Calling all professionally trained/experienced dancers and dance companies.
From October 2025
Dance with Me is a research project looking at dance from a psychological perspective.
The aim of the project is to document the process of an older person (me) working with highly skilled dancers and movement makers across different movement styles.
We can all get stuck in our own ways of moving (I know that I do) and I want to capture how it feels to step outside of that.
I want to collaborate with professionally trained/experienced dancers and dance companies. The essence of collaboration means that we should each get something from the co-creation process.
Through a process of talking and moving, I hope we can learn from each other. I’d like to learn about, and experience, your movement personality.
What you get from this co-creation process and experience will depend on what motivates you to take part. Perhaps you’ll learn something about the psychology or neuroscience of dance, perhaps you’ll experience a new way of moving, or perhaps you’ll meet someone else during the broader project process with whom you’ll have an interesting conversation or interaction.
I want to work across different dance styles because each form of movement offers its own language, rhythm, and way of seeing the world. Over time, we all develop habits in how we move, patterns that feel familiar, that fit comfortably, but can quietly limit our creative range.
By stepping into different styles, we’re giving ourselves the chance to expand our movement repertoire, to learn from new techniques, new energies, and new physical vocabularies. It’s not about giving up our own movement language, but extending it, layering it, and allowing it to evolve.
Every style holds something to teach, and every collaboration opens a new doorway into movement.
We give ourselves four intensive sessions because that feels like the right balance between depth and focus. It’s long enough to explore ideas, to develop movement material, and to build a genuine creative connection, but short enough to stay energised and purposeful.
Each session, lasting between one and three hours, becomes a concentrated burst of exploration and creation. We can work consecutively over a couple of days for an immersive experience, or meet weekly to let ideas breathe and evolve between sessions. Whether we’re together in person or connecting online, four sessions gives us the structure we need to dive deep, stay present, and make something meaningful.
Whether we create a 30-second improvisation or a ten-minute choreographed sequence, the aim of this project is simple, to create something new.
Each piece will grow from the meeting of our two movement identities, blending your dance personality with mine. It’s a space for discovery, where we respond to one another in the moment, exchange ideas through movement, and see what emerges when different experiences, styles, and energies come together on the dance floor.
The output of this project will be both the movement we create and the media we capture it on. Each piece will be filmed, providing a record of our collaborative process and the work that emerges from it.
Every participant will receive a copy of the finished video and a written reflection or “write-up” documenting the creative process, the ideas we explored, and the insights that arose through dancing together.
In addition, we will both have rights to use the output of our co-creation in any way we choose.
Lindsey (an Occupational Therapist) and I will document the process using the psychological STEP Framework, which looks at dance through four interconnected lenses:
Social – how we connect, communicate, and collaborate through movement.
Thinking – how we learn, remember, and create new movement patterns.
Emotional – how feelings, memories, and stories are expressed through dance.
Physical – how our bodies respond, adapt, and evolve as we move.
Together, these perspectives help us understand not just what we create, but how dance shapes our minds, relationships, and physical selves.
In addition, this project may form the basis of a new book or video broadcasts.
There are no fees payable either way for this project, we each give our time freely in the spirit of creative collaboration and shared exploration.
Where necessary, I will cover the costs of studio hire, as well as filming and editing, so that our focus can remain entirely on the movement, the process, and the experience of creating together.
Please contact me via email at hello@peterlovatt.com