Helen Kindred
mover | maker | practitioner | scholar
Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore,
Adesola Akinleye & Helen Kindred, 2026.
Dancing as dialogue: a study of movement and place that explores the fundamental entanglement of humans and the environment through dance.
Dancing Place: Scores of the City, Scores of the Shore intertwines dance ethnography, Black feminism and a new materialist lens to explore movement scores as methods and tools for a practice of eco-somatic, place-based art-making. The book examines research processes that explore somatic awareness, offering choreographic movement scores as methods for sensing and belonging within the world around. Dancing Place blends scholarly text, storytelling and poetic prose to discuss embodied dance methods that offer a reflective engagement within the environment, establishing a framework for understanding how movement both emerges from and shapes the places we inhabit. An essential resource for dance practitioners, spatial planners, ecologists and environmental scholars, Dancing Place opens pathways for understanding dance as a method of reciprocity and deep relational practice.
The ‘Female’ Dancer: a soma-scientific approach
edited by Claire Farmer and Helen Kindred , 2024.
This book questions dancers’ relationship with ‘female’ through biological, anatomical, scientific and self-social identity. Recognising the complexities of a fixed-ness of ‘female’ (as much as a fixed-ness of ‘male’), we seek through the contributory voices of scientists, dance and somatic scholars, and movement practitioners to discuss and unpack some of the identities, assumptions, and perceptions of female dancing bodies.
We recognise ‘female’ as both a gendered and biological term and encourage contributions that consider how ‘female’ relates to lived experiences and bodily knowledge through social, political, cultural contexts and those that relate to ‘female’ as attributed to biological sex and topics that reflect this in terms of physiology and anatomy, and how multiple lenses to the ‘female’ offer a rich and complex understanding of dancers’ health, training, and well-being.
Available from Routledge Taylor Francis
'Moving Meditations: embodying Bartenieff Fundamentals through sensorial awareness of breath, bones, and gravity'
Helen Kindred. 2022.
Journal of Dance, Movement & Spiritualities, Volume 8 Numbers 1 & 2
'Improvisation and Change', Animated, Summer Helen Kindred. 2020.
Queering, for Helen, is a process of questioning; the possibility of change, of resistance, of questioning assumptions, blurring boundaries, embracing difference and defying a singular definition. Here, she describes the improvised, participatory performance/presentation she shared at the Queering the Somatic symposium and the thinking that expands from it
‘Wright-ing the Somatic: Narrating the Bodily'
special issue Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices
vol.11, no.1
Adesola Akinleye and Helen Kindred. 2019.
Guest Editors
KnowingUnknowing CD/DVD/Text. 2019.
Benjamin Dwyer | Pete Gomes | Helen Kindred
The KnowingUnknowing DVD features a unique music and dance performance with Helen Kindred and Benjamin Dwyer filmed by Pete Gomes. This publication booklet features essays by Benjamin Dwyer, Helen Kindred and Pete Gomes.
Published by and available through Farpoint Records
'In-the-between-ness: Decolonising and Re-inhabiting Our Dancing',
Adesola Akinleye & Helen Kindred. 2018.
This book explores Black British dance from a number of previously-untold perspectives. Bringing together the voices of dance-artists, scholars, teachers and choreographers, it looks at a range of performing arts from dancehall to ballet, providing valuable insights into dance theory, performance, pedagogy, identity and culture.
Akinleye and Kindred discuss their need to be alert to how Western values creep into their creative processes through the language they use to discuss, describe and facilitate dance. The chapter explores their attempts to extract their ‘dancing bodies’ and choreographic processes from the Imperialist language of Western binaries. Despite their creative processes being informed by their multicultural, trans-national life experiences, how they talk about, or describe their work is often limited by the necessity of describing it using Western mainstream terms, which they suggest is a continuing legacy of colonization. The chapter discusses ways they have sought to decolonize the environment of their creative exploration.