Artist Advisory Group 2025/26
As part of our ongoing commitment to bringing more voices into our strategy setting 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 2025/26 Artist Advisory Group.
This group will work with us from June 2025 to the end of March 2026 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 not be able to take part in the discussion process for a specific opportunity if they have applied for it independently
If you have any questions about the Artist Advisory Group or would be interested in joining the Group after March 2026 please contact marlous.lang-peterse@dancebase.co.uk
Meet the Artist Advisory Group Members:
Jorja Follina
Through performance, collaborations and community engagement, my practice aims to benefit collective wellbeing and connection through improving access to arts, movement and the outdoors.
As a performer I find the contrast between expansive, complex movement and nuanced somatic experience rewarding, playing between opposing states to experience and express through the body. With a particular interest in outdoor, site specific and interactive experiences, I am interested in exploring performer-audience and environmental relationships, offering new perspectives on what a performance can be.
As a facilitator I aim to nurture encouraging and inclusive environments in which participants feel invited to move, observe, explore, discuss and play. Offering a range of classes, workshops and community events from a value driven perspective allows me to explore many disciplines with a broad range of artists, professionals and communities. I am interested in ways to bring agency and individuality into guided practices and in blurring the lines between workshops, performances and collective experiences.
Julia McGhee
Julia lives and works in Easter Ross in the Scottish Highlands. She’s interested in movement and working with the body, objects and materials that reflect elements of the environment, history and people around her. Her practice involves dance, contact improvisation, walking and sea swimming, as well as creating videos and gathering audio recordings. She collaborates with artists from interdisciplinary fields to create live indoor and outdoor performance, digital/multi-media projects and community engagement events.
Through her current performance projects – The Morrich and Goldy-looking blanket – she’s investigating a number of themes that are both close to home and universal: war, climate change, human intervention within the natural environment. And, in the last few years, neurodiversity has been a key discovery and is becoming an integral part of her practice, work and identity.
As well as being part of the Dance Base Artist Advisory Group, Julia is a member of The Work Room, Eden Court Connect and the Dance North Regional Artist Support Scheme.
Kieran Brown
Kieran is a dance artist and maker, originally from Cornwall and now based in Scotland. He is an Associate Artist with Scottish Dance Theatre and is currently training as a Focusing-Oriented Practitioner. His performance career spans both commercial and contemporary stages in the UK and internationally. He is developing his independent choreographic voice through his solo project Queeran, the farmer’s son.
Kieran’s work explores the body as an archive, a site of listening and learning. Drawing on his upbringing on a dairy farm, he is interested in the intersection of queerness and rurality, with a focus on class, identity, and the gendered body.
He is currently developing a Focusing-informed movement practice that explores the space between dance and therapeutic process. His research supports embodied connection, presence, and relational awareness—centring physical and emotional listening, mutual support, and the body’s capacity to hold and respond to feeling.
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
