POLITICAL DANCER

Julie Reed Henderson’s art practice deals with attention and relationship through durational forms. Her performance, moving image and installation works are informed by her experience as a contemporary dancer and draw on everyday sensory and social encounters.

Political Dancer is a reference to her own way, her first way of being in the world. What a dancer does most comfortably is to be in process, and in some physical transition or another. German neurologist Erwin Straus emphasises that to sense is also to be affected emotionally and to move.

To move around and change due to circumstance is to gain another perspective or to become more aware and then there’s just the desire for a life truer to self. Sometimes the change needed though is no change at all, just another kind of appreciation of what is already there and valuable.

This body of work stems from an initial investigation of what it takes to make ethical change happen systemically and collectively, but also in the intimate politics and small, yet more intense, scale between the people we know and love and, most challenging of all, in our own behaviour.