Lucy Suggate: Reflections on Practice and Research
Lucy Suggate in conversation with The Work Room
Lucy Suggate is a dance artist, choreographer and member of The Work Room, who in recent years has based her practice Edinburgh. Making working since 2003, she is recognised for her articulate and engaging solo performances as well as choreographic installations and public scores inspired by aspects of synchronicity and cooperation. Her movement practice is an ongoing inquiry into the perceptual and physical expansion that occurs when engaged in longterm moving and thinking. A lot of her current focus is around occupying spaces to practice in, investigating artistic extinction as feasible response to sustainability and revisioning future dance spaces as dynamic and flexible operations.
As the UK and communities globally went into lockdown in April 2020, and independent dance artists were suddenly unable to access studios to practice, Lucy began an enquiry into how to sustain a movement practice through a global pandemic. Supported by Creative Scotland’s Sustaining Creative Development Fund, Lucy undertook several weeks of self-directed residency from her home, transforming a small spare room space into a place for practice. Her residency weeks were split between two areas of enquiry; the first around an ongoing interspecies collaboration between Lucy and Molly Suggate (who is a rescue greyhound), and the second looking into choreomania and dancing plagues.
In March 2021, Lucy Suggate joined Laura Fisher over Zoom, to have a conversation with The Work Room about her residencies and share some of her reflections, research and questions that had emerged from that time.
You can listen to their conversation here and watch a short film of Lucy and Molly Suggate below.
A transcript of the conversation is available to download here.
Duration: 1 hour 28 mins
"...It's fundamental. Because if I have the practice, it doesn't matter, if I get the funding or not. It doesn't matter if I get the opportunity. It doesn't matter if I get the gig or not, I have the practice. And the practice gives me a kind of readiness, so that I can also respond to those things if they're there, but it's not the most important thing. The most important thing is the practice itself.
So it's like, yes, it's fundamental, it's foundational, it's like oxygen, it's like water, it's those elements that are so vital for trying to sort of make sense of… or even not make sense of, but just sense and be in the world. But also escape the world as well."
Lucy Suggate on the importance of practice, in conversation with The Work Room
Moodreel Molly& Lucy from Lucy Suggate on Vimeo.
