Watson & Woodvine in NPAFE’s words….

Watson & Woodvine in rehearsal

…Oh! If it only happened more often than it actually does. Two dancers with a sixth sense for choreography as well as dance show up at the same workshop in London. They don’t know one another, the class begins, ends, and they come back the next day. And the next. And the next one after that, suddenly without any warning to be told by the teacher: You ought to be dancing together.

…More than that, he said, they should be creating together. Choreographing together.

@Andy Clist

…Surprise of surprises: they do! With the stellar result in London on February 23 & 24, 2024 in two back-to-back performances, Cydney Watson and Liam Woodvine brought the house down with their premiere of “Watson & Woodvine”, a matchless choreographic journey in which two truly gifted dance artists married precision of movement with the emotion of intimate harmony.

…The result? As few actually do in dance, Watson and Woodvine immediately broke through that fourth wall to touch the imagination of the 700 or so in the two audiences, every one of them breathlessly rapt by the beauty of it all.

@mikecooper_photographer

…There’s more than that to know about these two artists. Watson and Woodvine are as incredibly hardworking as they are creative. Brimming with the experience and excellence of training at the best schools from an early age, they’ve got that mysteriously special something stirring from within – and the courage to match – for exploring the outer limits of contemporary dance.

…Their intent is clear: not to stop there and instead to break past those boundaries, to step through an uncharted complex of trial and error testing, to merge their private thoughts, their private emotions, and their private sense of self into patterns that by movement of body alone tell a quite personal story of intimate closeness, no words needed or spoken.

@Andy Clist

…And what a story it is. Their backgrounds quite different, Watson being from Sussex and Woodvine boasting a rather unusual Barbados/British heritage with a healthy dose of Canada thrown in, these two dancer choreographers are determined to make their mark as much jointly as individually.

…More than that, they want to – and surely will – make sure that the world understands that their focus centers not only on the creation and performance of dance in live form but also by employing the special and still quite rare skill of choreographed videography.

Watson & Woodvine in rehearsal

…What does choreographed videography mean? Integrating the camerapeople literally as performers so that the video work product is unmistakably immersive, breaking through the fourth wall to wrap the viewer directly into the emotion of spellbinding dance movement.

…In fact, Watson and Woodvine are ahead of the game experimenting and defining how best to make that camera a dancer so that you, us, and millions more are mesmerized by the intimacy of immersive dance filmmaking.

…We could say lots more about Cydney Watson and Liam Woodvine. But now’s the time for you to explore their stills and videos, and to use these links to find out more about them.

…You’ll love that you did.

• Learn more about Watson & Woodvine on Instagram
• Follow these links to find out more about NPAFE, AAlchemy, and AAlchemy Online’s immersive dance videos.