Esme Rocha-Benjamin

Esme Rocha-Benjamin is a researcher and movement artist who investigates the body and its place in the world. Esme began her journey at Dixon Woods School of Dance, later training professionally at London Studio Centre gaining a BA in Dance Theatre with a Contemporary Dance focus, and going on to do a Master’s Degree in Dance & Somatic Wellbeing: Connections to the Living Body at UCLAN. For the last fifteen years, Esme has performed and taught both nationally and internationally and is currently an associate artist for Movement Angol, under the guidance of Black British Dance Pioneer Francis Angol, as well as physical theatre company Babel Theatre.

 

Esme's work delves into themes of queerness and heritage, intertwining Contemporary African and European dance, Physical Theatre, embodied movement approaches, and poetry. Through performance-making, teaching, and research, she is keenly interested in the meeting places of the personal, social, creative, and theoretical. Esme is about to embark on a Practice Research PhD funded by the AHRC (Midlands-4-Cities) at the Centre for Dance Research in Coventry, focusing on a Choreographic Practice of disorder. This research aims to explore how the mixed-heritage queer body, through creative practice, can transform the perception of borderlands and disorder from a place of burden into a realm of possibility.