Keynote (Un)apologetic Bodies // Kate Marsh (UK)

The keynote and panel aims to bring together speakers from different dance professions to share perspectives on non-normative bodies in dance under a normative gaze. What kind of minorities does that create? How can they maintain power and take up space within the stronghold of a mainstream dance aesthetic? How can they work and create without apologies? How can the sector become better at their role as ally, in supporting non-normative bodies to tell their stories?

Keynote Radical Imagination // Kate Marsh

In her keynote, Kate Marsh will will consider the power of collective voices and experiences, drawing from conversations with crip friends and the ideology within Adrienne Maree Brown's “Pleasure Activism“. Kate aims to provoke a discussion that forefronts pleasure and joy in our ongoing demands for autonomy and agency in the arts. This is a development from her earlier research into leadership, specifically the urgent need to radically re-imagine leadership in dance and the arts, to privilege the vast and diverse knowledge and experience that exists within crip artists and thinkers.

Kate Marsh is a disabled / Crip artist researcher. Her practice-research specifically explores creating space for disabled / Crip and other marginalised artists. She is an Assistant Professor at C-DaRE (Centre for Dance Research at Coventry University). Her PhD thesis PhD focusses on leadership in the context of dance and disability and draws strongly on the voices of artists to interrogate questions around notions of leadership, perceptions and the body.