Lea Anderson (director) will be in conversation with Dr Mary Kate Connolly (writer, editor and curator) about Lea’s 40-year diverse career, making dance and performance works, then, now and in the future.

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This year there are two fantastic books out about the Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs dance companies. One has been created and published by the company and the other is by Dr Mary Kate Connolly published by Intellect Books.

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There will be drinks, discussions and book signings.

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Lea Anderson’s The Cholmondeleys and the Featherstonehaughs is a full colour hardback book with photos by Chris Nash, Pau Ros, Eddie Monsoon, Matilda Temperley, Pete Moss and the Douglas Brothers. Edited by Mary Kate Connolly and designed by Pep Sala, it includes drawings, interviews with key collaborators and features costumes designed by Sandy Powell, Emma Fryer, Simon Vincenzi, Joanna Parker, Marie & Maria, and Jess Hooks. The book is available to buy at TACO!

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https://shop.taco.org.uk/products/the-cholmondleys-and-the-featherstones

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What happens to contemporary dance costumes when the show is over and their surrounding legacy slips from view? How might costumes be mobilised towards representational repair, post-performance? Located within Lea Anderson’s choreographic archive, this book charts a series of hands-on interventions with the fabric remains of her companies The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Centred on practices of Disintegration, Preservation, Transaction and Display, they offer provocative modes of engaging with the physical leftovers of performance, the degrading of memory and legacy around pre-digital theatre work, and the temporal material transitions of artefacts enduring outside of traditional museological contexts.

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https://www.intellectbooks.com/in-smithereens

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Lea Anderson’s choreographic style is known for its distinct aesthetic sensibility which draws from a wealth of contemporary culture, media, film, and art history. For over 40 years she has created dance that is irreverent, dark, and deeply affecting. Employing an expansive and collaborative approach to production, her work incorporates costumes, music, film and staging by working with a range of designers, film-makers, musicians, and artists.

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Lea Anderson graduated in 1984 after completing a BA in Dance at the Laban Centre. Upon graduation she co-founded the all-female company The Cholmondeleys with fellow alumni Teresa Barker and Gaynor Coward. She founded the all-male company The Featherstonehaughs in 1987. Both companies were hugely influential in the development of UK contemporary dance, with Lea choreographing over 100 original works that toured nationally and internationally. Lea has won many awards, including a number of Time Out and Dance Umbrella awards and the Bonnie Bird Choreography award. In 2002, she was awarded an MBE, for Services to Dance.

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Mary Kate Connolly PhD is a writer, editor and curator based in London, UK.

Her forthcoming monograph In Smithereens: The Costume Remains of Lea Anderson’s Stage (Intellect, 2024) centres on the archive of The Cholmondeleys and The Featherstonehaughs. Mary Kate’s longstanding collaboration with Lea Anderson continues to unfold, finding new ways in which embodied objects and garments can live on beyond the performances in which they first took flight. In 2021, she curated Smithereens: A Collection of Fragments Considered as a Whole – a multimedia exhibition, at studio 1.1, London. Previous edited publications include Throwing the Body into the Fight: A Portrait of Raimund Hoghe (2013) and People Show: Nobody Knows but Everybody Remembers (2016). Mary Kate is former Programme Leader of the MA and MFA creative practice at Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance. She presents her research internationally and has performed at Prague Quadrennial, Brut Wien and SPILL, UK. Mary Kate is Co-Editor (with artist David Caines) of COMPOST, a multidisciplinary arts zine.

@connolly.marykate

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