RESEARCH DIALOGUE : with Margarita Zafrilla-Olayo

Research dialogue: with Margarita Zafrilla-Olayo

The LIVE EDITIONS programme includes a behind-the-scenes research strand involving four artists. This provides paid, albeit limited, time for the artists and me as curator to meet, share thoughts, go on site visits and explore project ideas that require more resourcing and co-presenting partnerships than are viable in this first year of programming.

These aren’t commissions but opportunities for peer dialogue and exploration—spaces to imagine and consider the shape projects could take, and how and where they might meet audiences - the kind of exchanges that are vital and happen all the time before projects are developed and fully realised but which mostly go under the radar and tend to be unpaid, for systemic reasons, on the freelancer’s side. 

I’m delighted to be working in this exploratory and open-ended way with artists Jean Abreu & Michael Johnson, Claudia Kappenberg, and Anna Maria Nabirye as well as Margarita Zafrilla-Olayo in summer and autumn 2026.

Margarita Zafrilla-Olayo is a London-based artist working with dance and performance, choreographic projects and objects, video, and installation, exploring how our bodies are transformed by movement. Classically trained as a dancer, she holds a BA (Hons) and PgDIP in Contemporary Dance and Performance from London Contemporary Dance School and MA Creative Practice from Trinity Laban/Independent Dance. Her work has been presented at Siobhan Davies Studios and The Place (UK), Northern Sustainable Futures in Moskosel (SE), Tanzinitiative in Hamburg (DE), MACRO—Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma (IT), Ritratti d’Artista in Ascoli Piceno (IT), Royal College of Art Situated Practice group Archive(r) at Tate Britain Archives, for the 58th Venice Biennale’s Giudecca Art District flagship exhibition, Body as Home.

Margarita and I will be meeting up to figure out how – and in what form – her work TiLTING VERTICALITIES might manifest in Eastbourne. TiLTING VERTICALITIES nurtures and expands a collective embodied holding—a choreographic space, process, and immersive experience which explores notions of grounding, interdependence, tension, rest, subtle movement, care, peace and support. It involves a simple ‘score’, or instruction, which is to experiment with moving within a large loop of stretch fabric with another person. Held and supported by the fabric, it becomes about communicating through movement itself – how to stand, how to balance and how to play with structural tension, inclinations and orientations, moving and being moved in direct relation to each other and sharing ground. For those watching, the work offers sculptural and poignant images as the participants negotiate interdependence, cooperation, harmony, affect, change, anchoring and support.

We will be exploring outdoor spaces in both the town and the open spaces of the South Downs National Park to explore how this work might relate and adapt to a variety of places, and how participants and audiences might potentially engage with it. We previously worked together on an iteration of TiLTING VERTICALITIES for Independent Dance’s International Festival of Learning (2021) which Heni Hale and I co-curated while Co-Directors there. This work has also been presented at Museum of Contemporary Art in Rome—MACRO ASILO, at Tate Britain Archive and Public Records Catalogue in a collective exhibition with the Royal College of Art Situated Practice group, Archive(r), the Dresden Frankfurt Dance Company—Meet the Snake”, Bauhaus University in Weimar and OPPi GLOBAL, and The School of Hope International program for young creatives in Margate.