Alexandrina Hemsley & Yewande 103
Fountain
2022
Performance, video
28’12’’
Building on Yewande 103’s current body of work around embodied advocacy, Fountain blends together dance and digital watery environments to explore tidal cycles of repair, loss, joy and intimacy. This powerful work draws on the symbolism and psycho-geography of water as inevitably linked to Black histories, embodiments, experiences and mental health.
Guided by choreographer Alexandrina Hemsley’s tightly woven movement score, dancers Rickay Hewitt-Martin, Rudzani Moleya and Shahada Nantaba, cycle through contrasting edits of splashing waves with a darkened theatre space, the trio shift between spectrums of being seen, mirrored & camouflaged by water.
Fountain situates itself amidst the colliding range and scale of experiences within Black subjectivities that water evokes: from the play of running through fountains in the summer, to the significance of oceanic passages and the impacts of colonial carving up of water and selves within Black existences.
Considering the water within our own bodies in relation to the other waters within Earth’s hydrosphere, Fountain tenderly senses our inescapable tides of life and death; welcoming how our watery bodies exist simultaneously as oceans, tombs and sanctuaries.
About Alexandrina Hemsley & Yewande 103：
Yewande 103 (yeh-wan-day one-oh-three) was founded in 2020 by dance artist, writer and facilitator Alexandrina Hemsley, drawing together their 13-year interdisciplinary practice. We foreground the overlaps between dance and mental health for our audiences & participants via immersive, accessible, nationwide dance; advocating for embodied experiences, narratives, discourse & representation. Yewande 103 nurture tender, compassionate encounters with creativity. Yewande 103 is one of the UK’s only Black, disabled, neurodiverse, survivor and artist-led dance organisations. Our vision is to cultivate & champion social change in the dance sector. Our work firstly lives in our bodies. Our form of embodied activism is responsive and adaptable rather than resting in specific genres.
‘Yewande’ is Alexandrina’s Yoruba middle name. It has been passed down the women in their family from their great-great-grandmother who ran away from slave traders in Nigeria. She hid, survived and lived until she was 103 years old. In Yoruba, Yewande means ‘mother has returned’. There are echoes of intergenerational, nurturing and survivorship within this name and family history, that speak to personal/ political lines of ancestry. This name also speaks to ways in which Alexandrina would like this company to hold others and uphold values of care and connection. ‘Yewande’ Urban Dictionary: A term for the girl you wish you knew. The girl you would not pass up a chance to befriend. She is usually the cutest, weirdest, and most awesomest person you know.