My Heart Is Mine as It Is Yours and Ours invites you to experience from your home, a dance work that is simultaneously a moving portrait, a screen dance, an audio work and/or a visual essay. We hope that the work carries a liveness and spaciousness as it reaches you, we envision that this film might play as an audio piece in the background with your screen set up somewhere you choose (as if hanging a painting) or as a film that you sit down to watch.

The work (created Spring 2021) draws upon memories and notes of reflection from the LADA team, prompted by a series of questions devised by Alexandrina, and uses footage that hasn’t yet been presented from Alexandrina’s personal archive of practice (disregarded texts and film rushes on the ‘cutting room floor’). My Heart Is Mine as It Is Yours and Ours calls in the occupation of non-linear time as resource for reparative actions.

Alexandrina concerns themselves with retrieving from the past and projecting into the future, the tools, stories and sensitivities for embodied reflections, movements (as in dancing and as in change) to support the imperative of calling in the close, colliding dialogues between history, present and future.

Through these hoped for acts of space-making, movement and re-sensitising, comes an attempt to cool the tyrants of internalised racism, ableism and misogyny (which so often command/erase marginalised bodies into stillness and silence). Concurrently, My Heart Is Mine as It Is Yours and Ours offers to unfix the physicality of  ‘objective’ archives and the dominant systems of oppression through which archives and knowledges of history operate in UK arts and culture.

The cyclical, multi-authored film voices an invitational space to recall your own felt-level material and autobiographical, systemic and relational changes over time.

My Heart Is Mine as It Is Yours and Ours (with captions)

My Heart Is Mine as It Is Yours and Ours (with BSL)

Audio Description version of My Heart Is Mine as It Is Yours and Ours

Biography

Alexandrina’s creative practice lands in the fluid spaces of dance, choreography, writing, facilitating and advocacy. Their interests are both enduring and in expansive states of flux – or just in connection/relation to the processes within life and within living. They turn towards the sensorial, the bodily, the multiple subjective positions of self – and self in intimate relation to self and other selves – as ways to find breath and voice amidst the unjust and inequitable.

Alexandrina has recently founded her own organisation Yewande 103. Yewande 103 formalises the past 10+ years of Creative Director Alexandrina Hemsley’s work in the contemporary dance field as a choreographer, performer, writer, mentor and educator.

Credits

Concept, performance, filming and edit: Alexandrina Hemsley

Collage: Alexandrina Hemsley

Words: Chinasa Vivian Ezugha, Ben Harris, Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway, Alexandrina Hemsley, Lois Keidan, Elyssa Livergant, Joseph Morgan Schofield, Megan Vaughan, Cecilia Wee

Text arrangement and narration: Alexandrina Hemsley

Guitar and Soundscore: Dave Archer

Captioning: Nancy May Roberts, Dave Archer

BSL: Dionne Thomas

Audio Description: Sightlines

Producer: Nancy May Roberts

Commissioned by the Live Art Development Agency in 2021 for Live Art Histories and Futures, a research project mapping the impact and influence of the Live Art sector in the UK, supported by Live Art UK and Arts Council England.

A Yewande 103 Production