Dance, Architecture and Engineering

This book was born from a year of exchanges of movement ideas generated in cross-practice conversations and workshops with dancers, musicians, architects and engineers. Events took place at key cultural institutions such as the Royal Academy of Arts, London; and The Lowry, Salford, as well as on-site at architectural firms and on the streets of London. The author engages with dance’s offer of perspectives on being in place: how the ’ordinary person’ is facilitated in experiencing the dance of the city, while also looking at shared cross-practice understandings in and about the body, weight and rhythm. There is a prioritizing of how embodied knowledges across dance, architecture and engineering can contribute to decolonizing the production of place - in particular, how dance and city-making cultures engage with female bodies and non-white bodies in today’s era of #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. Akinleye concludes in response conversations about ideas raised in the book with John Bingham-Hall, Liz Lerman, Dianne McIntyer and Richard Sennett. The book is a fascinating resource for those drawn to spatial practices from dance to design to construction.

Adesola Akinleye is a choreographer artist-scholar, Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University. Trained at Ballet Rambert, her career began dancing with Dance Theatre of Harlem, later working with UK Companies such as Carol Straker Dance Company and Green Candle. She creates dance works ranging from live performance that is often site-specific, to dance films, installations and texts including academic publications. She is a Research Fellow with Theatrum Mundi, visiting lecturer at Central Saint Martins, and Research Affiliate and visiting artist at MIT.