Artist Advisory Group 2026/27
As part of our ongoing commitment to bringing more voices into our programme design and decision-making processes, and to maintain a collaborative conversation with the dance community we serve, Dance Base Scotland have recruited these four dance artists to join the 2026/27 Artist Advisory Group.
This group will work with us from June 2026 to the end of March 2027 and they will:
- Advise us on the organisation’s overall strategy, providing reflections on past and current projects and responding to new proposals
- Support effective decision making on the allocation of opportunities such as residencies and commissions
- Promote opportunities generated by Dance Base to their wider communities and networks where appropriate
Please note that the members will have to declare conflict of interest to take part in the discussion process for a specific opportunity if they have applied for it independently. This eventuality will be avoided as much as possible.
If you have any questions about the Artist Advisory Group or would be interested in joining the Group after March 2027 please contact marlous.lang-peterse@dancebase.co.uk
Meet the Artist Advisory Group Members:
Amy Robertson
I work with movement and text and I’m interested in dance in performance, video, installation and everyday life. My creative process combines improvisation, experimentation and automatic writing.
Since becoming a parent, I have focused on sustaining an artistic practice within the rhythms of family life. I am exploring caregiving and nurturing as creative strategies and catalysts for making. Working through movement and text, I investigate how parenting can generate choreographic material rather than interrupt it.
I have grown suspicious of representations of caregivers, particularly mothers, as endlessly soft bottomless pools of giving. My work seeks to explore and celebrate the physical, energetic, defiant and confident dimensions of motherhood, alongside its tenderness. I am specifically interested in the transformation to mother and the new forms of creativity and agency that emerge through that process.
My work isn’t necessarily about motherhood but I’m using my motherhood to rethink what choreography and artistic process are. Caregiving is both the context and methodology of my making.
Bethany Edwards
Bethany is a dance artist working across performing, devising, improvisation, and teaching.
Bethany has created and toured new work internationally with choreographers including Becky Namgauds, Tim Casson, Tess Letham, Curious Seed, and Wired Aerial Theatre.
She is a founding member of bad body chaos code, a pop-punk band working non-hierarchically to create euphoric, surreal, riot grrrl live experiences. Supported by Arts Council England, Stadt Bern, Brainchild Festival, Womxn SRSLY amongst others.
Bethany works extensively with improvised performance. Collaborating with groups Collective Endeavours and Something Smashing in Scotland and performing solo at TicTac Brussels and Roadhouse Leeds. She is currently developing an improvised duet alongside Tess Letham in which audience input inspires the content, supported through Creative Scotland Open Fund. She is a founding member of Blunder Club Scotland’s newest night for movement driven improvised performer.
Bethany makes and performs work that embraces the slipperiness of the body as storyteller, plays with the nuance of movement and language, values its collaborators as equal players, interrogates performance as practice, and celebrates the irreverent alongside the esoteric. Encompassed in her latest solo ‘judith enters’ currently in development, previously supported by Dance Base.
Maya Bodiley
Maya is a Scotland-based dance artist working across performance, practice-led research, and teaching contexts. Improvisation sits at the heart of her practice, shaping an approach that values curiosity, collaboration, and interdisciplinary exchange. She is particularly interested in creative processes that emerge through dialogue between movement, people, and challenging ways of being in community.
Maya’s artistic practice informs how she engages with the world through both a critical and compassionate lens. Building community and creating accessible opportunities for artistic participation are central to her work. For Maya, dance is both ancestral and ever-evolving: a space for exploring identity, sharing stories, and cultivating connection and joy.
Her early career experience within disability-led arts continues to influence her approach, informing a commitment to inclusive practice across community and professional contexts. She works across a range of settings, from theatres and festivals to outdoor and non-traditional performance spaces, and collaborates with independent artists and organisations throughout Scotland, including Scottish Ballet, Scottish Dance Theatre, Aya Kobayashi, and Tess Letham.
Penny Chivas
Penny Chivas (she/her) is a Glasgow based dance artist, originally from Ngunnawal Country, Australia. Over the years, she has worked in a variety of contexts including community, professional, multidisciplinary performing the work of choreographers such as Ian Spink, Vanessa Grasse, Brian Hartley, and Rosina Bonsu. She also makes work such as ‘Burnt Out’ about climate change concerns which toured extensively within Scotland and abroad, and screendance; ‘Dissipate’ and ‘Out of Time’ which have both received awards and Honourable Mentions internationally. As a teacher and facilitator she has worked in training institutions and companies around the world and also co-founded @TheGlasgowJam (now The Glasgow Jam), Glasgow’s organisation for contact improvisation in 2013.
Penny is an active member of Equity, the trade union for the performing arts in the UK.
BA (Dance) (Hons.) MEd
