Jane Turner set up TURNING WORLDS dance company in London in the 1990s as a route to creating collaborative, performative and participatory projects. With an initial residency at Morley College, and in collaboration with composer Daniel Biro, the company created “at the still point in the turning world” that evolved out of tracing spirals through the body into performance patterns, asking ‘does the world turn us, or do we turn the world’.
“What impressed me about the performance was the group’s sense of collective strength and cohesion. Simple natural movements built from within, generated strong shapes and organically created patterns. Even in its most complex moments, the piece retained a spontaneity that reaffirmed its improvisational basis. Here the rigour of ensemble work was fruitfully married to an inventive and imaginative concept. Jane Turner’s choreography – with a clear artistic provenance in New Dance – thus revealed, above all, a capacity to give vivid and concrete embodiment to an abstract idea. Her images not only compelled the attention, they resonated long after in the memory.”
Patrick Campbell, MTD Journal of the Performing Arts.
Meet here the dance artists who have most recently collaborated with TURNING WORLDS:
Natacha Bisarre, Gwen Jones, Grégoire A. Meyer, David Ogle & Ann Pidcock in a short film by photographer/director Chris Frazer Smith.
Dance and Music remind us that “creativity – the means by which human cultures evolve – is a social affair” (Wheeler 2006).
Contemporary choreographic/compositional processes are essentially social in that they are collaborative and interdisciplinary and have their foundations in the liberational politics of the 60s, postmodernism. Contemporary performance culture involves creatively investigating and mapping human experience through listening, play and juxtapositions of difference. Rejecting the linear for the multi-dimensional and working with the body as both subject and object evolves an intercultural praxis that leads to greater understanding of the self as essential to the wider cultural ecology.
These understandings find synergy with the contemporary scientific theories of Chaos and Complexity which affirm the interconnectedness of all things at many scales as part of an ever-expanding universe.
Jane Turner, Choreographer, Artistic Director TURNING WORLDS