At BCU Polly teaches movement to undergraduate and postgraduate students.
She also guest teaches externally including open Skinner Releasing Technique workshops and classes.
Polly’s work is practice research and is artistic in nature, although she also talks and writes from an embodied perspective.
Research interests
Polly’s research focuses on process within an artistic practice, ethical approaches to teaching and interaction, and is informed by the Slow Movement, which she views as both an artistic and political position.
As an artist and researcher she creates screendance works that encompass installation and single screen presentations, and which question normative structures of hierarchy in the film making process alongside applying improvisational dance practices to filming and editing procedures. She is also engaged in ongoing investigations of collaborative performative acts between artists that include objects, sound, film, movement and place. Her approach values process as much as outcome, performance and artefact.
Work achievements comprise of a number of accolades including ‘Best Of’ for Making Lemonade in Transmit International Screendance festival, Philadelphia, USA, and semi-finalist in International Videodance Festival, Santiago, Chile, for Vis-er-al.
Polly's current long term research project "We Reap What we Sow (and so I sow)' considers embodiment, dance and gardening. She is curious about at what point a practice or an activity becomes art.
Polly is pleased to hear from prospective students in her research areas.
She currently supervises two PhD students, MA and MFA research projects.
Selected practice and choreographic projects
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2015 Vis-er-al; single screen dance film
9evenings Redux, Vivid Projects, Birmingham: UK
Mexico City Videodance Festival: Mexico
C.O.T.A. festival Fort Worth, Texas: USA
Global Short Film Awards, Cannes: France
Screendance Festival: Stockholm: Sweden
60 seconds International Film Festival: online
FIVC, International Videodance Festival of Chile: Santiago, Chile
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2013 Making Lemonade; multiple screen dance film installation
Journal Dance and Somatic Practices conference, Coventry: UK
9evenings Redux, Vivid Projects, Birmingham: UK
Body, Space, Object symposium, Coventry: UK
Tran(s)mit International Screendance festival, Philadelphia: USA
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2011 Measuring; live performance work
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2008 Multiple Body; multiple screen dance film installation
Vivid Projects, Birmingham: UK Lanchester Gallery, Coventry: UK
Oxford Playhouse, Oxford: UK
Moves 08 Screendance Festival, Manchester: UK
International Festival of Screendance, Brighton: UK
Videodanz Festival, Lisbon: Portugal
ISMETA Festival, New York: USA Somafest, Los Angeles: USA
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2007 Personals. live performance & film works; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
- 2006 Let me count the ways, San Fransisco Fringe Festival
- 2005 Tread Softly Because you Tread on my Dreams
- 2003 i feel a . . .
Selected publications
- 2019 Beyond Technique, Letting Go and the Art of Making Dances; in Skinner Releasing Technique Emerging Narratives, (Emslie et al) Triarchy Press
- 2018 Slow Dancing, The Embodiment Podcast
- 2013 Dancing bodies, Moving Images: An Exhibition of Installed Works at Summer Dancing, Coventry, UK; International Journal of Screendance 3, 144-150. (with Barzey, A.)
- 2012 Nine Ways of Seeing a Body, Sandra Reeve; Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices 3 (1/2), (2011) 1st ed., Axminster: Triarchy Press
Selected Conferences:
Thesis outline
Practice and Process: Skinner Releasing Technique and Making Dance for Performance and on Screen.
Polly’s PhD was the first by portfolio in dance in the UK. Skinner Releasing Technique is primarily considered a dance technique, and although some scholars have discussed the fact that it has the possibility to nurture creativity alongside this, what that means in practical terms has not been unpacked in depth. In the portfolio of works and accompanying thesis Polly proposes that its reach is beyond fostering creativity for its own sake, and suggests that Skinner Releasing Technique can also be utilised as a methodology, as an approach to the creative process, and as a practice of choreographing contemporary dance for both live and screen dance works.