7 - 11 December
Image credit Errol White.
White & Givan’s Dance Base residency marks the beginning of Immortal, a new full-scale ensemble work exploring how experience, memory, identity and contradiction live within the performing body.
Developed at a moment when questions of mortality, belonging and what it means to be human feel particularly present, Immortal considers how deeply personal experiences — fear, memory, self-consciousness, desire and the need for connection, can also become part of a wider collective experience.
At the heart of the research is an interest in the body as a place where multiple and sometimes conflicting states can exist at once. Through movement, voice, rhythm, repetition, disruption and stillness, White & Givan will begin to explore how these internal tensions can become physical and choreographic.
The residency is an early-stage period of research and experimentation, allowing the work to develop through embodied enquiry rather than a predetermined outcome. It is the first step towards White & Givan’s ambition to develop Immortal into their first full-scale ensemble production in over a decade.
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White & Givan will offer a class for the professional dance sector during their residency week. The class will focus on skeletal alignment, articulate placement and core stability, supporting dancers to move with fluidity, precision, power and strength. The approach encourages a clear and controlled understanding of the body’s physicality in performance, while creating space for individual interpretation, awareness and agency. The class will also offer an insight into some of the physical principles that underpin White & Givan’s choreographic practice and the early research for Immortal. Alongside the class, White & Givan hope to offer either an open studio or an informal work-in-progress sharing towards the end of the residency.
As Immortal will be at a very early stage of development, the exact format will respond to what emerges through the week. Rather than presenting a finished work, this would offer an opportunity to encounter the research in process and, where appropriate, create space for conversation around the ideas, questions and choreographic material beginning to develop. Exact dates and timings are to be confirmed with Dance Base.
About the Artists
Their practice has developed through more than three decades of professional experience in dance and is rooted in long-term collaboration, embodied dialogue and a commitment to making work that reflects lived experience.
Their recent work Grace, inspired by Paula Rego’s painting Angel, explores strength, vulnerability, protection and transformation through an intimate duet form. Their wider practice includes performance, choreographic research, education and artist development, alongside Dancers Connected, their developing programme exploring more sustainable and artist-centred approaches to dance employment and professional practice.
White & Givan are increasingly interested in how time, memory, ageing, neurodivergence and lived experience reshape the performing body. Their work values complexity over resolution and questions conventional ideas of virtuosity, productivity and what a dancing body can be.
Immortal marks the next stage in their choreographic practice and their ambition to return to creating larger-scale ensemble work.
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