Meet Louise…

Louise Siddons is a transatlantic choreographer, printmaker, curator, and historian who uses social practice to mobilize embodied knowledge in communal history-making and queer epistemologies. The movements we make leave marks that carry meaning and memory — whether it’s the trace of an etching needle over a printing plate, the worn-down varnish removed by dozens of dancers slip-circling across a wooden floor, or a groove carved in the earth by thousands of feet over centuries. Siddons is especially interested in how we find and recuperate queer-bodied spaces inside the everyday and the habitual — in between the serialized and repetitive actions that generate footpaths, folk dances, printed images, animation, archives, and more. Across media, she creates her work in the context of the ordinary, the vernacular, and the iterative rather than the spectacular. Hand-crafted, digitally informed, historically rooted, and movement-based, her work celebrates the queerness of the familiar through individual and collective forms of expression.

In her residency at Emmanuel College, Siddons will further her work with devised ceremony, built on and with material archives, as a tool for building communal identities through embodied experiences. Ceremony, as a method rooted in relational aesthetics, draws on collective imaginaries around archives, rather than the archives themselves, to generate new experiential knowledge. Stimulated rather than hampered by history, invented ceremony is a collective identification against the violence of archives that all too frequently document marginalized bodies in terms of stigmatization, incarceration, loss, and self-harm. In my practice, the collective performance of invented folk choreography becomes a ceremonial means of generating creative work which can itself be documented and honored, empowering artists and communities to find new ways to engage with history, build resilience, and articulate their futures.

An internationally-recognized, award-winning multidisciplinary researcher whose practice-based work engages communities with hidden histories as a spur for participatory cultural innovation, Siddons has been supported by grants from the British Library, the English Folk Dance and Song Society, the Terra Foundation for American Art, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, the Country Dance and Song Society, the Alaska State Council on the Arts, and others. An active curator and historian, she is the author of two monographs as well as numerous exhibition catalogues and invited book chapters, and her research has also been published in American Art, Frontiers, Panorama, the British Art Journal, and African American Review.