Tess Letham | Dance Base and Scottish Dance Theatre Choreographer Placement 2024

We are thrilled to announce Tess Letham as the recipient of the Dance Base and Scottish Dance Theatre Choreographer Placement 2024.

Tess is an award winning performer and prominent dance-theatre maker based in Edinburgh. Her work spans theatre, film, outdoor and large-scale spectacle and has included performance projects with Pinwheel at Edinburgh International Festival 2024, Shotput Dance Theatre, Abby Warrilow, Simon Fildes/Cagoule, David Zambrano, PanicLab, Mairead McClean/The Wapping Project, as well as her own productions. 

Her creations focus on human experiences — constructing both obscure and deeply authentic environments, bringing the audience fully into an intriguing theatrical world. Her work combines passions for multi-disciplinary theatre, dynamic physicality and high quality integrated design and has included her inaugural show, How to Survive the Future, and mid-scale work, Remedy for Memory, both programmed for Dance Base Fringe Festival, 2018 and 2022. Her latest projects include Where We Used to Wander commissioned for Hidden Door 2023, and currently in development, What ever happened to Harmony Banks?

During the placement, Tess will be exploring a process that unites a specific group movement practice — Passing Through — with narratives developed through performance improvisation, delving into vocal and physical storytelling. Having trained, practiced, and shared Passing Through methods for ten years, Tess has long been interested in how this group composition can serve as an architectural environment for theatrical narratives.

Coupled with her ongoing dedication to improvisation within her own performance-making practice, Tess is curious about how this group composition can become a core state from which stories emerge, develop, and dissolve as the environment continuously shifts and transforms.

Tess says: “I am thrilled to be collaborating with Scottish Dance Theatre for this exploration and am eager to see what emerges and develops from uniting these approaches in a focused research process with the company’s dance artists.”

The Dance Base and Scottish Dance Theatre choreographer placement provides a local artist with the opportunity to undertake a week of research and experimentation with the Scottish Dance Theatre company with no expected outcome. This is an opportunity for Scotland-based dance artist to research creative ideas that would benefit from working with multiple performers in a supportive and collaborative environment. The 2024 placement will take place from 4-8 November.