Research
Bringing distinctive embodied knowledge to sociological issues that land in the body, and in the body of organisations.
Our stories live in our bodies.
At Yewande 103, we believe movement is opens up ways of knowing.
Our work grows through asking questions of our bodies, our bodies in society as well as how society itself is organised.
We are interested in what bodies know, what happens when we listen to them, and how creative practice can help us imagine different ways of being together in the world.
We work across dance, writing, performance, film, workshops and creative engagement. Our practice is rooted in care, accessibility and embodied enquiry, creating spaces where people can research ideas through sensation, movement, conversation and reflection.
We are particularly interested in the people whose research lives between disciplines.
Who is a researcher?
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At Yewande 103, we understand researchers as people who use their practice to ask questions, explore ideas and generate knowledge.
They might work in universities, studios, communities, cultural organisations, health and wellbeing settings — or across several of these worlds.
We are particularly interested in interdisciplinary practitioners working at the intersections of artistic, embodied, social and critical enquiry.
This might include an artist developing a movement practice as a way of understanding social change. A choreographer exploring access as a creative and relational process. A community practitioner asking how people can come together differently. A writer thinking through the relationship between lived experience, systems of oppression, and radical structures for transformative justice.
Research does not always happen at a desk.
Sometimes it happens in a rehearsal room.
Sometimes in conversation.
Sometimes through movement.
Sometimes through reflection, witnessing or listening.
We are interested in all of these ways of knowing.
Our role is to create the conditions for the practitioners we support to develop, connect, rest, experiment and stay with their questions.
Research through practice
Research has long been part of how we work at Yewande 103 — through movement, writing, performance, conversation, facilitation and collective enquiry.
Our practice sits across epistemologies of Blackness, disability, access, dance, care, wellbeing and social change. We are interested in what embodied and creative practices can reveal, and in creating spaces where artists and researchers can develop questions together.
Many Lifetimes 2024 - ongoing
A choreographic enquiry into memory, inheritance, Blackness, disability, care and the ways bodies carry knowledge across time.
The project has developed through multiple forms of enquiry, including research and experimentation with BA and CAT dance students, and a series of workshops responding to pregnancy and baby loss through collage, movement, writing and discussion. These spaces have informed the development of the choreographic material, themes and questions within the work.
FOUNTAIN, 2022
A movement and film-based enquiry exploring watery embodiments, grief and Black joy.
Alongside the development of the work, Yewande 103 created We Hold Water, a series of workshops bringing artists and researchers together to explore the ideas, questions and embodied practices emerging through FOUNTAIN. These sessions created space for movement, conversation and shared reflection, extending the enquiry beyond the artwork itself.
Selected research collaborations
Digital Black Dance Ecologies
Research group member, 2024–25
A collaboration led by Dr Tia-Monique Uzor exploring digital creativity, Blackness, dance and repair.
Dancing Otherwise: Exploring Pluriversal Practices
AHRC-funded network, 2024
Facilitated movement sessions exploring pluriversal approaches to dance practice and contributed written reflections to the network's research outputs.
Europe Beyond Access Lab
Co-curator 2025–2026
Co-devising and facilitating a choreographic laboratory for disabled artists across Lisbon, the Netherlands and Barcelona.
Artistry & Access Lab
Siobhan Davies Dance, 2023
Movement-based sessions exploring access as an aesthetic, relational and choreographic tool.
Supporting researchers and practitioners
We have supported artists, practitioners and emerging researchers through workshops, mentoring, teaching, facilitation and spaces for reflection. We hold space for the particular importance of supporting researchers with lived experience of race and health/disability based marginalisation.
This includes:
Next Choreography, Siobhan Davies Dance
2019–21
Redesigned and co-led two annual cohorts supporting young artists aged 18–25 to explore choreography through embodied and reflective practice.
Words Collect In My Mouth
Spring 2023
An online talks series and producer development programme created by Yewande 103. Across four chapters, guest speakers shared their practices and entered into dialogue around staying in the unknown of creative processes. Alongside the talks, our producer development programme supported emerging cultural producers through reflection, conversation and professional development.
Sadler's Wells Disabled Artist Programme
2025
Movement and reflective writing workshop supporting embodied access and sustainable creative development.
CripLab, Zurich
2024
Workshops for disabled artists exploring loss and repair.
Lavanderia a Vapore, Turin
2024, 2026
Workshops with artists, community participants and senior leaders exploring access, equity, wellbeing and embodied organisational change.
Shobana Jeyasingh Dance
2025
Wellbeing session for teaching artists focused on care and self-regulation within community and educational engagement.
Access, Intimacy and Arriving: Working With Access Riders
2020 - ongoing
Several commissions, including from People Dancing, Matthew Bourne's New Adventures and Mainspring Arts to deliver training on access and inclusion for supporting disabled and neurodiverse creative workers.
Writing, publishing and critical enquiry
Alexandrina Hemsley's research and writing practice has developed alongside her choreographic work for more than a decade.
Her writing has been published by Bloomsbury Academic, Faber & Faber, The Live Art Development Agency, Disability Arts Online, BookWorks, NO GOODS and others.
Selected publications include:
Feeling My Way Through Several Beginnings in Performance, Dance and Political Economy: Bodies at the End of the World
Bloomsbury Academic, 2021
For Each of Us: Gaps Between Professional Advocacy and Private Experience
Material, Siobhan Davies Dance / The Live Art Almanac, 2021
Making Contact: Reflections and Resonances with Imagined Touch in On Time: A SPILL Reader
SPILL Festival, 2018
A Contemporary Struggle
Edited with Jamila Johnson-Small, Project O
This Is Unbound, 2013
Alexandrina's choreographic work has also been the subject of critical and scholarly writing in dance studies, including research examining disability, solidarity, vulnerability, affective labour, Blackness and contemporary choreographic practice.
She has also guest edited and commissioned writing for Disability Arts Online and co-edited BELLYFLOP Magazine from 2009–2015.
Continuing the enquiry
In 2026, Alexandrina began an MPhil/PhD in Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), continuing a longstanding enquiry across embodiment, dance, writing
disability, Blackness and social structures.
Her research’s working title is Crip Tidal Time: Watery Embodiments and Care at the Shoreline of Inclusion.
The research looks at the practices of Black artists living with hidden disabilities, situating their experiences within an oceanic space. It explores watery frameworks for moving through currents that carry the potential of Black and disabled-led ways of making, even as they move against the weight of anti-Blackness and ableism.
Inclusion is understood as an active, tidal process: a shoreline where disabled-led care meets exchange, ebb and flow.
Water carries painful and mournful archives, but it also holds the capacity to soothe, to connect and to erode persistent systems of oppression.
The research brings together Black artists and cultural leaders working across dance and health, while continuing Yewande 103’s wider interest in embodied knowledge, care, access and the possibilities of creative practice. It is an opportunity to develop the theoretical language for patterns Alexandrina has been recognising, experiencing and working against through years of practice.
More to come as the research unfolds.
A Growing Research Ecology
We are building on this history to create more opportunities for interdisciplinary practitioners to start, develop and grow their artistic research practices.
For us, embodied research offers ways of knowing otherwise — creating space for more caring and inclusive approaches across the creative arts, health and wider advocacy.