We are delighted to announce the new Artist Advisory Group for Yorkshire Dance: Ayesha Fazal, Ella Tighe, Inari Hulkkonen and Zoe Katsilerou.

The Artist Advisory Group at Yorkshire Dance is a subcommittee of the Board of Directors that includes a number of freelance artists. The purpose of the group is to amplify the voice of a diverse group of independent artist in the programming and decision making at Yorkshire Dance with the aim of keeping these as informed and relevant as possible. Especially, the group has time and space for deeper reflection than there is time for during Board meetings. You can find out more about each artist below:

Ayesha Fazal

Contemporary dance artist Ayesha Fazal has Ugandan Asian & Welsh roots, she is a driven and passionate performer touring nationally and internationally with a number of different companies and choreographers. She also has a strong pull to create and choreograph her own work embedding culture, identity, joy and togetherness within. Ayesha is a keen advocate for performing, creating and paving the way for the future of dance and young artists. She strives for keeping dance inclusive, representative and heartfelt. She aims to represent the diverse communities of today, allowing northern voices to be seen, heard and felt through contemporary dance.“Dance is for everyone, it’s a shared experience for both the audience and performers, it’s a powerful way of uniting people and therefore everyone is deserving of dance”.

On joining the Artist Advisory Group, Ayesha says:

“Feeling recognised and appreciated as part of this group I’m excited to speak with the importance of staying true to you are and the powerful force of youth, identity and community in dance. Bringing an element of support and care for artists and championing Northern talent and communities with pride and joy!”

Ella Tighe

Ella Tighe is a Bradford based independent dance artist. She makes work that is bold, intuitive and assertive. It aims to champion undervalued forms of dance, through exposing alternative movement languages and physicality’s than that of typical contemporary dance training. Her practice is eclectic. She began dancing as a Disco Freestyle dancer before a contemporary dance, improvisation and somatic based practice training. She has a BA in Dance, Making & Performance (Cov Uni, UK) and an MA in Performance Practices (ArtEZ, NL). Ella is developing a new work Disco Queen, an autobiographical dance-theatre solo that will explore her experience as a Disco Freestyle dancer.

Alongside her making practice Ella teaches yoga, curates BOLD! Bradford Artist Scratch Night, an artist development initiative in Bradford and is an independent supervisor at Bird College. Recently she has performed and facilitated workshops for Flux Dance Theatre and Balbir Singh Dance Company.

Regarding the Artist Advisory Group, Ella had this to say:

“I’m excited to get stuck into the Artist Advisory Group and looking forward to having dialogue with Yorkshire Dance about how to move forwards and support the dance sector further.”

Inari Hulkkonen

Inari Hulkkonen is a dance artist based in Leeds. With an interest in movement, language and poetics, her work comprises dance and text within the mediums of installation, solo choreography, improvised performance, and interdisciplinary collaboration. She is interested in slow, process-oriented, and collaborative working processes. As a performer Inari has worked with choreographers Madeline Shann, Lewys Holt, Katy Hewison (Improplay), Gracefool Collective, Tora Hed and Vanessa Grasse amongst others. Inari’s choreographic work was most recently presented in the exhibition Craft of Convalescence by curators Swen Steinhäuser and Laura Mansfield.

Inari is a CATAPULT Artist 2019/20 (NSCD & SpinArts) and Accelerate Artist 2019/20 (Yorkshire Dance, NSCD, Leeds Dance Partnership). She is a winner of the Poetry Debutant Competition by prestigious Finnish literary magazine Nuori Voima in 2017. Inari studied at Northern School of Contemporary Dance (2013-2016) and as part of SMASH – an intensive training in experimental physical performance in Berlin (2016).

Zoe Katsilerou

Zoe is a performer and maker with background in dance-theatre, devised & socially engaged theatre, polyphonic singing and improvisation. Originally from Greece, she lives in West Yorkshire and works across the North of England and Scotland as a freelance practitioner and part-time lecturer in Performing Arts at Leeds Beckett University.

Zoe’s choreographic work is rooted in improvisation and draws on her wide range of disciplines. Incorporating dance, theatre and music, her practice and research are interested in relationships between choreography and storytelling, and the poetic qualities these can evoke. Zoe uses her performances as a way of reflecting on her observations of the socio-political and ecological of her everyday life, and hopes that it will evoke pertinent discussions between her and her audiences.

For more information visit https://zoekatsilerou.com/

In regards to the Artist Advisory Group, Zoe commented:

“I am so excited that I will be part of a dynamic community of dancers who, in partnership with Yorkshire Dance, will advocate for a fairer and healthier freelance workforce! I hope that together we will create more opportunities that our freelance peers need, and ones that will support them in further strengthening their work.”

We are delighted to begin working with our new Artist Advisory Group. They will meet four times a year, in a similar pattern to our Board, and bring with them a breadth of knowledge and experiences that will help inform, shape and develop our work at Yorkshire Dance.