Adesola Akinleye
I believe Dance is a lively philosophical method: to literally understand what it means to be moving with and in the world together. Dance is a practice-based inquiry into what it means to be human.
Dr. Adesola Akinleye (pro-nouns she/they): I am an interdisciplinary artist-scholar and choreographer. I began my career as a dancer with The Dance Theatre of Harlem Workshop Ensemble (USA), later working in UK Companies including Green Candle and The Carol Straker Dance Company. Over the past twenty years, I have created works ranging from films, installations, and texts to live performances that are often site-specific and involve a cross-section of the community, as well as acting as a guest choreographer for university programs and professional company repertoire. My work is characterized by an interest in glimpsing and voicing people’s lived experiences through creative moving portraiture. A key aspect of my process is the artistry of opening creative practices to everyone, from women in low-wage employment to ballerinas to performance for young audiences. My research and artistic practice rest in Afro-Indigenous world views, which value community, relationality, and polyrhythm. I have written art-integrated curricula for K-12 as well as written and led BA, MA, and PhD programs in the UK and the USA. I founded and am currently co-artistic director of Dancing Strong Movement Lab., a non-profit arts organisation that incubates new ideas, creates performance work, and nurtures interdisciplinary exchanges and projects. I have been a Research Fellow with Theatrum Mundi and a visiting lecturer at Central Saint Martins, on the M-Arch program. I was a Visiting Artist 2020–2022 at the Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), MIT, and a Research Affiliate at Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), MIT. I was a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University, UK, writing and leading the BA and MA Professional Practice programs in the Faculty of Creative Industries. I am an Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University (TWU), where I direct the TWU PhD in Dance Program.
“My dance studio has no fixed walls. It might be the shoreline, wind tugging at my back, or a stretch of city pavement shaped by passing footsteps. Here, bodies, environments, and technologies meet—dance appears in public squares, in theatres, and in Augmented Reality. It’s a place for care and co-created imaginations, for moving together.”
– Adesola Akinleye
I use a ‘doing‘ methodology – I love to make artwork, curriculum, structures for art-experience, and collaborate across disciplines. My studio and my classroom are places for collaboration and creation from immersive dance choreography experiences for AR (Space+Dance+Digital), to making site-specific and installation work (such as for The Hop), to stage performance experiences, I work through praxis: practice as/is research.
I have a new book forthcoming, Dancing Place: scores of the city, scores of the shore, co-written with Dr. Helen Kindred. The book has the premise that performance art lives across geographic locations and across times. The book draws on six years of dance practice, working with DancingStrong Movement Lab., co-director, Dr. Helen Kindred, in our movement lab., Concrete-Water-Flesh. I founded and now co-direct DancingStrong Movement Lab which also includes triip Lab (turning research ideas into practice). triip is a Lab aimed at cultivating unique, multi-generational, multi-disciplinary, nurturing, and practice-based ensemble spaces.
I have been a Research Fellow with Theatrum Mundi and a visiting lecturer at Central Saint Martins, on the M-Arch program. I was a Visiting Artist 2020–2022 at the Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST), MIT, and a Research Affiliate at Art, Culture and Technology (ACT), MIT. I was a Senior Lecturer at Middlesex University, UK, writing and leading the BA and MA Professional Practice program in the Faculty of Creative Industries. I am an Associate Professor of Dance at Texas Woman’s University (TWU), where I lead the TWU PhD in Dance Program. This is the longest continuously running PhD in Dance program in the USA.
I have published in the field of dance scholarship as well as cultural and social studies. My work includes the editing and curation of Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices (2018), which was shortlisted for One Dance UK’s Impact in Dance: Writing Award (2018). I also edited and curated the anthology (re:)claiming ballet (2021). My first monograph, Dance, Architecture and Engineering, was published in 2021 and was on the MIT Summer Reading List that year.
For choreographic performance work, I have been awarded the ADAD Trailblazer Award, Bonnie Bird, New Choreography Award, and One Dance UK Champion Trailblazer Award. As well as receiving commissions internationally across the USA, Europe, and the Caribbean. For my work in community dance and education, I was awarded Woman of the Year in Community Dance by the Town of Islip, New York. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (FHEA), and the Royal Society of Arts (RSA). I hold a PhD from Canterbury Christ Church University, an MA (distinction) in Work-based Learning, Dance in Community and Education (2007), and an MA in Film (distinction), 2020, from Middlesex University. I am also a certified GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS® instructor* originally teaching at White Cloud Studio in New York.
*GYROTONIC® and GYROKINESIS® are registered trademarks of Gyrotonic Sales Corp and are used with their permission.
LEADERSHIP
"I believe leadership is shaped through dialogue and mutual accountability, where decisions emerge from relationships built on trust, care, and strength of collective purpose. This is where new futures can be co-imagined. My leadership is guided by my Afro-Indigenous worldview captured by the Lakota phrase Mitákuye Oyás’iŋn, 'we are all related' and the Bantu, Ubuntu 'I am because we are'". - Adesola Akinleye
Current Research
spatial practices
dance = spatial practices = mind-full-body-environment
I position choreographic practice and choreo-thinking as part of a wider interdisciplinary field interested in spatial practices: looking at how we move through and shape space-time. From my Afro-Indigenous worldviews, this is ontologically about relationality and the axiology of ‘we are all related’ and ‘I am because we are’. Dance within spatial practices research offers tools of embodiment/emplacement as part of the exploration of the relationships we navigate and move through, and what they create and mean for us artistically, socially, politically, and historically. Thus, my research explores Place-making from the perspective of my choreographic dance practice, engaging in interdisciplinary exchange, particularly with architectural, urban design, and engineering practices. It continues my interest in narrating/understanding Place through starting with somatic experiences. While also asking how agency can be equitable across the entities that come together in the making of that Place. The research leads me to rich collaborations with architects, urban designers, curators, visual artists, healthcare clinicians, musicians, and policymakers. This research develops from my PhD methodology of dance as a way to facilitate the expression of people’s lived experiences in specific places (2011). My work has recently been enriched by my residency at MIT (2020-22) and my Theatrum Mundi Fellowship (2019-21). As well as leading a M-Arch Studio at Central Saint Martins. (2020). A branch of this research has developed into the Space+Dance+Digital (S+D2) AR choreography. which is underpinned by my interest in how digital space can create common spaces of co-creation without leaving the felt embodied experience on the sidelines. In other words, I am working with the Place-making opportunities extended reality (XR) can offer us in moving together across physical boundaries, in how dance-arts can continue to support us in practicing for co-created futures.
My research-based choreographic inquiry in this area includes Narrating Spaces a collection of Place-based dance-research projects Untitled: women’s work [Flint, USA], Undercurrents: Flint Water Dances [Flint, USA] Global Water Dance Deptford [London, UK], Movements, Narratives and Meanings: Border Identities [Enniskillen and Belfast, NI], Choreographing the Campus at MIT [Cambridge, USA] as well as written publications that include:
Dancing Place: Scores of the City and Scores of the Shore, Intellect Books, University of Chicago Press. Akinleye, A. and H. Kindred. (forthcoming, 2025).
Choreography & Architecture: Compositions in the Place. In Vicky Hunter, Cathy Turner (Eds.), Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance. (pp.) Routledge. Akinleye, A. (2025)
Fearless Belonging and river-me. In Sondra Fraleigh, Shannon Rose Riley (Eds.), Geographies of Us: Ecosomatic Essays and Practice Pages (pp. 225-241). Routledge. Akinleye, A. (2024).
Marking the Moment: documenting dance in coloured water, flesh, sand, and charcoal. Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 15 (2), Akinleye, A. (2023).
Navigations: scoring the moment London: Theatrum Mundi. Akinleye, A. (2022).
Dance, Architecture, and Engineering. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Akinleye, A. (2021).
archiving with bare feet
As my notion of the specificity of Place challenges time/space as disembodied concepts there is a branch of interesting exploration about how we remember, how we move alongside past and future. This has led me into explorations into how we remember our dance making, our dance linages, and how our body-mind-environment are archives shaped by movement. Our movement and the residue it leaves in environment on bodies become frames for the future and present of dance. In 2024, I was commissioned by Siobhan Davis Studios to create an archive of a work that was only performed for a limited amount of time (in this case, 3 times). It can be found here: Archiving with Bare feet – the Archiving of performance work Truth & Transparency
This topic also raises community questions about how we remember the artists and teachers who shape or have shaped our creative landscapes. I have a particular interest in the lineages of teachers and performance companies that sit outside mainstream histories (but who are often related to my own dance lineages). This has led me to edit, curate, and contribute to the following published works:
(re:)claiming ballet. Bristol UK and Chicago USA: Intellect Books, University of Chicago Press. Akinleye, A. (Ed.). (2021).
Narratives in Black British Dance: Embodied Practices Palgrave Macmillan. Akinleye, A. (Ed.). (2018).
dance, young people and agency
Dance, Young People, and Creative Agency
My research in this area addresses agency and Place-making for young people and their families in public art experiences, particularly young people years 0-6. My research premise is that art-making can be a conduit for community participation and cultural inclusion for young people. This explores agency in identity-making and place-making through young people’s co-curation and co-creation of public art experiences. I ask:
How do children (particularly those from international diasporas) re–claim public space (such as museum/gallery spaces) and have a voice in the cultural curation of the city/town where they live?
How do we support and empower these young people in engaging with and voicing narratives of Self that authentically speak to their twenty-first-century circumstances?
I have developed a process of involvement of young people in research and development activities through artistic residencies in public schools or community centers. This is an exchange where young people and their families create their own artwork. After this phase, I work with professional artists to create a dance-based artwork that dialogues back with the art, relationships, and experiences a residency generates. This is then shared as performance for feedback with the community. After further choreographic development, the performance work is shared beyond the original community it is in dialogue with. This sharing is through national and international touring. This method has been used to create the interactive immersive performance works for children, ‘Rose’s Jingle Dress’, ‘Light Steps’, ‘Found’, and most recently ‘SPLASH!’.
Across October 2024 to April 2025, my company, DancingStrong Movement Lab., toured ‘SPLASH!‘, the immersive interactive dance performance work for young audiences about water and ecology, co-choreographed with Dr Helen Kindred. The research process of empowering voice, dialogue, and making outlined above takes several years to develop meaningful relationships; however, over the last ten years, my company, DancingStrong, has had four international tours of dance works for young audiences and their families (SPLASH!, Found, Light Steps, and Rose’s Jingle Dress). As well as tours, this work has led to films and written scholarly-reflection publications, which include:
For Kaydence and her cousins: health and happiness in cultural legacies and contemporary contexts. In Nancy Van Styvendale, J.D. McDougall, Robert Henry, Robert Alexander Innes (Eds.), The Arts of Indigenous Health and Wellbeing (pp. 60-75). University of Manitoba Press. Akinleye, A. (2021).
‘…wind in my hair, I feel a part of everywhere…’: Creating dance for young audiences narrates emplacement. Journal of Dance and Somatic Practices, 11 (1), 39 -47. Akinleye, A. (2019).
curriculum development and dance education
Curriculum development: shapes pathways that support dance as both a practice and a way of knowing. I have been a curriculum development consultant for over 20 years. This has also led to the dissemination of my pedagogical approach through lectures and talks, as well as publications that include:
The distance of education. In Karen Schupp (Ed.), Futures of Performance: The Responsibilities of Performing Arts in Higher Education (pp. 127-144). Routledge. Akinleye, A. (2024).
Finding a place for responsiveness, possibility and emergence in dance education assessment systems. In Noyale Colin, Catherine Seago, Kathryn Stamp (Ed.), Ethical Agility in Dance (pp. 68-80). Routledge. Akinleye, A. (2023).
Keeping movement at the centre as we dance into interdisciplinary research. In Rosemary Candelario, Matthew Henley (Ed.), Dance Research Methodologies Ethics, Orientations, and Practices (pp. 389-400). Routledge. Akinleye, A. (2023).
Dancing un-vsible bodies. In Pam Musil, Karen Schupp, Doug Risner (Eds.), Dancing Across the Lifespan: Negotiating Age, Place, and Purpose (pp. 113-128). Palgrave Macmillan. Akinleye, A. (2022).
Play: ‘ideas are statements not of what is or what has been but of acts to be performed’. In Bacon, J., Hilton, R., Kramer, P., Midgelow, V. (Eds.), Researching (in/as) Motion: A Resource Collection, Artistic Doctorates in Europe, Series: Nivel – Artistic Research in the Performing Arts. Helsinki Online Open Assess: Theatre Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki. Akinleye, A. (2019).
PhD: Body, Dance and Environment: An exploration of embodiment and identity. (2012)
Canterbury Christ Church University, Centre for Sport, Physical Education and Activity Research (SPEAR),