COHORT 26/27 Announced!
We are pleased to introduce our first COHORT artists – Amy Lawrence, Kiki Oladapo, Sara Kemal, and Tharanga Wikramasinghe!
The four artists will deepen their choreographic and performance-making practice over 12 months, through a series of solo and group residencies, a Peer-led Syllabus of practical and creative workshops, as well as regular opportunities for collective learning, exchange and peer support. We’re excited to work with and support Amy, Kiki, Sara and Thara, in this first iteration of our new longer-term support programme.
Amy Lawrence is an artist, curator and producer based in Glasgow. Her creative projects are interconnected and interdisciplinary, spanning live/visual art, experimental dance, sculpture, food/eating and the development of creative platforms. She is drawn to collaborative projects involving ensembles of bodies in public and non-institutional spaces that offer liveness, unpredictability and opportunities to question how different bodies encounter place - creating a patchwork of choppy contemporary culture, social politics and dreamy diasporic memories/predictions.
Kiki Oladapo is a hip-hop dancer, choreographer and creative director based in Renfrew. His practice is rooted in hip-hop culture, storytelling and his experiences as a Black artist with Nigerian heritage. His practice is currently developing from his experience as a performer and dancer into creating work that holds space for more personal and cultural stories. He is interested in how movement can explore Black masculinity, fatherhood, cultural identity and the ways our experiences, knowledge and creative practices are passed between generations.
Sara Kemal is a Glasgow-based dance artist with a dynamic, community-focused practice spanning choreography, performance, facilitation, and arts management. She has worked in a range of creatively ambitious and collaborative ways, including large scale outdoor performance, dance films, and working with theatre practitioners and musicians. Her work centres on engagement, collaboration, and creating opportunities for people to experience and participate in dance. As an artist, she is interested in dance as a site for exploring rights, agency, and participation.
Tharanga Wikramasinghe is a Sri Lankan dance artist, choreographer, and instructor with over 15 years of training, primarily in Kandyan Dance. She is based in Edinburgh and works at Theiyā Arts as the ‘Arts in Wellbeing Lead’ and is a co-member of the Theiyā Arts Dance Collective. She also works closely with different demographic communities, making dance and yoga available and accessible. Her passion for dance, coupled with innate drive for justice and equality, and her experiential insight of yoga and meditation, has led her to explore the transformative power of creative, mindful and embodied movements towards holistic wellbeing of both individuals and society as a whole.
Background
COHORT is a new pilot project following a member-led process of evaluation and review of our residency programme (read more about this here). The 12-month programme will support four artists to deepen and develop rigorous approaches to making dance and choreographic performance.
Our aim is to bring together artists working across a range of dance styles, practices, forms and techniques, who share a central focus on choreographic enquiry or innovation in their work, and a commitment and enthusiasm for engaging in generous, reciprocal and supportive peer learning.
COHORT is intended to run every other year, alongside our year-round artist residency programme. This iteration will run from September 2026 – August 2027.
"The opportunity to be part of the COHORT feels so pivotal. I’m excited to develop my practice in the early experimentation of a new ensemble project via thematic research and experiments with friends and collaborators. The project circles around trembling, freezing and drifting; as visual, movement and vocal material inspired by Édouard Glissant’s text ‘Trembling thinking’ as a starting point (part of ‘Archipelago Conversations’ 2021.) I’d like to develop my studio practice of score-building and re-dip my toes into ensemble choreography with focused time on facilitation techniques and values; alongside exploring closeness, intimacy and pleasure in making. The COHORT offers me valuable time to interrogate my practice from a place of choreographic research, build my confidence and consider my sustainability as a maker whilst developing new creative relationships." - Amy
"Through COHORT, I am bringing an enquiry around how I can develop my choreographic voice and create work that connects personal experience, cultural heritage and hip-hop theatre. I want to explore how these ideas can become physical, theatrical and emotionally engaging stories. Joining the Choreographers COHORT at this point in my practice feels like an important opportunity to move from being primarily a dancer and performer into becoming a more confident choreographer and director, while learning alongside other artists and developing a stronger understanding of my own creative voice." - Kiki
"The enquiry I bring to COHORT involves researching children’s rights-based approaches to collaborative, participatory work with and for young audiences in non-stage settings. This choreographic enquiry will exist in relation with an exploration of conceptual knowledge structures which prioritise relationships, exchange, and decentralised, non-linear generative practice. Through COHORT I am looking forward to exploring new ideas, learning, and discovering what unfolds throughout the process alongside other artists." - Sara
"The inquiry I'm bringing into the COHORT program is a woman’s journey of embodiment, shaped by the social, cultural, and familial forces and how these imprints are carried across generations. I aim to study how embodiment transforms across the key social domains of childhood, adolescence, and adulthood, and how women navigate the tension between agency and conformity within these structures, based on the Development Theory of Embodiment (DTE) by Niva Piran. This initial exploration extends to how the experiences of embodiment, disembodiment, and re-embodiment travel across generations, and how artistic practices make visible the often-hidden processes through which “docile bodies” are produced and resisted." - Thara