A journey so far ~ ENSEMBLE DANS-TANK

ENSEMBLE DANS-TANK is a collection of dance projects lead by dancer Hayley J S Matthews, established in 2014 in Norwich, UK. The collection includes solos, ensembles, movements and the integration of public into professional dance performance. Hayley leads the projects, often alongside professional and public collaborators.

Through ENSEMBLE DANS-TANK projects Hayley is driven to investigate freedom and the unleashing of dance into the world uninhibited, she wants dance to reach deeply into our lives, with powerful impacts on our health and development. Hayley breaks down forth walls and unveils and supports the beauty of artists and participants alike. She practices deeply listening to the currents of the world and works out how dance can speak these and offer space to digest and resolve them. At times this plays out in solo practice, at others in relationship to a community, approaches to artist support, untethering from systemic malfunctions or the growing and sharing of a philosophy. Hayley nurtures healthy communities, supported by dance, that integrate artists, participants and audiences and relate to the world around them.

Hayley integrates her knowledge and experience as one of under 50 Rolfers in the UK into ENSEMBLE DANS-TANK projects. Rolfers work in the legacy of Ida Rolf with touch and movement education to help people come into a more harmonious relationship with gravity. They help clients process trauma, resolve pain and develop healthier relationships to their bodies in the world.

In establishing ENSEMBLE DANS-TANK, first Hayley integrated children between 0-4 into professional performance, in project ‘Still in the City’. She was curious to research a space that allowed young children to develop freedom of movement and expression, freedom in their life and the potential for freedom in their most formative developmental years, while growing up in urban environments. Knowing that our experiences between 0-4 years are the most powerful at setting our patterns for the rest of our lives. The project took place across Norfolk theatres and libraries. It trained three dancers and a live musician, Teresa Manjua, Jen Vogtel, Guiseppe Claudio Insalaco and Hej Jones, to learn to read the weight distribution of young children and respond in a way that encouraged them and gave them space to join them onstage, becoming dancers with them. It supported parents to be present but let go of their children in a safe environment. This allowed the potential for the children to explore freedom of expression to be heightened, their confidence grown. And on the flip side of all this the children’s untamed beauty was unleashed for all to cherish and learn from, held and contained as it was by the professional dancers moving intelligently and intuitively around them with live music following the movements of the dancers and the children, supporting it, encouraging it and calling it into fullness; as the project opened as public performance. The parents became audience members and observed in ore, the who is learning from who was allowed to somersault. The live shows were filmed and edited and projected onto the fabric of the City itself, becoming an exhibition at Norwich Cathedral cloister, accompanied by live music, haunting and bringing life the arches. And so bringing the freedom the dancers and children had found back out into the urban space that can so inhibit it, for all to see.

Hayley moved from here to a solo moment, having stood back during Still in the City as choreographer she returned to her own dancing body to research how we can ‘go home’ through the layers of ourselves to an unleashed life force that can never be tamed, and dance from there. She listened to 86 local people through hosting 11 events; these folk included musicians, those come to find home in Norwich from overseas, students, those who stayed for a long time in the homes of their parents, fellow artists, graduate dancers. She asked questions and listened to what the journey home to belonging meant to them. And then supported by her own embodied therapeutic and meditation practices she attempted to wade through the layers of herself to belonging and speak these through movement, words and music, woven with fragments of the voices of others she had collected from outreach events. This resolved as an hour long solo dance performance, accompanied by musician Hej Jones, who assisted her to find the sonic resolutions which spoke these layers of ‘homing’, accompanied by the voices she had collected. She calls this show ‘Home-Solo’. At times it is deeply sad, as it dwells in the acknowledgements that we are alone in our own bodies, at others it expresses the journey of acceptance of our unique kookiness and at others explores the connectivity of our skin, that contains us, yet is permeable and able to connect us to the world. 

Intrigued by this homing journey and how it effects the deep potential of our movements in the world, Hayley explored this further in next project ‘Flying Solo’. Through the community research and the research through her own dancing body in ‘Home Solo’ she felt sure that if dancers went on this journey through themselves they could accesses a deep potential to communicate and move audiences through their movements. But she was also sure there were more ways to do this than those she had unearthed in her own solo practice. So she invited fellow dancers Tyrone Isaac- Stuart and Nii-Tete Yartey to join her in a process based performance research. She shared the research topic of homing and how she had met it so far and invited the three of them on a journey. The journey asked them to bring some solo material into a process where it was first performed in the place where their dancing journey was sparked, second together in the forest and in two theatres and lastly alone again where there lives are based now. Two other artists accompanied them on the journey, Martin J Gent and Alistair H M Simmons. Martin to open dialogue, which formed recorded conversations that mapped the journey and Alistair to photograph the dances and create an exhibition of photography and snippets of the dialogue. Tyrone Isaac Stuart is a London based dancer from Caribbean heritage who blends hip hop dance with his own contemporary jazz compositions, Nii-Tete Yartey is a Traditional and Contemporary African dancer, based in Accra Ghana. So the starting points and modalities were diverse, and it allowed the dancers to see wide into this homing journey and tap into it, and then unveil it for audiences in performances and through the final exhibition.

Having knocked up against the more shadowy, addicted, turbulent parts of herself in Home Solo and Flying Solo, as well as her own creative life-force Hayley then felt drawn towards the human shadow and it’s normalisation. She felt the societal human tendency to group together those suffering from a particular heaviness in one part of their shadow – addiction, mental health, pain, many other shadows, and to compartmentalise those suffering and ‘treat’ them – rather than acknowledge that we all have these shadows, and to integrate them into daily living and societal structures. She had a long-standing relationship with a recovery centre in Norfolk, ‘Finchams Turn Around Stays’, where she had spent time volunteering and recovering over many years and turned there to bring together a community of artists and those in recovery, for a year. The research question was ‘could we support a process of showing our shadows without drama to the world through sound, photography and dance making?’. This resolved as a 30 minute immersive show called ‘Booth’, which combined live sound, recorded sound, dance and projection composed in and by the community that gathered at Finchams for the year. The show invites the audience into the centres of a large, indoor space to experience sound, dance and projection unfold around them as the community share their shadows, giving the audience not a thinking, rational explanation of the human shadow but a felt sense.

Along this journey Hayley had been learning how to operate as a self-producing dance artist and breaking at the seams with what this asked of her; to access funds, manage projects and develop relationships while also making sure she was paying her bills, on top of the high physical and emotional demands of being a dancer. The weight felt too much. She suffered injuries, felt overwhelmed most of the time, and struggled to pay her bills. Taking stock she realised she couldn’t grow any further, without acknowledging and addressing the shadow of the dance industry itself. The pandemic hit, her work as she knew halted, and, Sanctuary on the Fault Line was born.

Sanctuary on the Fault Line is now growing out of the deadwood of 12 women dancers loosing all their work and being completely halted by a world-wide pandemic. And at the same time given the time and space to acknowledge that their working lives had been too financially precarious, lacking the space,  ground, foundations or circumstances for the physical and emotional demands of their craft. And this was deeply effecting not only their health but the quality of performance the public received. So borrowing from Clarissa Pinkola Estes invitation for women to ‘run with the wolves’, they ran to the woods, roof-tops and gardens. Sanctuary on the Fault Line is now an establishing healthy alternative system for dance to operate in. Which calls on womanhood and wildness to unleash the deep potential of dance by liberating, bringing to health  and into community women dancers world-wide. Dances operate in ‘wild’ spaces’ in gift economies, giving dancers access to direct remuneration for the their craft, growing amounts of neighbours and passers by come as audiences, there are no systemic pre-movements beyond the dancer’s central and sacred skill set, there is an upmost care for the dancer within each woman and the world she inhabits, with dancers setting their own terms and bringing the life-blood of spontaneity back to their dances. And a leave no trace practice without touring, lights or buildings. Instead the dancers are beginning to develop national and international ‘touring’ possibilities by teaching the solo work they create in this space of freedom to each other and ‘touring’ it through each other’s bodies and skills.   There is no  ‘company’ with overheads and wages, no dramaturgy, no learning to be an entrepreneur, no choreographer accept the dancers themselves, listening deeply to the currents of the world, digesting them and bringing them to gesture, sharing this with local people through performance. And so returning dance to its sacred role as a part of the tapestry of emotional health for the human family; by bringing dancers back to health and them taking space to give their digestions of the of world, back to the world, through their gestures.

The work of Sanctuary on the Fault Line is only just begun….