Marie is a dance artist with a BPA from Northern School of Contemporary Dance (2005) and an MA in Creative Practice with distinction (2016) from Trinity LABAN Conservatoire of Dance & Music in London. She moved to Horsens, Denmark in October 2017 after being based in Leeds for 15 years.
Through her diverse work with movement, especially in the context of dance improvisation and yoga, she has developed a broad interest in the body. Her work spans dance and yoga, filmmaking and collaboration with other artists and with academics. In 2015 she co-organised a conference and a subsequent project on the philosophy of dance improvisation with Professor Aaron Meskin of the University of Leeds, and from 2017-2018 she worked with Maria Kapsali, lecturer in Performance Studies, also at Leeds, to expand perceptions of the possibilities of yoga and its overlap with other practices, in the project Two Trainers Prepare. Marie is co-founder of the performance collective Mathilde and the Improvisation Exchange Leeds. Currently she is developing a project, Fieldwork in the Body, with anthropologist Mette Terp Høybye at Aarhus University, which explores ethnographic material through movement improvisation. They will be making an ‘audio track’ contribution to the Coventry-based project Somatics Toolkit in February 2019.
Marie is a yoga teacher certified from Independent Yoga Network in 2011, currently teaching in Horsens and Aarhus. She is a certified Life Coach and facilitator of the Liz Lerman Critical Response Process.
Alan is Professor of Film and Cultural Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies, and a member of the Centre for World Cinemas & Digital Cultures, University of Leeds. His first degree was a BA Art & Social Context from Dartington College of Arts and, following this, he worked in his hometown of Cork as a stage designer. He later studied Italian and English at Trinity College, Dublin, before going on to study for an MPhil in European Literature and then a PhD at Cambridge (Wolfson College). He started at Leeds as a lecturer in Italian in 2005 and has since taught courses at the University of Mumbai and presented his work in many universities around the world. He is spending the academic year 2018/19 as a Guest Professor at Aarhus University.
He has authored or co-edited several books and published many articles on Italian and other cinemas. His work has focused especially on terrorism in Italian cinema (the topic of his PhD), questions of pleasure, cultural distinction and the popular, and he has been developing an ambitious project on film and history for several years, involving arts organisations from Leeds and Yorkshire, and co-investigators from three countries.
Alan has collaborated with tenor Dan Norman as part of the Opera North/University of Leeds DARE partnership. He recently began making videographic criticism (videoessays about film) following attendance at a workshop devoted to the practice held at Middlebury College, USA, in June 2018. He is currently planning a hybrid prose/audiovisual long study of cinema and history. Tweets @trivial_alan
