There is a whole ocean here for becoming in

Guest post by the director of Fountain

Alexandrina Hemsley

06 Sep 22

I have always daydreamed. The shelter I find in dancing, writing, choreography and film-making are a way of reality-dealing. Reality-healing.

When I tune into my body dancing, or I work with other dance artists and creatives in the studio, I am seeking information; a dialogue, perhaps a form of counsel from these live, embodied encounters.

As I breathe and move, I connect with my many selves, the selves of others and the environments we are within. Earthly, psychic, spiritual, 'real', 'imagined' environments.

I am so invested in these processes of bodily and choreographic inquiry, this dreamscape of dancing, because this work offers up space for multiplicity.

There is a resistance to binaries and hierarchies. This creative process feels tender and so important within developing a creative practice I hope to be transformative and reparative. It is lifelong work and learning.

Water metaphors, ideas around embodied, non-linear time, and questioning the gazes encountered by bodies, have been a key part of my creative and critical writing practice since 2012.

I conjure them as ways of voicing through systemic and intimate harms. Concerning myself with water helps me to language fluidity and experiences of mental health, which soothe, encourage and support a sense of being in the world.

Within my film work, water has featured recurrently. Primarily in Saved (2019), made in collaboration as Project O with Jamila Johnson-Small/SERAFINE1369 and my solo work Maelstrom Under Glass (2020)

"...this was her becoming ocean floor.
Born within an embryonic sack of lava; cooling and cracking red liquid, cracking into solid black.
She sleeps for several millennia.
Her soft snores influence the tide."

— Poem extract from Maelstrom Under Glass

After a decade of both live performance and short film practices, surfacing my latest dance film Fountain has been immense.

I started researching the movement material in 2020 and since then have had the opportunity to work with wonderful creatives in London, Leeds and Manchester.

Through its ups and downs I have been moved by the dedication of the whole team and all the layers of experience each person has brought to this film.

With Fountain, I have strived to make a work that takes the autobiographical and expands it into an invitation to consider and encounter each other; to build creative universes which hold, show and protect Black bodies in all our multiples.

The work draws on water to navigate tides of joy, loss bereavement and repair.

"We are shaping water
underwater and surfacing our soil.
we dance our choices"

— Excerpt from Fountain

There is a quiet rage within my work too. I am angry that I have to make and un-make simultaneously; make art while un-making power plays dictating who has representation, legitimacy, legibility, value and visibility.

Make love while un-making the traumas from abuse. Making texts while unmaking my pressure to be articulate.

And yet, the solace I find in my artistic practice happens as follows: I often start with writing. Writing crystallises (or glitches), the inky, the marbling, the messy. Writing draws expression and voice upwards. Dancing splinters my perceptions of time and feelings; I can be soaked in a multiple — space, time and possibilities become endless.

Both writing and dancing feel like a dive and a skim at the same time. I wonder if I can only dance because I write and vice versa?