Laban Dancers

When I started as Artist in Residence at Laban, I was worried that although I had a lot of experience drawing (and teaching ) life drawing, I knew extremely little about dance. I made the decision never to use a camera and to sit and watch and draw for hours. What I learnt was that the Dance becomes a thing in itself – the ‘movement’ we talk about in life drawing becomes many movements, so the shapes the body makes, and the shapes between the bodies that are moving, become crucially important. This painting was oil on wood and was painted in my studio when I tried to distil hundreds of drawings focusing on the patterns and rhythms the dances created over the surface of the floor.