From Moving Well to Kick Up A Fuss Collective
We thought it was time to draw attention to the many off-shoots of Moving Memory Dance – the artists and participants who have worked with us over the years and gone on to set up their own companies or develop their own work in dance and theatre. Our Off-Spring!
This first article, written by Frances Moran of Kick Up a Fuss Collective, charts their journey from Moving Well workshops to performing at events and festivals to setting up their own company of tenacious and talented women. Enjoy!
We are a group of women who have benefited from workshops and performances with Moving Memory Dance Theatre Company since 2017. In 2018 we performed in Start Stomping at the Boing Festival, at the Gulbenkian Arts Centre and at Turner Contemporary and we also took the opportunity to train to run Moving Well sessions using the Moving Memory methodology. July 2019 saw us taking an active role in the Love Grows project. Workshops in schools, care homes and Age UK centres immersed us in these settings, engaging with the very young to some of the most senior of our citizens. This workshop period culminated in film screenings of the project in some of the locations we had worked in.
However, Love Grows wasnât over, as again there was the Boing Festival to prepare for. We rehearsed in the first few weeks in August 2019 with the core company and Intermoving, a younger group that increased the diversity of the work. On the two days of the festival on 24th and 25thAugust, we ran workshops for family groups who then performed with us – it was a joyful experience.
September saw our main cohort, Frances Hull, Claire Vian, Chloé Gallien and Frances Porritt, really forming into a supportive partnership and running our third Moving Well course of six sessions.
Our group of four had a meeting with Sian prior to the 2019 AGM about our next steps. We wanted to perform more, and the This Girl Can festival at the Gulbenkian was suggested as an appropriate platform for us. We soon came up with the theme of âWhat Would I Say to My Younger Selfâ and decided to invite previous participants of our Moving Well workshops to join us. Rehearsals would start in January 2020.
In December 2019 we rejoined the Love Grows team to perform in the Folkestone Living Advent Calendar. We ran a family workshop so that the participants could join us in the performance. Emerging onto the Bouverie Place Shopping Centre concourse with the original Love Grows Company we performed in an amazing setting, full of happy people with festive spirit. In fact the music was repeated and repeated, we really had to dance our socks off until Sian finally called it a day!
In January 2020, we started rehearsals and the creative process for the This Girl Can festival. Four of our previous participants joined us: Helen Howard, Bim Dyer, Deborah Gasking and Janet Winder. We had nine sessions and during the first two or three many decisions had to be made, some key ones being:
What would we call the group? What would we call the dance? What costumes would we wear? What music would we choose?
In fact all of these decisions were made quite quickly apart from what to call the group. We went through many suggestions from Ageless Manoeuvres to Not Fade Away to Gerry Hatricks but finally agreed upon Kick Up A Fuss Collective. And so an associate company was born.
The dance became And Then She…, the aesthetic was taken from the World War Two poster We Can Do It! of Rosie the Riveter â a woman wearing a knotted headscarf and boiler suit and bending her elbow with her hand in a fist. The music was a selection of favourites from Tracy Chapman to Tears for Fears.
We performed twice at the Gulbenkian on 7th March to very appreciative audiences. We reviewed the whole experience on 11th March – just before the whole world changed.
Like most people during the lockdown period we continued our connection through Zoom. We were grateful to have seven creative Zoom sessions in June 2020 with Sian. In addition to this, we each filmed ourselves dancing for the Moving Memory ten year anniversary film and contributed films for the new online resources.
And Then She… was still alive and kicking. We repurposed the dance for the camera, and had many creative sessions on Zoom figuring out how to use the technology to keep the essence of the dance intact. This resulted in many short films representing all the different sections of the dance. Since then, Frances Porritt and her talented husband Bernie, have edited the sections and created a film.
2023 and Kick Up A Fuss Collective are heading back to the studio. Weâre not finished with And Then She… (itâs only had one outing) but weâre also excited to see where our creativity takes us next.