising Group (FIG), Fluxus, The Women’s Playhouse Trust, The Manchester Royal Exchange, The Almeida (with Yuri Lyubimov),The Royal Court and The Bristol Old Vic (as a co-director with Lily Susan Todd). She was a founder (with Fergus Early, Emilyn Claid, Maedée Duprès, Mary Prestidge) of the UK’s radical independent dance studios, X6 Dance Space and Chisenhale Dance Space and in 2002 she founded the Dance Research Studio in London where she is based. Her work in film includes choreography and performance in Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers, The London Story, Orlando and The Man Who Cried. She has written and directed several short films, including Through the Fire, The Life Class, Swaying and Who Became Those (with Fergus Early).

CHOREOGRAPHIC PRACTICE

Her choreographic practice combines visual and theatrical disciplines and is concerned with space and the site specific; she has made works in many different kinds of indoor and outdoor environments and one of her most recent projects View from the Shore was inspired by the Cornish coastal landscape with which she has had a long-term special relationship. In 2008 she created Standing Stones which premiered at York Minster and toured to fourteen UK cathedrals, adapting to the unique qualities of each cathedral spaces. Guest Suites (2012) developed in dialogue with the Bach Cello Suites 1-111 premiered in The Clore Studio at the Royal Opera House, London and toured to diverse sites with outstanding reviews. Her most recent project, ABOUT US (2016) will tour in Spring 2018.

EDUCATION & RESEARCH

Throughout her working life she has been developing processes and training methods for interdisciplinary performance practice and in 2009 she launched a professional development programme: The Speaking Dancer: Interdisciplinary Performance Training (SDIPT) for dancers and actors. She guest lectures in dance and performance at a variety of institutions and is an associate lecturer at the University of Plymouth in the United Kingdom. She was a founder and editor of the seminal New Dance magazine, and has written extensively on dance and performance including articles for Performance Research, The Open Page, Dance Theatre Journal and the British Film Institute. She is the co-author (with Fergus Early) of The Wise Body: Conversations With Experienced Dancers published by Intellect Books. Her new book Choreographies: Tracing the Materials of an Ephemeral Art Form will be published in June 2017. She has been the recipient of numerous awards from The Arts Council of England and other trusts and funding organisations; including recent awards from the Daiwa & Sasakawa Foundations to support a long research trip to Japan (2010) which inspired and informed her project Guest Suites.

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© Jacky Lansley 2017