Science and the arts come together in a new dance show aiming to take us inside our bodies to discover the secrets of how our immune cells generate equilibrium and keep us healthy.

Created by Birmingham-based Keneish Dance and premiering this spring, BALANCE plays at Resonate Festival at Warwick University on 2 June.

Choreographed by Keneish Dance’s artistic director Keisha Grant, the production features movements inspired by the shapeshifting and flux of cells as they strive to keep balance in our bodies.

Keisha has collaborated with Warwick University associate professor Dr Darius Köster to better understand how the cells operate and move, changing shape to respond to individual need.

And she hopes the work will encourage audiences to stop for a moment and consider the miniature miracles taking place inside their bodies every second of every day.

“The work is about many levels of understanding balance,” she says. “We began by looking at cells generally and then we honed it into immune cells and their role in regenerating the body. I thought it was really interesting to look at regeneration on a biological level and I was interested in how we can use dance to have an opportunity for people to understand and experience this.”

The project was initially sparked by an understanding of how small and yet how essential our cells are - not just to our balance but to every element of our health and wellbeing.

“It’s the idea of really small particles that we don’t always see,” Keisha explains. “We always want to do the big things, like we want to go up to space, but we’re asking why don’t you look in your own body?

“Everything that is in your body is in space as well so your lungs are trees and your eyes are like black holes. And if everything is in our body, it’s time to come back to earth and look at these small things. Our cells are vital for life but we always need to create the biggest and the best and the fastest rather than coming back to the smallest - and I just wanted to go in the opposite direction.”

BALANCE can be appreciated on many levels says Keisha and so will appeal to people of all backgrounds, ages and experience of dance.

“Our audience could be anyone - I’d like to see a really mixed audience, particularly parents, their children and people of colour. I know it can appeal to families because my children are four and eight and I asked them for feedback as part of the research and development and they enjoyed it. I thought if I can hold them down then I can hold other four and eight-year olds!”

Birmingham-born Keisha first took up dancing at the age of three and won a host of awards as a child and teenager. At the age of 18, she trained at Laban Centre and Roehampton University before performing with companies across Europe, Africa and Canada. In 2009 she founded Keneish Dance in Birmingham.

“I love the self-expression of dance and also that physical feeling that you get from moving, being able to feel every single muscle and the skin on your body, feeling it stretching and contracting and connecting to the different layers of self,” she says.

“I was dancing for other companies and wanted to create my own work so Keneish Dance is a space where I can choreograph. It was always about creating work and experiences. I almost have my dance as my therapeutic space, it’s like the creation process is literally my way of understanding what the hell I am doing here. Making new work helps me process and understand life.”

Keisha has choreographed a number of diverse works for both outdoor and indoor spaces over the past 15 years including African Sanctus which was performed in Birmingham’s Symphony Hall with Ex Cathedra Choir and HAL in collaboration with composer and musician Bill Laurence.

For Keisha, dance is a vehicle for health and wellbeing and she hopes that taking BALANCE out to such diverse venues as open air festivals, museums and libraries will encourage people to experience a bit of balance in their own lives.

“I’d like people to leave performances feeling like they have had a huge weight lifted off their shoulders and it’s disseminated into the air during BALANCE. Sometimes we are not actually consciously aware of the things that create imbalance so hopefully people will be a bit more conscious and aware of the things or decisions that we all make that create imbalance.

“Sometimes it’s just putting something boldly in front of your face - this is what is potentially happening inside your body right now. We can use that factual information about cells but also a lot of the work is imagination because as artists it’s our job to fill in some of the missing knowledge with ideas because there’s not answers for everything.”

As part of the tour, the company will be offering workshops with activities aiming to explore some of the elements raised in the work.

“We’ve done some workshops with some young people and their mums where we were pretending to be a cell and were just mimicking the contractions, the wobbles and the little actual sensations that we are imagining as well as seeing,” Keisha says. “And that can be a very therapeutic experience. It’s connecting movement back to natural form, natural rhythms, natural movement and also I like the idea that we can discuss ‘balance’ within that therapeutic space.”

And at Sandwell Museums, the team are also running CREATE in collaboration with other local artists, a day of workshops and experiences for other artists which has been supported by the Shared Prosperity Fund, part of the UK Government’s levelling up investment.

“It’s a collaboration for artists,” Keisha explains. “We’re trying to build that little gap that happens to females and moms especially people of colour and creative people who aren’t necessarily in a creative environment. CREATE is quite special and I’m hoping that BALANCE can hold some space for that deficit that tends to happen in the sector.”

Keisha is looking forward to taking the show into community spaces which wouldn’t automatically be seen as venues for dance including museums and libraries in Birmingham and the Black Country, a woodland festival in Leicestershire and an arts and science festival in Yorkshire.

“Originally we were thinking of this piece like a pop-up dance and it’s very exciting that the venues are very different spaces. You could say it’s all a bit of an experiment with that idea of a pop-up experience which can happen anywhere. It’s about bringing dance to everywhere.”

BALANCE plays Resonate Festival at Warwick University on Sunday 2 June. The production then shows at Bromwich Hall in West Bromwich on Monday 12 & Tuesday 13 August and Thinktank Birmingham Science Museum from Monday 28 October to Friday 1 November.                         

There will also be a series of workshops across Birmingham libraries from Wednesday 14 August to Monday 2 September. To find out more, visit keneishdance.com 

Article by Diane Parkes