Suzy Willson
Born in 1970, Suzy Willson is a multi-award winning British choreographer and director. Over nearly three decades, she has created an extraordinary body of work that has pushed the boundaries of choreographic practice.
Willson formed Clod Ensemble with Paul Clark in 1995 in order to create work with movement and music at its heart. She has subsequently made over twenty-five works for Clod Ensemble which have been presented in art galleries, theatres, dance houses and public spaces both across the UK and internationally.
Willson’s work is provocative, uncompromising and finely crafted. From presenting the choral lament Silver Swan in Tate Modern’s vast Turbine Hall to staging the iconic Red Ladies across an entire city, Willson’s productions often encourage people to see familiar spaces from a new perspective.
Recurring themes include the chorus and collective movement, the ethics of care and medicine, architecture and the built environment, and the movement of natural phenomena. She is known for her collaborative style of performance-making and for valuing collaboration, dialogue, and diversity of experience and knowledge.
Willson’s approach questions inherited disciplines and hierarchies in the performers’ training, inviting multiple perspectives into the creation process and encouraging manifold interpretations from the audience. This vision has resulted in such genre-defying productions as gig/dance event The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (‘the best use of audience participation I have ever seen’ the Guardian) and performance/installation Under Glass, created for Sadler’s Wells and described as ‘astonishing and unforgettable’ by the Scotsman, which featured performers contained within glass vitrines.
A powerful advocate for the importance of movement, music and the arts in our culture, Willson’s approach has inspired a generation of artists and choreographers to make performance work which crosses artforms, disciplines and sectors.
Willson is a pioneer in the area of arts, medicine and health. In 2006 she created the Performing Medicine initiative to encourage people working in healthcare to appreciate the choreographic, non-verbal and spatial dimensions of care. From 2003-2006 she was AHRC Artist Fellow at Queen Mary University where she later was awarded a PhD for her practice-based thesis ‘Performing Medicine’. She is currently Professor of Movement, Arts & Medicine at Queen Mary University Faculty of Medicine, where she leads on a variety of research projects.
Willson is a regular contributor to journals and books on both performance and medicine, authoring articles in Dance Theatre, the Guardian, the Lancet, Performance Research and both the Routledge and Methuen edited collections.
