‘LEgaversary’ Scratch night
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‘LEgaversary’ Scratch night *
A sharing of FIVE new or work-in-progress pieces created by artists working in and around Legem Dance Cooperative.
The evening showcased an eclectic range of performances from Ciar Wild X Violet Savage, Martha Tribe, Olivia Devine, Kin Dance Company, and Esme Wales X Annarose Atamian, exploring contact methodologies, chance operations, intimacy and desire, improvisation and audience participation.
This self-funded event SOLD OUT and provided the financial means to host further Scratch Night events in 2026. ‘Legaversary’ was a proud culmination of a year of hard-work and dedication, and a testament to the Legem Dance Cooperative community.
ARTIST BIO’s
CIAR X Violet
Ciar Wild and Violet Savage are a duo based in London who have come together to research and perform a contact improvisation practice. Putting sensation over aesthetics, they explore narratives of collective consciousness in a variety of collaborations and performance settings, notably Iklectic Art Lab, The Burrows Gallery and Spanners Brixton.
MARTHA TRIBE
Martha Tribe is a dance artist working between Ireland and the UK with a practice background in folk dance, contemporary, ballet, improvisational techniques and acting.
Her award winning research into space and place as danced phenomena is currently being developed towards publication. Using GPS technology to track pathways, she explores the application of this to dance, aiming to unpack how movement can help us understand our relationship to space and place.
Title: ‘Album’
Duration: 14mins
Choreographer: Martha Tribe
Dancers: Olivia Devine and Martha Tribe
Synopsis: Imitating the structure of live music sets, this work abstractly references Martha’s unqualified time working with live reindeer at Elf Town Dublin.
Esme Wales is a London based artist. She was part of Verve 2024 at NSCD, following her BA at LCDS. Through her work she assembles immersive cacophonies of sound, setting and movement seeded with human sensitivity and cathexis. How can we indulge, purge and free parts of ourselves through intensified and assiduous acts of performance?
Annarose Atamian is an American-born movement artist based in London. Her work extracts and dismantles experience from the archival body into intensified and surrealist identities. She uses improvisational play constrained with the endurance of repetitive patterns to realise relational and personal catharsis.
SYNOPSIS: Pleasure Chest, Kiss Garden, Hair, The Trough is an episodic performance of four short new works.
Pleasure Chest embraces improvisation as a playground for thrill and desire.
Kiss Garden is a game of dare and provocation, a movement loop testing our will to endure.
Hair conceptualises intimacy as a creature: at once an adoring slow dance and a divulgence of grotesqueness.
The Trough explores a farmyard and a party as a play on hedonism and self indulgence.
Throughout the collection of works, Wales and Atamian study the parallels between pleasure and fear in the human experience.
ANNAROSE x ESME
With foundations in modern and post-modern dance philosophies, Olivia’s work discusses ideas of femininity from a lens of queer theory.
Utilising…
* functional movement pathways,
* balance and counterbalance,
* abstract forms of gesture and
* linear pathways
she creates phrases that travel across the space, change direction and fold in and out of the floor, on a backdrop of varying music genres.
‘A Boxtrot’ is a short work danced by Erin Carey, Pollyanna Mann, Ciar Wild and Martha Tribe
SYNOPSIS: Acting as an anniversary dance, the piece is devised from class material over the past year, deconstructed and composed using chance methods.
OLIVIA DEVINE
KIN DANCE COMPANY
KIN is a dance company born from the curiosity to make and to share. Made up of five artists, KIN is a space for play, a place where exploration leads, and choreography becomes a shared language.
Rooted in the idea of kinship, we value closeness, care, and collaboration, connection to each other, to our ideas, and to the communities around us.
‘While We Gather’ a piece born out of improvisation and a shared love for social dancing.
SYNOPSIS: This Work in Progress piece underlines the power of community; gatherings around a fire or crowds of ravers cut through a building individualism perpetuated through political, generational and social divides.
Exploring this friction, we make our way from lost connections towards shared rhythm, care and support.
It is a call to recognise the joy and creative power of our communal spirit as KIN.
PERFORMERS:
Nell, Martina, Kai, Ciar, Daniel and Ted.
