Dance
with Me
The aim of the Dance with Me project is to encourage cross-disciplinary collaborations between professionally trained/experienced dancers. Each collaboration begins with a process of sharing movement, and then develops through conversations that are guided by the STEP Framework and other psychology-based tools. The outcome of each collaboration is decided upon between the collaborators – but it must be the creation of something new, something that would not have been created otherwise.
The STEP Framework explores dance from Social, Thinking, Emotional and Physical perspectives.
The Dance with Me project started in October 2025. As an older dancer I noticed two things about the way I dance: First, I keep doing the same movements, and second, almost everything else is changing.
Across my life, the social aspect of dancing has changed (from going to clubs, classes and performances, to either dancing alone in my kitchen or dancing with large groups of people in unexpected places). The thinking aspect has changed (I can no-longer pick up choreography as quickly as before but I am much more creative than I used to be). The emotional aspect has not changed (I still feel an intense emotional connection between my moving body and my emotions). The physical aspect has definitely changed (at 61 my body cannot do some of the things that it used to do at 16, but that’s OK, most of the time).
The reason I started the Dance with Me project was to broaden my movement repertoire by dancing with people from different dance disciplines, and to start conversations about the psychology of dancing.
The Dance with Me Process
Stage 1: Share Your Dance Personality
The first stage in the Dance with Me process is to find another dancer to collaborate with and then share your dance personality with them. This is a two-way sharing.
Your dance personality is a phrase of movement that you believe expresses who you are as a dancer at this point in your life.
The sharing process involves showing the other person your dance personality and then inviting them to dance with you in that style
Stage 2: STEP Framework Discussion
Stage 2 is all about the Psychology of Dance.
We discuss the social, thinking, emotional and physical aspects of our dance personality, and our engagement with dance. We also discuss our dancer’s lifeline.
Again, this is a sharing experience. Through these discussions we learn more about each other as dancers and we learn more about the dance cultures that we both inhabit.
Stage 3: Merge and Motif
Stage 3 is a return to movement.
At this stage we start to combine our dance personalities, merge our different approaches to dance, and create a movement motif. During this process we might need to adapt the way we move to fully accommodate each other.
We might cycle through Stages 2 and 3 several times, across a number of sessions.
Stage 4: Crete Something New
What you create is entirely up to you, but it needs to be something new, something that neither collaborator would have created alone outside of the collaboration.
Here are four ongoing Dance with Me examples:
Video Recording. Jodie and I merged our two dance styles in the studio, set the movements to a poem, and will record the piece in an outdoor, urban location.
Knowledge. Gemma and I danced together and then took a deep dive into the themes which emerged from our discussions. It’s fascinating to see the psychological role that dance plays across our lives.
Public Event. Laura and I both have a passion for public engagement so we’re creating a new public event, a full evening of dance participation and chat with a 1970’s theme.
Performance. Anastasia and I have been working on a variation of a Foxtrot, which we will costume and perform.
These are just some of the many ways of creating something new with the Dance with Me process.
If you would like to join the Dance with Me project as a collaborator, or you would like further information about the project, please get in touch.
