After graduating from the University of Surrey in 1999 with a BA Honours degree in Dance and Culture, Abigail started her professional life in the moving and performing arts as a dancer and choreographer, working both with groups and as a solo artist, experimenting with a broad range of disciplines from contemporary dance, contact improvisation & dance theatre, to the Japanese avant garde dance genre, Butoh, and the discipline of Authentic Movement.

Her dance-based projects were situated in a variety of theatre and site-specific contexts, including The Royal Festival Hall (London), The Place (London), the Big Chill and Glastonbury and Brighton (Fringe) Festivals (UK), The Electric Theatre (Guildford) and a 17 th Century Master Shipwright’s Palace overlooking the river Thames in Deptford (London). During this period she was interested in the impact of environment on the body, and often experimented with the transformation of performance spaces by fusing film, installation, and live music with her work.

After moving to Bristol in 2003, and training briefly with Janis Claxton & Co, whose work encourages grounding and centering in the body through the pelvis, as well as ease and pleasure in movement, Abigail’s relationship to movement and dance changed in emphasis – away from dance purely for performance – towards dance as somatic practice, or dance as a ‘practice of embodiment’.

In 2005 she completed her MA in Somatic Studies and Laban Movement Analysis, also at the University of Surrey, with distinction, and is now developing her practice as a qualified Movement Analyst.

An ongoing theme in Abigail’s exploration of movement and dance is a concern with the relationship between ‘inner life’ and the body’s potential for movement that is both creative and ‘authentic’. She hopes to create dance that manifests from an ‘authentic’ place of ‘inner connectivity’, and for dance to also be an experience that facilitates and enhances somatic experience and a sense of embodiment.

Her long-term goal is to integrate her experiences of working with dance from these two perspectives – of dance as art, and dance as somatic practice – by training as a Dance Movement Therapist. She views Laban Movement Analysis as the bridge between these two paradigms.

Abigail lives and works in Bristol and can be contacted by clicking here.

This is a temporary page and will be developed into a full site in the near future. Full CV and list of works available on request.

Page last updated Feb 2006