about
artistic vision
Sally’s ongoing artistic practice seeks to create ‘portals’ for perceptual shifts – in the form of cultural immersion, sensory re-configuration and integration, dis- and re-orientation, collaboration and limitation. The intent is to induce alternative states of ‘being’ and ‘perceiving’ for both performer and audience alike. This approach is highly informed by somatic-based practices and techniques.
Sally’s performances play on the edge of the magical and ritualistic, to the ordinary and mundane. Site, costume, language and physicality collide – creating a highly visceral and sculptural landscape of poetic imagery and dream-like narratives. Each moment evokes a theatrical ‘scene’ heading towards the surreal and absurd.
Sally’s performance work is informed by her eclectic background and training in Amerta Movement (Javanese performer Suprapto Suryodarmo), somatic-based movement (Skinner Releasing Technique™), site-based performance, playwriting, Butoh, and body-based theatre. Her recent two years of living in Java, Indonesia, continue to inspire her artistic process, teaching and performance making. Sally’s artistic work is immersive and site-specific, presented in performance-timed events or as ongoing, live, durational gallery installations. She currently is experimenting with the performance/audience relationship as a ‘gallery type’ dialogue – inviting audience to choose their own time and spatial relationships to the performance work itself.
As a performer, Sally’s immediate and raw intimacy is tucked into explosions of physicality and quiet, subtle, minimal movement. Layers of juxtapositions surface and are toyed with: the grotesque and the beautiful, animate with the inanimate, violent and gentle, public and private.
Currently Sally’s experimental research into ‘somatic costume’ is a means to further challenge perceptual expectations. The aim is to transform habits through costume alongside creating innovative performance work.
biography
Sally is a London-based American performer, choreographer, playwright and teacher. Over the past decade Sally has performed her work in venues across London, Prague (Czech Republic), Essen (Germany), Java (Indonesia) as well as in the United States in New York, San Francisco and Seattle. Her work has been produced in venues ranging from established theatres, such as The Place, Robin Howard Dance Theatre (London), to site-specific settings such as church crypts, traditional Javanese markets, a post-war junk museum, and gallery spaces.
Sally has performed for independent companies and artists such as Dappin’ Butoh Company (2001-2002, 2006) in Seattle and London, Miroto Dance Company in Java, Indonesia (2007, 2008) and more recently with the London College of Fashion directed by choreographer Marie-Gabrielle Rotie (2011) and artist Serena Korda at The Welcome Trust and Camden Arts Centre (2010-2011).
Sally has taught dance and theatre practices at leading universities such as Laban (2005-2006), Central School of Speech and Drama (2006-2007), Chichester University (2004-2006), ISI (Institut Seni Indonesia) the National Arts University in Surakarta/Java (2007), Coventry University (2009), Byam Shaw School of Art (2010) and London Southbank University (2011). She teaches independent workshops for professional artists in Performance Making, Training for Performers, Skinner Releasing Technique™ and Yoga.
Sally holds a MA by project in Art, Design and Visual Culture from London Metropolitan University, based on cross-disciplinary, practice-based research into subjective and objective perspectives on the performance making process. She holds a BA in Choreography/Playwriting from Bennington College and in Theatre/Psychology from College of the Holy Cross in the USA. Sally is a certified teacher of Skinner Releasing Technique™, an influential and innovative somatic approach to movement training.
artistic collaborations and company growth
Sally is the Founding Director of Sally E. Dean Performing Arts Inc. and the Kolaborasi project, whose mission it is to bring American, European and Asian artists together to collaborate and produce innovative performance works.
Collaboration is Sally’s ethos. Whether interdisciplinary or trans-cultural, Sally is passionate about creating a dialogue and exchange with others as a key to her process. Sally’s artistic practice centers on interdisciplinary collaboration, using a facilitative approach to shared creativity. Examples include long-standing visual/performing arts company Duets for Objects from 2004-2010 and Kemanapun (Java in 2008), an international collaboration and performance between seven female artists of different disciplines.
Upcoming collaborative projects for 2012 are with Sri Lanka’s Floating Space Theatre and Cambodia’s Amrita Performing Arts.
Sally facilitates and mentors creative process in both educational and professional settings and through her independent artistic mentoring sessions for professional artists.
learn more about the kolaborasi project