Belonging (in The Hop)
Belonging (in the Hop) was commissioned by the Hayward Gallery, Southbank as a response to Jyll Bradley’s The Hop, Summer 2022.
I created this work as an invitation for audience members to experience Jyll Bradley’s The Hop as a threshold space. Firstly, a space between present and past – its homage to the hop pickers (immigrant workers) who traveled from London’s East End to Kent every summer. Also a threshold place between being present in the city and dancing through the city. Lastly, I was choreographing considering the threshold experience of immigration, to arrive by having to leave.
The accompanying music was live data collection from a hop plant being fed through a synthesizer as we danced. The plant responded to the environment and us, and thus was dancing with us in sound.
Program notes: “You’re invited to stand and sit at marked places in and around the pavilion to view the performance.
Belonging (in The Hop) explores The Hop pavilion as a threshold space that is both an entrance and an exit. ‘Going on the hop’ from London to Kent was to share the experience of simultaneously arriving and leaving: leaving the city while arriving in Kent. In this dance, The Hop becomes a prolonged act of passage that shapes multiple ways of belonging to the city and the fields.”
Created by artist Jyll Bradley, The Hop tooks its inspiration from the thousands of working class families from Lambeth who travelled away from the pollution of London for a working holiday in the Kentish hop fields. Bringing in the hop harvest – or ‘hopping’ – was hard manual labour, but it was also a transformative time away from city life, and a space for new experiences and new relationships.
Bradley’s commission echoes the geometry of Kent’s unique hop growing structures, designed to expose the crop to the maximum amount of sunlight.
Belonging (in The Hop) was realised with the generous support of David Maclean.
Dancers: Adesola Akinleye, Ofelia Balogun, Aaliyah Dawkins, Aisha Sanyang-Meek & Cheniece Warner. (DancingStrong Movement Lab.) performed to live synthesized feedback from a hop plant.
Choreographer Adesola Akinleye has created a series of dance performances in response to the Hayward Gallery’s new interactive pavilion, Jyll Bradley’s The Hop.
This work is linked to the later community project, Re-Membering The Hop
Related texts
Chapter: Choreography and Architecture: Compositions in This Place.
In this chapter in The Routledge Companion to Site-Specific Performance (2025) edited by Victoria Hunter and Cathy Turner, I discuss the creative processes I used when making work for The Hop.
Running and Returning
Running and Returning is the first comprehensive monograph of internationally acclaimed artist Jyll Bradley, whose diverse practice spans over four decades and encompasses photography, film, writing, performance, sculpture and large-scale public installations. I contributed a short essay-poem about The Hop
About the Book: A pioneer of adopting commercial lightbox technology in art, Bradley is renowned for her use of minimalist, industrial forms as spaces for exploring identity, spirituality and community. Her ambitious public realm artworks, such as Green/Light (for M.R.) (Folkestone Triennial), Dutch/Light (Turner Contemporary) and The Hop (Hayward Gallery), reflect her innovative approach to sculpture as a potent gathering place of people and ideas.
This richly illustrated book features some of the most exciting voices in contemporary art and literature exploring every aspect of Bradley’s multifaceted practice. Running and Returning will provide a vital resource for those familiar with Bradley’s work, while introducing her to new audiences in an accessible, engaging and imaginative way.