Laboratori 2022

 

Choreographers 
 

Ed Myhill  
Originally from London, Ed grew up in Leeds and trained at the Hammond School in Chester, followed by three years at Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance. He joined NDCWales as an apprentice in Autumn 2015 and is now a full time dancer with the Company. Ed has toured extensively across the UK and internationally, performing works by choreographers including Alexander Ekman, Roy Assaf and Marcos Morau. In 2018 he choreographed ‘Why Are People Clapping!?’ for NDCWales which has been part of the Company’s repertoire since 2019. The work has also been adapted for both online and outdoor performances. As well as dance, Ed is also a freelance sound designer, creating sound scores for various choreographers and film makers. 

Photo: Kirsten Mcternan
 

Deborah Light 
Deborah is a mover, maker and mother based in Cardiff. She creates work as an independent dance artist and is co-director of Light / Ladd / Emberton.  

Deborah’s independent work described as ‘bold, beautiful and intimate’ spans theatre/studio performance, installation, site based practice, film and still image. It includes a series of works focused on female identity: HIDE which showcased at British Dance Edition and Spring Loaded at The Place, Cortex a Place Prize commision, beyond reality, Angelica toured with Dance Bytes and Dance Roads and Seeds and Bones a project that has been in gestation while Deborah has had her 3 young children. During lock down she researched work together with her family called Who’s in Charge.  

Light / Ladd / Emberton makes bilingual dance productions which move people physically and emotionally and are performed with and for audiences in castles, village halls, theatres, urban spaces, and on beaches, across Wales. Their work has features in British Council Edinburgh Showcase, Surf the Wave UK dance showcase, A Nation's Theatre at Battersea Arts Centre, Wales in Kolkata in India, and BBC’s Dance Passion. 

Light / Ladd / Emberton projects include: amser / time, a short climate-focused film for BBC Dance Passion; Danfona Ddawns / Deliver A Dance doorstep dances across Wales for Christmas 2020; Disgo Distaw Owain Glyndŵr Silent Disco and Disgo Zoom Disco gdg/feat. Owain Glyndŵr, a silent disco tracking the rise and fall of the rebel Prince of Wales, performed live in castles and urban spaces and online; Croesi Traeth / Crossing A Beach a site-specific performance on Harlech beach; and CAITLIN, an immersive performance for an audience of 20.  

Deborah also works as a movement director for theatre including Theatr Genedlaethol, Taking Flight, The Other Room and she lectures in movement for actors at RWCMD. Performance credits include Laura Wilson, Joanna Young, Caroline Sabin, Run Ragged/Jem Treays, Sean Tuan John, Longborough Festival Opera, Diversions, Polish Dance Theatre, and the Institute of Crazy Dancing.  

Deborah uses her experience and knowledge to offer both strategic and individual support to freelance artists and the dance sector in Wales. She was part of UK/Wales freelance task force, is a Freelance Champion for the Creative Industries Federation and an Arts associate for Arts Council Wales. 

Photo: Deborah Light

June Campbell- Davies 
June is a Cardiff Based dancer choreographer and Carnival Artist. Trained at the Laban Centre for Movement & Dance in London, her early experience working with Moving Being Mixed Media Theatre Company under the directorship of Geoff Moore, Dance Wales, Striking Attitudes under Caroline Lamb left a lasting impression and influence throughout her career. She has worked in higher education teaching students at the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, Cardiff Metropolitan University and for Rubicon Dance’s full-time dance course and outreach programme. Since SWICA (South Wales Intercultural Carnival Arts) folded in 2015, her experience in Carnival Arts as consultant & facilitator has led to new collaborations with Butetown Carnival/Eisteddfod ‘Carnifyl Yr Mor’ and also Wales Millennium Centre’s performance engagement programme.’  

June returned to theatre with National Theatre Wales production of Lifted by Beauty/Adventures in Dreaming in 2016 a site-specific project based in Rhyl, North Wales, and the River Wye Project outdoor theatre piece ‘The Water Ones’ in collaboration with Bristol Based Duo Act “Desperate Men.”  

To date June is involved with a number of smaller organizations and projects, leading movement sessions alongside other facilitators for Breathe Creative team under the Directorship of Alex Bowen focusing on arts and wellbeing for their outreach programmes.  

For Oasis One World Choir - a newly formed organisation – she is leading regular sessions on a voluntary basis within the Oasis Centre programming, leading movement sessions alongside Singer Songwriter Laura Bradshaw and Tracy Pallant, Filmmaker and Administrator for Asylum seekers and Refugees.  

For Artes Mundi 9 in partnership with National Museum of Wales June was commissioned to create a site-specific durational piece “Sometimes We’re Invisible “ which was created and filmed in 2020 for their Lates programming.  

At present June is one of many collaborators paired with singer-songwriter Seun Babatola for this year's NDCWales/Tŷ Cerdd /SSAP Plethu: affricerdd collaborations.

Photo: Ffion Campbell-Davies

Faye Tan 
Faye was born in Singapore and trained at the Singapore Ballet Academy and School of The Arts before graduating from the Rambert School in London. She then joined Verve, the postgraduate company of the Northern School of Contemporary Dance in Leeds, performing in works by Anton Lachky, Athina Vahla and Efrosini Protopapa. Faye joined Frontier Danceland (Singapore) in 2016, working with choreographers such as Shahar Binyamini, Thomas Lebrun, Edouard Hue, I-Fen Tung, Annie Vigier and Franck Apertet, amongst a varied pool of other makers. The work Faye did in Singapore also included outreach programmes, coordinating Frontier Danceland's youth dance training programme, teaching, choreographing, digital marketing, videography and photography. In May 2019 Faye worked with Richard Chappell Dance (UK) on Silence Between Waves, performing and working with local residents of various ages and abilities in Devon, before joining NDCWales for Rygbi: Annwyl I mi / Dear to me and subsequently as a company dancer in December 2019.  

Faye choreographed 'Moving is everywhere, forever' which was performed as part of NDCWales' repertoire indoors and outdoors in 2021. 

Photo: Kirsten Mcternan
 

Visual Artists

George Hampton Wale
George Hampton Wale is an Abergavenny-based artist with a background in visual arts, movement, and physical making, whose practice explores themes of place, belonging, and queer- identity.  Raised just outside of Abergavenny, George received a Bachelor of Fine Arts and Visual Culture from the University of the West of England in Bristol.  With extensive experience in prop making, costume design, and prosthetic fabrication, George developed a specialism in large-scale costume fabrication over several years. George went on to work as a costume artist on projects such as James Bachelor’s an “Evening-Length Performance”, as well as Corin Sworn and Claricia Parinussa’s “eco-co-location”, among others.  Returning to Wales in January 2022 George took part in the g39 Jerwood UNITe Residency in Cardiff, where they created large-scale dancing wind sculptures that allude to the paradox of bodies being out of and within one’s control simultaneously.  Following on from the residency, George will be exploring the performative potential of sculpture through dance and movement.

Photo: Polly Thomas

Cecile Johnson Soliz
Cecile is a first generation American of Bolivian heritage. She was born in Germany and grew up mainly in Merced in the San Joaquin Valley of California. She also lived in Mexico, Bolivia, Brazil, Italy and Ghana before moving to Cardiff in 1975 to study for one year at Cardiff College of Art. She then completed a B.A. and M.A. in Fine Art at Goldsmiths’ College, London. Cecile began exhibiting in 1989 in London. Since returning to Cardiff as the Henry Moore Fellow in Sculpture (1995-1997) she has exhibited and done numerous projects and commissions in the U.K. and abroad. She has two children and lives in Cardiff with her husband Will. She works in their Cardiff city centre studio. 

Between 1998 and 2011 Cecile was Senior Lecturer, Head of Fine Art and Programme Leader in Sculpture at CSAD. From 2013-2014 she was a recipient of a Major Creative Wales Award from the Arts Council of Wales. In 2017 Cecile was awarded the Gold Medal in Fine Art at the National Eisteddfod and in 2018 and won the Oriel Davies Open which led to her most recent, solo exhibition, TWIST, in Newtown in 2019. Her first commission to work with dancers, Exploratory Dances for Drawing and Sculpture was seen at the launch party for the Cardiff Dance Festival 2019. 

 

Mentors

Jo Fong 
Jo lives in Wales and her creative work reflects the need in these times for people to come together. Her artistic practice is an evolving, collaborative approach which puts ideas around belonging or forming community in the forefront. 

Recent performances and events; Ways of Being Together, Neither Here Nor There, To Tell You the Truth, Our Land, What Will People Need? Nettles: How to Disagree? and The Sun’s Come Out created in collaboration with artist Sonia Hughes. A Brief History of Difference with Das Clarks, Marathon of Intimacies with artist Anushiye Yarnell, Jo contributed to Luke Hereford’s Grandmother’s Closet at WMC and she is currently on the road with The Rest of Our Lives created with clown and circus maker George Orange. 
In February this year, Jo gathered 14 artists and their guests for a two week shared residency Ways of Being Together Toynbee Takeover, London. The evolving artist-led community created space and time to reconnect, repair, replenish and explore performance making and co-creation. The annual convergence is layered centring learning, support, coming out and actioning change.  

Jo is a Creative Associate with the Wales Millennium Centre, Cardiff. 

Photo: Simon Banham 
 

Sioned Huws
Sioned is a Welsh choreographer base in London, born in Bangor 1965 and spent her childhood on the family farm in Snowdonia. She started making contemporary dance and performance in New York 1989, whilst studying at the Merce Cunningham Studios, after her training at the Laban Centre London 1983-86 and dancing with Transitions for one year 1986-87. Her work focuses on perception, memory, person and place within choreographic structures; systems patterning small details that allow for the unexpected within a world sensed through an awareness of physical movement. Moving on the Rhythm of One is a new project, started by way of an encounter between dance and psychoanalysis, to dance our way with words in new patterns moving the body in language. 2009 Sioned was recipient of a Creative Wales Ambassadors Award; 2009-11 and 2015-18 an International Program Award by The Saison Foundation, Tokyo, in collaboration with ARTizan for her Aomori Project and Odori-Dawns-Dance that toured to over thirty venues in UK, Asia, Europe and Australia. Sioned continues to ask the question “How dance can have a body that does not have an image?” 

Here is a paraphrase I like by the artist Louise Bourgeoise “When one tries to find a memory that is nostalgia but when a memory comes to you that is form.” And another by the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan “I think with my feet.”

Photo: Sioned Huws
 

Dancers

Gaia Cicolani, Alys Davies, Elan Elidyr, Mika George Evans. Niamh Keeling, Zi Hong Mok, Lucy Jones, Mario Manara, Marine Tournet