Creative Team
We work across a range of artforms, incorporating light, sound, text, theatre and dance. The creative team is:
Hannah Bruce (director)
Lead Artist Hannah Bruce is a director and maker of performance work. She holds an MA (distinction) from The Laban Centre for Movement and Dance. She is particularly interested in collaborative cross-artform work. Her site-specific performance projects create experiences that play with place and circumstance. Since 2005 Hannah has been inviting small audiences to unusual sites (such as the staircase of a basement flat in Hammersmith, a deconsecrated church in South Africa, a family home in Hackney, and a school in Fulham).
These audiences experience performance as part of an encounter in which the existing narrative of space, light and architecture are equally as important as the performers.
Her work finds a narrative drawn from the interplay between layers of light, sound and bodily movement onto the existing architecture of a place. The audience occupy this liminal space and participate in an atomised, curatorial experience; this sensitises them to their environment, the site, and each other. Through this experience, the audience become collaborators within the artistic act, through their presence and what they witness.
The work is highly visual, full of fleeting images meshing different scenes together, and an intensely submersive environment for the attendees to experience.
Sophie Arstall (movement)
Sophie Arstall is a dancer, maker and facilitator. She trained at the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, UK (First BA Hons) and completed a Masters in Performance at LABAN as part of the internationally touring Transitions Dance Company. Sophie has worked for many Choreographers in the UK and abroad such as Ben Wright, Rosie Kay, Ingri Fiksdal, Hagit Yakira, Rosemary Lee, Willi Dorner, Tony Mira, Harry Theaker, Charlie Morrissey and in Festivals such as Glyndebourne Opera, Greenwich and Docklands International Festival and Harare International Festival of Arts, Zimbabwe.
Alongside performing, she choreographs and teaches in a number of community and professional settings around the country and collaborates with artists of different mediums to create works in diverse performance contexts. Most recently she has performed her own work in London, Finland and Hungary.
Jonathan Eato (sound design / composition)
Jonathan Eato is a composer and saxophone player. In 2003 he formed the duo ev2 with Craig Vear to explore various ways of combining contemporary composition, interdisciplinary performance, and improvisation. The duo has subsequently performed in the UK, Germany, Canada, and the Falkland Islands and their music has featured on BBC1 television's Countryfile (2006), the film shorts 5 Antarctic Solitudes by Craig Vear (2004), and with Sophia Clist's interdisciplinary performance piece Stretch (2004-2007). Jonathan was a finalist in the 2004 Luxembourg International Prize, and is a regular collaborator with choreographer Jacky Lansley. Their work together includes Anamule Dance (2006) based on the music and life of Jelly Roll Morton, the Arts Council England funded performance research project Guests (directed jointly by Jacky Lansley and Tim Brinkman, 2010), and Guest Suites based on the solo cello suites of J. S. Bach in collaboration with cellist Audrey Riley.
Jonathan's interest in interdisciplinary performance environments includes the site-specific promenade performance piece Here, at home conceived and directed by Hannah Bruce (2008).
Jonathan also teaches in the music department at the University of York.
Luke Ganz (movement)
Luke Ganz is currently at the start of his career as a dancer and performer, training at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. He is a member of the U.Dance ensemble, performing in Hofesch Shechter's TANK which premiered at the South Bank Centre, London in July 2012, and continues to tour into 2013. Luke danced for National Youth Dance Wales, and was a member of County Youth Dance Company (2008-2010).
Luke choreographs his own work, and recently was choreography assistant for a collaborative project between West Glamorgan Youth Theatre and County Youth Dance Company (CYDC). In March 2012 he was choreography assistant to CYDC Graduates, Scheherazade Project, performances at Taliesin Theater, Swansea.
Jo Hammett (producer)
Jo Hammett has seven years experience managing UK and international performance with artsadmin, Bobby Baker's Daily Life, New Work Network, the Lighthouse, Poole and Crying Out Loud. She works independently with artists and organisations in different ways from tour booking and managing events to programming, co-commissions and developing new work. Besides working with the able bodied and neuro-typical she has worked with artists with a disability and developed a programme of work for children with an autism spectrum disorder.
Jo has toured and managed artist's work around the UK, America, Australia and Europe. Recent artists and companies include Gisele Edwards, Pete Edwards, Elyssa Livergant. Currently she is working with Crying Out Loud for TPO Company, Action Hero and Acrojou Circus Theatre.
Sam Lawrence (movement)
Sam Lawrence is a dance artist committed to touching the imagination with new dance work that is enchanting and enigmatic; she aims to challenge perceptions of what is dance and explore accessible and inventive ways to engage audiences. Sam is Director of 103 Falling Birds; a company which creates performative events for more intimate and unusual spaces. Performance work includes site specific projects, dance-theatre installation, rural touring and cross art-form collaboration.
Sam also works in a variety of community and education settings. Most recently, Sam performed at the Galtres Festival (N.Yorkshire) with 'Lunch Break Island',a pop-up solo dance-theatre piece where a lunch break turns into a Hula Dance.
Helen Longworth (voice)
On graduating from RADA in 2001, Helen was awarded the Carleton Hobbs Radio Award, resulting in her becoming a member of the BBC Radio Drama Company. She has to date appeared in over 300 plays for BBC Radio Drama and also played the character of Hannah in 'The Archers'. She has toured nationally for various theatre companies, and she has twice performed with a company of RADA graduates onboard the QM2 on Transatlantic crossings. TV appearances include Hollyoaks, Heartbeat, Emmerdale and Jane Hall's Big Bad Bus Ride. Helen also sings with the rock band, Heroes of She.
Matt Morrison (writer)
Matt Morrison's play Through the Night was one of four chosen by the Papatango New Playwriting Awards 2011 for production at the Finborough Theatre. His monologue Inside Out was selected for the inaugural HighTide festival. Other recent work includes: The Shelter, a LAMDA long project commission; Brightest and Best at The Half Moon (2012, dir. Natalie Ibu); Insect, performed at the Arcola (Miniaturists, 2011); Hypertension, part of the 'Ave it / Coming Up Later Festival at the Old Vic Tunnels (2011) and W-11, a community project for The Gate (2010). Matt has also written radio comedy, short stories and two non-fiction books.
As an actor he has performed at The Tricycle, the Arts Theatre, The Watermill and the BAC. He is an Associate of The Soho Theatre and Senior Lecturer in Playwriting at the University of Westminster. In June 2012 he curated the Soho Poly Theatre Festival.
Dan Starkey (voice)
Dan Starkey trained at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School in Bristol, and now works as a professional actor. He has worked extensively in theatre, television, radio and voice over. In 2012 he was nominated by OffWestEnd.com for Best Male Performance for his role in the premiere of Torben Betts' Muswell Hill at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond.
He specialised in Old English and other Medieval languages for his MA at Cambridge University, where he won the inaugural Peter Clemoes Reading Prize in Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic in 1998 and again in 1999.
[last updated: December 2011]