Rosemary wanted to investigate how working in a distinctive landscape would affect the work being made. She also wanted to challenge the dancers as performers and herself as a choreographer. She worked with characterisation, hidden narratives, extensive improvisation, complex spatial patterns and movement phrases, as well as continuing to draw on the landscape and weather of coastal East Anglia. Beached began life under the expansive windswept skies of East Anglia with a residency at Snape Maltings in 2001.

Research was supported by DanceEast and created with funding from Dance Northwest. It was revived in 2004 and toured to London and the North West.

Choreographed by Rosemary Lee with the dancers
Performed by Ruth Spencer, Andrea Buckley, Paula Hampson
Music by Jonathan Lever
Design by Louise Belson
Lighting Design by Chahine Yavroyan

Beached: a commonplace book (London: ResCen Publications, 2006) was the result of Rosemary’s ongoing collaborative partnership with writer Niki Pollard. It is composed of extracts and annotations from Rosemary and Niki’s studio notebooks on the making of Beached, the result is not a documentation but a reflection of process illuminating the choreographer’s perspective.

This hybrid performance/lecture-dem un-picked and exposed the layers of exploration within the creative process.  Intimacies, subtleties and fruitful accidents were revealed as the audience witnessed the dancers’ thought processes and physical challenges and heard the choreographer’s struggles and discoveries. Simultaneously an intimate duet unfolded before their eyes.

the Suchness of Heni and Eddie explored a new form of presentation that is both educational in its broadest sense and a performance at the same time. It was designed to be presented in more intimate settings such as studio spaces. It toured to the main UK Higher Education institutions offering dance at postgraduate level as well to various dance agencies and festivals, including NottDance06. It was first shown at the ResCen conference Nightwalking (2002) and was then developed and toured in 2006-2007. The development of the Suchness of Heni and Eddie was supported by ACE and ResCen.

Choreographed by Rosemary Lee with the dancers
Performed by Henrietta Hale, Eddie Nixon and Rosemary Lee
Writing and devising by Niki Pollard and Rosemary Lee

the Suchness of Heni and Eddie DVD (Bristol: PARIP and London: ResCen, 2007) is an interactive DVD that is part of a research project by PARIP (Practice as Research in Performance) that investigates how new technology can be used for the documentation of performance, as well as part of ResCen’s ongoing research into revealing the creative process of the artist.

The viewer enters a corridor to find a virtual dancing partner waiting in anticipation at the far end. As they begin to explore the consequences of subtle and extreme changes of motion, the viewer effectively ‘scratches’ the dance video back and forth, faster and slower. The longer they stay the more they discover as new sections of dance and new contexts are revealed. They can meet up to six virtual dancing partners of all ages. 

Rosemary continually investigates new contexts for her work and mew media. In Remote Dancing she and Nic Sandiland investigate ways to involve an audience intimately as participating partner and choreographer. Remote Dancing premiered at the Festival Hall, the South Bank in 2004 and has toured internationally and nationally over the last three years. It is often accompanied by another of their installations, Stereo Dances and Rosemary’s four films for broadcast made with filmmakers Peter Anderson and David Hinton. The sound for the installation and three of the films is composed by Graeme Miller.

Devised and created by Rosemary Lee and Nic Sandiland
On screen performers: Matilda Lee-Kronick, Omari Carter, Henrietta Hale, Frank Bock, Linda Lewcock, Colin MacLean
Sound by Graeme Miller

Originally created through the Arts Council of England’s Capture series and further developed with a commission by RFH Education, South Bank Centre London with additional support from ResCen.

photo: Nic Sandiland