Trendswatch | Take your partners

Museums are increasingly welcoming dancers as a way to widen their audience and help them appreciate exhibitions from a new perspective. Siobhan Davies Dance is a contemporary dance company that has visited museums across Europe after partnering with Dancing in Museums, an initiative to foster collaboration between dance organisations, museums and local communities. 

“Visitors were surprised and occasionally unhappy that there was movement in the gallery, but far more often they were delighted,” says Siobhan Davies, the director of the dance company.

Different dancers would bring their own way of working with the objects and art. “The audience had a wonderful time and said they had looked at the art differently,” Davies says. 

Davies particularly enjoyed one session where her dancers compared the wear and tear that happens to their bodies with that of the artworks on display. “It resonated with the curators who work hard to look after their paintings and could see the similarities,” she says.

The Florence Nightingale Museum, in Lambeth, London, hosted a performance in 2018 inspired by the deadliest pandemic in human history, the 1918 Spanish flu. The dance piece, suitably titled Contagion, was choreographed by the Shobana Jeyasingh Dance Company and hosted by the museum during its annual late-night opening. 

David Green, the director of the venue, says it helped to create an intimate atmosphere to explore an emotive topic. “Being a small museum made it interactive and personal,” Green says. “The piece is about sheer devastation, so being able to have performers within touching distance of the audience and surrounded by the story of the gallery was particularly effective.”

Dance is also a really good way for museums to appeal to children. The Imagination Museum, a dance theatre piece designed for performances in museums and heritage sites as part of the Dancing in Museums project, provides educational performances and dance workshops where children can use artefacts as props in a routine. 

The performances travel to museums and heritage sites around the world, including 31 venues in the UK. An upcoming event (dates to be confirmed) is a commemoration of the 400th anniversary of the Mayflower ship – performers will explore what it was like to make the historic journey from England to the US aboard the Mayflower in 1620.

Katie Green, the artistic director of the Imagination Museum, says: “By bringing historical stories and artefacts alive through dance we try to draw attention to their more human side. So we won’t just look at a fragment of a pot, but at the person who owned, buried or lost it or the person whose skeleton is on display and what they were really like.”

An exhibition held over three days in May, called Dancing in Peckham, explored a range of political issues through dance and photography. Topics tackled included the Troubles in Northern Ireland and a type of dance that women were forbidden from doing in Iran. 

“We’re looking at how dance can be a refuge, a place of expression, and processing things in relation to political developments,” says Jamila Prowse, the curator of the exhibition. It isn’t just dancers entering the world of museums though – it is vice versa, too. 

In April, Sadler’s Wells Theatre in London hosted sculptures in a performance of Vessel. This was a collaboration between Belgian choreographer Damien Jalet and Japanese experimental sculptor Kohei Nawa. Inspired by the body’s composition predominately being made up of water, the near-naked dancers inhabited a flooded stage, sometimes standing on polyurethane works that were created by Nawa.

 

Dance transcends age and language. Whether it’s a ball, a ballet, a festival or a workshop, the art form has found a firm place in museums.