Lea Anderson Artist Encounters UK

Artist Encounters is a professional development talk with a guest artist, focusing on cultivating practical skills, sharing knowledge and asking questions that resonate.   

For Dance Umbrella Festival 2024, Artist Encounters was led by choreographer Lea Anderson, celebrating the 40th anniversary of her company The Cholmondeleys with the publication of two new books focusing on her work. Using these as a jumping off point, Lea, alongside author Mary Kate Connolly, offer a window into a unique choreographic world. 

In addition to revealing Lea’s unusual modes of collaboration with some of the UK’s leading creatives, they explore the ways in which her works live on today via their rich archive of costumes and performance ephemera. From the earliest Cholmondeleys days of dancing in Doc Martens on beer-strewn gig platforms, to the rigour of sleek chorus lines for the theatre stage, and the precision of performed gallery exhibitions, Lea Anderson and her dancers have forged a unique path.

Glimpses of a vast notebook collection, short films, archival images and costume objects will allow for an intimate look at her way of working, and the legacy of her companies. This encounter will also unpick the ways in which collaborations between artist and scholar can ignite new after-lives for archival remnants and sustain both legacy and ongoing artistic practice. 

Lea Anderson as Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden by Otto Dix. Photo by Margaret Williams. Costume by Sandy Powell.

Lea Anderson is an independent artistic director, filmmaker and choreographer, based in North Devon. She co-founded The Cholmondeleys dance company in 1984 and The Featherstonehaughs in 1988, creating over 87 works. Lea has collaborated on hundreds of projects. She received an MBE in 2002 for services to dance and an Honorary Doctorate of Arts from Dartington College in 2006. In 2014, she became a Regents Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. 2024 marks the 40th anniversary of The Cholmondeleys.

Mary Kate Connolly 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.