SITTING COMFORTABLY (2016 - ongoing)
Sitting comfortably is a 50-minute touring performance for both sheltered housing/care homes and theatres that celebrates life and joy both for audiences and participants’ and the changes that happen as we age. We hear so much about people remembering unhappy events in their lives – this project is about happiness.
Sitting Comfortably symbolically uses wingback chairs as the lives and memories of the people who have sat in them. By creating a performance that aims to reach the highest standards of artistic achievement with residents of care homes/sheltered housing and isolated individuals working alongside professional younger and older performers and practitioners; Sitting Comfortably aspires to make a difference to the way that older people are perceived by society and the wider arts sector throughout the U.K.
This performance is inspired by the image of my Mother, who was admitted to a care home in the last week of her life. She was slumped despondently in a grey plastic wing backed chair, one of 20 in the care home lounge. How I wanted her to raise her head, get up and walk towards me with a smile, arms outstretched to greet me and we would hug and dance around that room as I remembered she had done when she was younger.
Performances in 2016/17 supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation Sharing the Stage: widening participation in Performance. The initial research and development for Sitting Comfortably was supported by: Arts Council England, Gulbenkian Foundation: Sharing the Stage and Jerwood Choreographic Research Project with funds from Appetite, Battersea Arts Centre, Birmingham Rep, DanceXchange, Fierce Festival, Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, The Place.
Sitting Comfortably symbolically uses wingback chairs as the lives and memories of the people who have sat in them. By creating a performance that aims to reach the highest standards of artistic achievement with residents of care homes/sheltered housing and isolated individuals working alongside professional younger and older performers and practitioners; Sitting Comfortably aspires to make a difference to the way that older people are perceived by society and the wider arts sector throughout the U.K.
This performance is inspired by the image of my Mother, who was admitted to a care home in the last week of her life. She was slumped despondently in a grey plastic wing backed chair, one of 20 in the care home lounge. How I wanted her to raise her head, get up and walk towards me with a smile, arms outstretched to greet me and we would hug and dance around that room as I remembered she had done when she was younger.
Performances in 2016/17 supported by the Gulbenkian Foundation Sharing the Stage: widening participation in Performance. The initial research and development for Sitting Comfortably was supported by: Arts Council England, Gulbenkian Foundation: Sharing the Stage and Jerwood Choreographic Research Project with funds from Appetite, Battersea Arts Centre, Birmingham Rep, DanceXchange, Fierce Festival, Greenwich and Docklands International Festival, The Place.
