‘Reflecting on the collaborative practice and socially engaged principles underpinning the making of Vincent Dance Theatre’s Art of Attachment.’

This work is a critical examination of Vincent’s influences, principles, processes and methods that underpin her 30 years of artistic and socially engaged practice. It examines, as a critical commentary, in the context of theory and literature, reflections on how Vincent brings together professional performers and often marginalised, non-professional participants to create and craft collaborative performance work. These methods of making are investigated through analysis of Vincent’s extensive creative and research work with vulnerable community groups, from which she identifies individuals whose voices she captures and records in order to thread through production work, translated into dance theatre and text-based ‘material’ or used within soundtracks for her work on stage, on film and online. Set against and within the physical, abstract and poetic elements of her work, these ‘messy narratives’ are given a much wider public platform.

Vincent has built an original, inclusive, skilled and ‘risk tolerant’ practice that reaps results for both professional and non-professional collaborators, participants and audiences alike. Published works as original dance theatre constitute a contribution to knowledge at the forefront of dance theatre. The development of artist and artistry as process and performance are particularly analysed through a Case Study of Vincent’s work Art of Attachment. The work aims to offer an examination of how Attachment Theory andChildhood Developmental Trauma impact on everyday lives, push dance theatre work into new realms, critique some of the challenges encountered in socially engaged creative practice and articulate a practice based on equality of opportunity and diversity of voices. The work engages audiences andperformers alike as therapy/not therapy. This work has potential for distribution, use and application in arts and non-arts contexts, such as social care, youth services, sociology, social work, psychotherapy and integrative therapeutic arts.