Scratch Night | Friday 20 March | 19:00-21:00 | £10/8 | Book Now
An exclusive first look at works-in-progress by some of Scotland’s leading dance artists, curated and hosted by Dance Base Artistic Director Tony Mills.
This spring, our Scratch Night will feature:
- Amy Robertson | Social Organ
- Goddess Divine | Letter to Hip Hop
- Bethany Edwards | This Is Judith
- Corey Owens | HIVE
The Dance Base Scratch Night is a unique platform in Edinburgh which brings live dance work to audiences and creates a supportive platform for dance and movement artists to try out ideas on the stage, experiment with an audience and share their work with their peers, the sector and the public.
The evening will be hosted by Dance Base Artistic Director Tony Mills, who will create a safe space for artists to receive feedback from you, the audience, through a relaxed facilitated conversations.
Along with space in the theatre for conversation during the show, there will also be drinks in the interval and at the end of the show, providing space for audiences and artists to connect.
Let’s move. Book your tickets now.
Social Organ (working title) by Amy Robertson
I look here, I look here, I look at you.
The initial score.
These movements are some of the initial research towards a solo performance with dance, voice work and an intimate setting. The research stems from explorations of sensory (over)load, considering the ebb and flow of a sensory experience from internal to external to further then back again. How our cells link into pathways through sensory experience to become knowledge and skill, how sensory load can bolster or break, numb or awaken. Join me in my thoughts, my home, at the edge of my skin and wherever else you see.
The catalyst for this exploration came from the experience of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood.
Image Credit: Amy Robertson
More about Amy Robertson
Amy is an Edinburgh based dancer with performance experience traversing stage, screen, outdoor and site specific work. As well as working as a dancer and movement collaborator Amy also works as an actor, facilitator and teacher.
Before training in dance Amy started with studying engineering and is still very much with this way of thinking about bodies, movement and space. Much of Amy’s work involves the voice in movement, exploring the voice and how it moves with the moving body.
More recently Amy has been exploring caregiving and nurturing as a catalyst or strategy for making, ensuring that practice reflects where Amy is in life. Wholeheartedly embracing being a dancing mother and allowing it into the studio has proved fruitful, exciting and freeing.
Letter to Hip Hop by Goddess Divine
Letter to Hip-hop: The story of the women in hip-hop. A piece exploring the different element of hip-hop from spoken word to rap with a fusion of movements. Taking the audience on a journey of entertainment of hip-hop culture and its originality.
This piece explores the fusion of rap and hip-hop fundamentals. The goal is to break through the division of the art, from the movements to rap and bring them together as one. Letter to hip-hop challenges the knowledge we have of hip-hop as art form, where it truly comes from and who it has had the most impact from within the movement. It also challenges the conversation that is mostly dismissed within the community, the importance of the black women’s influence in hip-hop sound and movements. Herstory through hip-hop history and the impact she has created to the men within hip-hop and their reasoning for the art form.
The piece opens with rap/spoken expressing the history of black people and their journey, then we slowly develop into a hip-hop movement exploring the body of femininity through raw movements and hip-hop fundamental.
Image courtesy of the artist.
More about Goddess Divine
Divine Tasinda is a Glasgow-based dance artist and she specializes in directing, dancing and choreography. She specialises in different elements of art such fashion and dance. She has trained in various street dance styles including hiphop, afrobeat, dancehall and experimental.
She trained in street dance – Hip hop, Afro, Dancehall, Commercial and Experimental other various styles. She also works in fashion and modelling and is one of the founding directors of Three60 company. as well as the co-creator of AKO and House of Kungi.
Previous projects include Netflix Dance100 2022 (release January/February 2023) Wings solo piece Breakin Convention 2022, World’s evolution DIG tramway 2022, Three60 Director / choreographer merchant city festival 2022. Performer in the film Lagareh – The Last Born by Alberta Whittle (2022), Grin Battersea theatre 2022.
This is Judith by Bethany Edwards
This is Judith. This is Judith of Bethulia. Judith, seductress and assassin. Returning home in the quiet of the dawn with her victim’s head.
Judith, pious Jewish heroine, dangerous femme fatale or a woman who denies such simple categorisation. Here and now, in her own space, Judith untangles and narrates her own story.
Image credit: Chi Wai Cheung
More about Bethany Edwards
Bethany is a dance artist whose work spans performing, devising, improvisation, creative facilitation and teaching. Bethany has created new work with choreographers and companies including Wired Aerial Theatre, Becky Namgauds, Tim Casson and Tess Letham.
Touring internationally in contexts as diverse as night clubs, galleries, stately homes and 7000 seat lake stages. 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. Support and commissions for their work include ACE, The Place, Hidden Door, Stadt/Kanton Bern and, V&A London. She regularly performs improvisation solo and ensemble most recently at Roadhouse Leeds, and TicTac Brussels, and is an organising member of Blunder Club; a new night for improvised performance in Scotland.
Bethany wants to make and perform work that has a clear conceptual basis, that embraces the slipperiness of the body as storyteller, that plays with the poetry and nuance of movement and language, that values its collaborators as equal players, that interrogates performance as practice, and that celebrates the irreverent alongside the esoteric.
More about Charlotte Mclean
Performance Doula Bio: Charlotte Mclean is an award-winning transdisciplinary artist whose practice explores anti-capitalist, cyclical ways of working through movement, voice, and collaboration. Drawing on her childhood training in Highland Dance, she reimagines tradition through intersectional feminism and community values, expanding its possibilities for contemporary audiences.
A graduate of London Contemporary Dance School and a 2025 Arts Foundation Dance Fellow, her work has been presented across Europe, including at Tojo Theater Bern, FITS Romania and Black Box Teater Oslo, with her debut solo show And still touring internationally to critical acclaim. Charlotte’s latest work not for glory, created with Jack Anderson, in collaboration with Malin Lewis will World Premiere at Dance Base this August.
She is co-founder of movement grrl-band’s badbodychaoscode and Die Berner Band, whose performances have featured at London’s V&A Museum, Pete the Monkey Normandy, and Alte Münze Berlin, amongst others. Alongside her creative practice, Charlotte performs and teaches internationally, collaborating with independent companies and leading dance institutions.
HIVE by Corey Owens
Picture an MC so powerful he sounds like a preacher, with a sermon so palpable it turns a club into a cathedral, he claims himself a prophet delivering the prophecy of groove ;
In the beginning there was Jack,
And Jack had a groove,
And from this groove came the groove of all grooves,
And while one day viciously throwin’ down on his box,
Jack boldly declared let there be house,
And house music was born.
I AM YOU SEE
I AM THE CREATOR
AND THIS IS MY HOUSE
Image courtesy of the artist
More about Corey Owens
Corey Owens is a Wishaw born movement artist based between Scotland & London. Trained within a variety of styles, from HipHop freestyle styles to contemporary Corey now works within the HipHop theatre world, Being a member of both ‘BoyBlue’ And ‘FarfromtheNorm’ International Touring Companies.
Performing for BoyBlue as ‘Neo’ in their 2023 production ‘Free Your Mind’ based in Manchester, Corey then went on to a residency and recurring tour with their current show ‘Cycles’ both nationally and in NYC. Also Performing for FarfromtheNorm in their long standing piece ‘BLKDOG’ across 3 Continents in the last 2 Years including Canada, Italy, Sweden and Australia.
Corey teaches & collaborates with institutions across the UK regularly, and is looking to continue his search for his independent creative work through widening his network.
Collaborators:
Marco Barot, Mark Bleakly, Kiki Oladopo, Nicolette McCormack
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Dance Base is a charity with a mission to encourage and celebrate the potential for dance in everyone. We use the power of dance to improve people’s health and wellbeing, and we support professional dance artists at all stages of their careers. We’re grateful for the generous support of out funders and donors.
