Deep Light is a performance and retreat day shared by dancers and musicians moving with the legacy of dancer Isadora Duncan and the work of dancer and musician Hayley J S Matthews. Audience may attend the performance, retreat day or both.
Together we will be unearthing the gesture of ‘deep light’. A quality, perhaps a liberation, a steadiness, that integrates in the dark, in slowness, deep in the peat bog and deep within us; within experience, silence and the body.
On the evening of Saturday 13 September we will move with this through the performance of three works: Isadora Duncan’s Funabre, Hayley J S Matthews Burial and Duncan’s Ave Maria. And on Sunday 14 September gather for a retreat day that shares embodiments, Celtic wisdom and the learning of Isadora Duncan’s Ave Maria choreography.
The workshop will be led by dancers Debbie Allan, Hayley J S Matthews and Isadora Duncan legacy dancer/teacher Barbara Kane. Simple and open to all levels. We’ll begin preparing our bodies for support and yielding. We’ll continue by exploring some Celtic understandings of ‘deep light’ and some embodiments. And we’ll finish by learning a little of Duncan’s Ave Maria together.
Through these two events we will remember together that dance and music are a way to be with life’s experience, deeply and expressively. And we may experience that dance is often able to say things we have no words for, hold us, and move us through things we cannot move through alone.
Hayley J S Matthews – is a multidisciplinaire; contemporary dancer Advanced Rolfer, flutist and vocalist. She was awarded the Thea Barnes Legacy Award, an award of female leadership in dance across the UK and US in 2020. And in 2021 was nominated for ‘Women in Dance Awards’, UK. She makes territories of dance, moving image and ambient metal music as Murmura, with husband Al H M Simmons and other collaborators. She creates and dances solos, ensembles and movements as Ensemble Dans-Tank, and works as freelance dancer and collaborator. She runs practice as an Advanced Rolfer in London, Norwich and Leeds. In 2020 Hayley founded Sanctuary on the Fault Line, an earth-wide fugitive dance movement, liberating dance into a wild feminist paradigm. Much of her current dance work takes place in the woods, her sound scores and dances emerging from the re-wilded body and mind of this Sanctuary on the Fault Line practice.
Barbara Kane – Artistic Director of Isadora Duncan Dance Group, studied Duncan technique and repertoire in New York (1970-79) with Lillian Rosenberg, Julia Levien and Hortense Kooluris. Since 1980, Kane has learned further aspects of the Duncan work in Paris with pupils of Lisa Duncan, in Munich with pupils of Elizabeth Duncan, and in Moscow with pupils of Isadora Duncan. She was member of the New York-based Isadora Duncan Centenary Dance Company (1976-79). In 1985, Kane co-formed the Isadora Duncan Dance Group (London/Paris) and continues to teach, lecture and perform throughout Europe, North America, and Japan. Kane has taught and coached the dancers on Duncan’s work that you’ll see in Saturday’s performance and will be teaching in Sunday’s workshop.
Debbie Allan – began her contemporary modern dance training in 1972, at the age of 11. Her love of dance, sparked in Aberdeen, Scotland, has lasted throughout her life. From an early age she was teaching, performing, choreographing, and running a modern jazz dance company. She has performed in both community and professional settings through five decades, and has continued to develop her skills in dance, improvisation, and somatic movement (she is an accredited Somatic Movement Educator in Body-Mind Centering). In 2021 Debbie joined the Sanctuary on the Faultline international dance network founded by Hayley Matthews and through Hayley’s lab ‘Dancing a Path through the Crisis’, was introduced to Barbara Kane and the dances of Isadora Duncan. In 2022 Debbie joined the Isadora Duncan Dance Group (IDDG) finding ongoing inspiration and community, while learning and embodying the artistry and natural movement flow of Duncan Dance.
BOOKING AVAILABLE SOON. To register your interest, please email Kate@wccm.org
