Selected projects past and present in which I have been a key collaborator
The Other Side of Me
Website: https://hosting.northumbria.ac.uk/theothersideofme/
The Other Side of Me is a collaboration between Gary Lang NT Dance Company – based in Darwin, Australia – and Northumbria University. The project is the vision and legacy of the late Dr Laura Fish. I have supported this project since 2017. The dance theatre work premiered at the 2023 Darwin Festival. Supported by BlakDance, it has since toured across Australia and is intended to come to the UK in 2026. The project incorporates workshops with vulnerable and disadvantaged young people within secure settings.
Photography by Paz Tassone
The dance theatre production is the primary output of a wider practice-led research project When Words Fail Us, Expressing the Unspeakable: The Other Side of Me, principle investigator the late Dr Laura Fish. The research project investigates the combining contemporary and traditional Indigenous Australian dance, literature and physical theatre to explore ways to communicate a true story of personal trauma that sits at the limits of linguistic expression. The project explores ways to translate the life of a young Aboriginal man, whose story is inseparable from the Australian Government’s policy to wrongfully remove Aboriginal children from their parents – the Stolen Generations, into a narrative that expresses experiences of indigeneity in the contemporary world.
Eyemouth: People & The Sea
Theatre director Fiona MacPherson, musician Eleanor Logan and I worked with a cross-generational community in Eyemouth, Scotland to create a new performance about Eyemouth today. The project was funded by Creative Scotland and led to performances in Eyemouth and at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.
Get Up and Tie Your Fingers Eyemouth
Fiona MacPherson, Eleanor Logan and I worked with a multi-generational cast of local people participating as narrators, singers or dancers to tell the story of the Eyemouth Fishing Disaster of 1881. Funded by Creative Scotland with performance in Eyemouth and Edinburgh.
Get Up and Tie Your Fingers
I created choreography for this 2017 ACE funded Guild of Lilians & Custom’s House production of Ann Coburn’s play with music by Karen Wimhurst, directed by Fiona MacPherson. Touring to a dozen locations down the East Coast from Musselburgh to Hastings, at each venue with a local choir of women was incorporated in the production.
A folio reflecting on my work within both Get Up and Tie Your Finger and Get Up and Tie Your Fingers Eyemouth is available here.
To read more about this work see:
Pavey, Liz (2024). Get Up and Tie Your Fingers: affective choreography emphasizing touch within community storytelling performances. The Senses and Society, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/17458927.2024.2350802
Pavey, Liz & MacPherson, Fiona (2022) Get Up and Tie Your Fingers Eyemouth: Listening for dialogic resonance within a co-produced community performance. Journal of Arts & Communities, Volume 13, p25-45.https://doi.org/10.1386/jaac_00037_1
Liz Pavey 