Irrepressible Spirit
Irrepressible Spirit: a creative response to the legacy of Rosina Bonsu
Christian Noelle Charles and Salma Faraji will be in The Work Room as part of Irrepressible Spirit. This project – supported by the Abderrahim Crickmay Charitable Settlement – is enabling us to work with Christian and Salma in developing their own creative responses to the archival material of Rosina Bonsu. Rosina was a significant woman and influential dance artist who worked in Glasgow from 1984 to her death in 2020. Across almost 40 years, Rosina was at the very heart of the dance community in Scotland and woven into so much of what has evolved.
For Christian, this is developing from the time she spent engaging with Rosina’s archive last year, and for Salma, this builds on being the recipient of the Rosina Bonsu Bursary in 2023.
We are able to take this project forward at this time as Rosina’s family has gifted her creative material to The Work Room to ensure it would be cared for; as they wished for it to become a resource for dance makers, other artists and the wider public. The archival material that we hold includes videos, photographs and written material from across Rosina’s career, documenting her incredible impact on dance across Scotland and internationally. These give a glimpse of the impact of Rosina’s artistry – photos capturing movement in studios, gym halls and stages; videos of her choreography performed by herself and a breadth of dancers of all ages and abilities; printed materials about the projects, performances and events that she made happen. Collectively they begin to tell a story of an artist who inspired and encouraged thousands of people to dance.
Irrepressible Spirit is an opportunity for The Work Room to pilot creative approaches to working with dance archives and work with partners towards the longer-term vision for a national archive for dance in Scotland. Our ambition is for ‘a living archive for dance’ in Scotland, to hold the work of incredible artists, like Rosina, who have shaped the artform; as a resource for acknowledging and learning from the past, whilst looking to the present and future.
The title Irrespressible Spirit, comes from an article on Rosina written by Mary Brennan and published in The Herald newspaper in December 1989. The full article can be read here
Rosina Bonsu - Alan Wylie