Studio Seminar in Art and the Public Sphere: Choreographing the City (Spring 2022)
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Dr. Adesola Akinleye is a dancer, choreographer and artist-scholar. She began her career as a dancer with Dance Theatre of Harlem Workshop Ensemble (USA) later working in UK Companies such as Green Candle, and Carol Straker Dance Company. Over the past twenty years she has created dance works ranging from dance films, installation and texts to live performance that is often site-specific and involves a cross-section of the community. Adesola draws on non-Western, Indigenous and Africanist world views to explore how body-mind-environment form an intra-connected ontology. Her work is characterized by an interest in glimpsing and voicing peoples lived-experiences through creative moving portraiture. A key aspect of her process is the artistry of opening-up and exchanging creative processes between people (from women in low wage employment to ballerinas to performance for young audiences to city makers). Adesola creates live performance, installation and film, she has published in the field of dance as well as cultural and social studies. Her work includes the editing and curation of Narratives in Black British Dance: embodied practices, Palgrave Macmillan, for which she was shortlisted for One Dance UK’s Impact in Dance Writing Award (2018). Most recent publications include editing and curating the anthology (re:)claiming ballet, Intellect books and the monograph Dance, Architecture and Engineering (Dance in Dialogue), Bloomsbury Publishers (selected for the MIT Summer 2021 suggested reading list).
Adesola is a fellow with Theatrum Mundi. She is founder and co-artistic director of DancingStrong Movement Lab. Working with co-director, Helen Kindred, their current focus, Concrete-Water-Flesh, is hybrid physical-web-based live performance. This work sees performance-art as living simultaneously across geographic location and across time. DancingStrong Movement Lab. also includes triip (turning research ideas into practice) to cultivate a unique multi-generational, multi-disciplinary nurturing and practice-based ensemble space. Akinleye is also a certified teacher in GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS® practice.
