“I am a contemporary dancer, dance maker, director and Rolfer. As an artist I’m informed by my initial studies in fine art, art history and curatorship as well as my training in dance. My Rolfing and dancing practices inform and support one another.  I perform and make both solo and ensemble work. I am interested in collaborations and interdisciplinary working and creating spaces that allow people to express, and for audiences to get close up to that. I  have most recently collaborated with technology artist Will Wilson (Laboratory Media), Film Artist and Photographer Al Simmons, Aerialist Daisy Black, Writer Lucinda Everett, Artist Connie Page and musician Hej Jones.

My work has been described as thoughtful, engaging,  intelligent, beautiful, strong, moving, compelling, unconventional.

‘I’m interested in how space inside us and how we cultivate it and educate it affects and has a relationship with the space outside – the theater space, the street, other people, our community, our cities.  I’ve believed for a long time that a performance can create a microcosm to introduce and to breed a different way of being or a new possibility. I hope that my work does that sometimes. If we build new possibilities as performers and makers, if people experience it, then maybe, it will filter out into the wider community.

The question of how we can make integrated spaces as performers and makers also preoccupies me, and how we can reach and touch audiences; build a space where audiences are not in  passive receipt and how we can permeate the ‘forth wall’

www.vimeo.com/hayleymatthews”