people

The artistic directors and facilitators for the project are Christopher Best and Emilyn Claid. Their role is not to teach, but to encourage, mentor and offer help where needed.

Emilyn Claid is an independent dance artist and professor of choreography at Dartington College of Arts. Her book Seductive Ambiguity in Dance was published by Routledge in spring 2006. The book investigates performer spectator relations in Western contemporary dance theatre from 1950s onwards. Emilyn has also completed a three-year performance and writing project, Embodying Ambiguities, co-directed with Valerie Briginshaw at University College Chichester. www.embamb.com Emilyn has choreographed for Cando Dance Company, Phoenix, Ludus, and created her own solos shows. Her latest show Pocketsize toured in Autumn 2006.

Before coming to Dartington, Emilyn was director of the ‘PAL Dance Labs’ held at Bore Place in Kent, a similar environment to Dartington, beautifully situated in the heart of the countryside. The organisers targeted independent performer-choreographers across a wide range of dance forms, together with filmmakers, digital animators, theatre practitioners and writers. Many nationally acclaimed performances were initiated at the PAL Dance Lab.

Christopher Best (www.christopherbest.net) has worked as a composer with dance for nearly twenty years, including collaborations with ‘Scottish Dance Theatre’, ‘Bimba Dance’, the ‘Jamaican National Dance Co’ and Emilyn Claid, for whom he wrote the music to Pocketsize. He is currently senior lecturer and reader in composition at Dartington College of Arts, heading up the undergraduate composition programme.

In addition to composing and teaching, Chris has also been musical director of the ‘Composers/Choreographers Exchange’ at London’s South Bank. Though based in the heart of a busy city, this six-day course ran on very similar lines and had similar aims to that of m&de. It offered opportunities for composers and choreographers to explore diverse starting points for making work and develop varied approaches to collaboration. In 2001 and 2002 Chris was invited to set up and run related exchanges in Madrid.