Walking / Talking with Constance Humphries
My conversation this time is with Constance Humphries, an interdisciplinary artist and dancer living on the Isle of Bute. We met on Zoom due to a lack of phone signal ....again :)
Her practice is grounded in Butoh and moves between live performance, sound, video, costume, drawing and painting, with a longstanding interest in place, interconnection and the more-than-human world. She has been making, performing, teaching and working with communities internationally for more than 35 years.
Her environmental work has included Blue Wave, a site-specific dance project developed with coastal communities along the North East coast of England, including women from refugee and asylum-seeking communities. Through walking, movement, visual journals and costume-making, participants explored their own relationship with the coast and its marine environment. At the time of writing, Constance is preparing for a trip to Japan, performing, touring and teaching.
Our conversation begins with gathering.
One of the questions running through this research has been how, or whether, dispersed artists living across Scotland want to gather. There can be an assumption that those of us living at a distance from central spaces are searching for ways to come together more often, so we start there.
“If I wanted to gather, I wouldn’t live here.” We both laugh. A reminder that where we live is often a conscious choice, connected to how we want to live, make and move through the world.
When I ask what brought her to Bute, Constance turns her screen around. Suddenly I am looking out towards this extraordinary landscape of silvery gradients, sea, coast and sky merging into one another.
It makes me think about the images accompanying this conversation. Constance’s are from Bute and mine were taken during a recent residency on Eigg. Different islands, different moments, but I love the visual connection between them, bodies moving beneath these shifting silver skies, close to water and weather.
Before Bute, Constance had lived in Newcastle for eleven years. Her practice has always been deeply connected to place and environment: advocating for the natural world, for non-human species and, as she puts it, for the right to dance anywhere.
She loves moving on beaches, rocks and cliffs. There is something important for her in normalising the dancing body in these places, and it is something we both resonate with.
We talk about the kinaesthetic response to landscape, how a body responds to wind, rock, sea, gradients, weather and changing ground. And about how, when you live closely with landscape, choreography is everywhere: the grass moving, birds travelling across the shore, water shifting, weather arriving.
“The dance is not stepping on the eggs of the oystercatchers. That’s the dance.”
I love this idea.
It proposes another understanding of choreography, the act of paying enough attention to recognise all the movement already happening there. The movers in the places we live are also the birds, the grass, the sea and the weather. And perhaps there is something healing in continually witnessing that choreography.
“I’m on Bute because I need nature. I need green. I need to not hear sirens.”
At the same time, Constance talks about the thriving arts community on Bute and her desire to be part of it. There is a conscious choice here too , to be involved in culture and community, but in a different relationship to place.
Our chat turns to audiences for dance and performance. In both our experiences, there are audiences in rural places. There are people curious about movement and performance, young people who want to participate, artists who want to make things, and communities willing to encounter unfamiliar forms of work.
There can also be a real willingness to go to what is happening locally, perhaps partly because there is less on offer than in a central area, but also because cultural activity can feel closely connected to the community and place in which it happens.
When thinking about what dispersedness makes possible, there are different relationships to place, different ways of working, different audiences and communities, different rhythms, knowledge of land and forms of attention.
What emerges from my conversation with Constance is a desire for connection that supports the lives and practices we have chosen, where we have chosen to make them, with ways of connecting that are designed with distance in mind. Perhaps the value of a dispersed network is in creating routes between dispersed places, making visible who is working where, helping artists find one another, and allowing knowledge, opportunities and support to move between islands, towns and villages.
What makes connection useful to us, where we are, and what kinds of exchange or support would strengthen our practice without asking us to leave the conditions that help it exist?
Scotland’s dance ecology is rich and alive on beaches, along coastlines, in village halls, between artists who haven’t met yet, among birds, weather, bodies, forest and grass. There is already so much moving between these places.
Part of Gail Sneddon’s Embedded Artist research with The Work Room, exploring how members across Scotland gather, connect, and sustain practice across distance. Read about the Embedded Artists 2026-27 announcement here.
Gail Sneddon trained at Trinity Laban Conservatoire before touring as a dancer with Nigel Charnock, Athina Vahla, and Ersatz. She later completed a Master’s in Performance Design and Practice at Central Saint Martin’s School of Art and Design.
Her work spans performance, design, and direction, with collaborations including Mute Records, National Theatre of Scotland, Candoco Dance Company, Claire Cunningham, and Cora Bissett. She has held leadership roles at The Beacon Arts Centre, Dance North Scotland, and Barrowland Ballet, and recently founded Company Hame, a platform for collaborative, place-responsive work connecting people through shared creative practice.
She is currently developing two new works: The Shape of Grief, a project exploring lost mourning rituals and the ways we carry grief, shaped by research into procession and Scotland’s historic coffin roads; and HEL, an dance film set in a disused multi-storey car park in the Scottish Highlands, exploring youth culture and the mythology of the underworld.