During the Spring/Summer lockdown in 2020 Jane Turner led her dance company TURNING WORLDS into shapeshifting their planned touring project into a film with a large cast. As climate crisis global events including Covid 19 foregrounded our bodies’ intrinsic interconnection to the environment in our era of the anthropocene, we found ourselves working in a new way.
With a rich history of creating performance with the self-organising systems that drive Nature and Culture, sensitive attentiveness to our isolated dancing bodies led to finding new outdoor studios, and to a digital choreographic method of working. Zoom enabled the company to swell from the usual 5 London based 16 international dance artists whilst the Gog Magog hills near the Stapleford Arts Centre that originally commissioned the work, became central providing a site for research and creation. Also called the ""Telegraph clump"" the hills functioned as one of the locations for the semaphore line, an optical telegraph system between London and Great Yarmouth in the 19thC whilst giant figures supposedly cut into this ancient chalk hill fort that Cambridge archeologist Lethbridge’s 19th century excavations of the site suggested: a moon goddess and her horse (Magog/Epona of the Celts) fed into our work.