Is there an art to seeking out the hidden gems of London - especially around Elephant and Castle? How can we discover the wonderful curiosities and moments of beauty that we so often miss from right under our nose?

Strolling away from that busy, iconic roundabout, down St George's Road, you’d be forgiven for missing the home of the highly respected arts organisation - Siobhan Davies Dance. At number 85 you’ll find a hotbed of talent, fizzing with creativity. Their website explains they’re ‘an investigative arts organisation that stimulates new thinking based on a more contemporary definition of choreography.’ For anyone curious about dance taking an unexpected step-change - this is exciting stuff! OK. I digress. Let me get back on track. Seeking out other hidden gems, wonderful curiosities and moments of beauty…

Choreographer and Artist Amy Harris has been part of Siobhan Davies Dance yearlong course for 14-21 year olds Next Choreography since September 2014. As part of the Next Choreography Festival, she’s devised a new work that quite literally challenges the road map as we know it. Google Maps, ciao! Imagine a new form of mapping, with drawings and sounds - encouraging you to stop rushing, slow down and really soak up the landscape. Pause for a moment. Be mindful. Relish your senses. Here lays the beauty of this simple and abstract experience. Of course, there’s more to it than meets the eye, as Amy explains below.

The work is titled A Re-Search and will be presented at the Next Choreography Festival at Siobhan Davies Studios on Saturday, 4 July.

The festival explores choreography through live performance, installation, film, exhibitions, talks and participatory events including a performance by choreographer Robbie Synge, a dance writing workshop with Sanjoy Roy, film screenings co-curated by artist Lucy Cash, and much more.

As a performer and artist in her last year of contemporary dance training at London Contemporary Dance School Amy has performed in a range of productions, from immersive theatre and open-air pieces to more conventional contemporary dance works by choreographers such as Akram Khan, Rafael Bonachela, Richard Alston and Hofesh Shechter.

Here, Amy tells us about getting into dance, her work, moving to Copenhagen, European beer, deep fried mozzarella sticks and other cliche-busting facts about being a 20-year old choreographer and artist. After all, she is emerging from this investigative arts organisation having torn up a metaphorical map. Here comes the contemplative trailblazer!

RR: What was your first taste of dance?
Amy Harris: It was when ballet dancers from a Royal Opera House scheme called Chance to Dance came to my primary school when I was seven. I was in awe of how high the guy could lift the woman! Luckily for me, I got through the audition process and so danced with them for 4-years. A lovely lady called Iris Tomlinson later convinced me to try contemporary dance and now I'm the one lifting my partner, whether they're male or female. I got to perform in a series of shows for The Place's 40th anniversary in 2010 and that's what made me realise I'd love to train and perform professionally.

RR: Should more people dance?
Amy: Yes, namely my boyfriend! It's been 5-years and he's danced with me TWICE! British people frustrate me with their unwillingness to dance, which is why I wish my family were Latino. I love going to salsa bars because everyone likes dancing for dancing's sake, everyone enjoys it and lot of people can move!

RR: How did you get involved with Siobhan Davies Dance Next Choreography Festival?
Amy: I had been interested in the work of Siobhan Davies Dance for ages so when I saw the new yearlong course for 14-21 year olds (called Next Choreography) I knew it was something I wanted to go for. I thought, ‘I’ll apply but I probably won't get it!’ So I was over the moon and felt extremely lucky that I was accepted. The festival is a culmination of the yearlong course and gives us an opportunity to present our highlights from the year and show some of our own work we’ve created for the festival. We’ve also invited back some of the artists we met and worked with during the year to help co-curate and show some of their own work. For example we’ve worked with the artist and filmmaker Lucy Cash to curate a series of films using themes of space, time and energy, and we’ve also invited choreographer Robbie Synge to perform his work Douglas.  

RR: Tell us about your work, A Re-Search.
Amy: It’s an exhibition of two abstract maps which invites the audience to look closer at the area and landscape surrounding Siobhan Davies Studios.

The piece started with me inviting some friends to take a walk around the area, the epicentre being Siobhan Davies Studios. They knew the area, but had commonly passed it off as polluted, with lots of traffic and busy roads so commonly associated with Elephant & Castle. While they took the time to travel slower, reading the landscape and noticing its details, I created a way for them to record the locations and details that caught their attention. The resulting drawings show the spatial tendencies and disparities of the locations of interest in the area. Both maps are abstract - one of the maps is pictorial and one is verbal. The pictorial one is quite large and simple, the second is made up of each of the participants' handwritten descriptions so that whilst they're organised by distance, the viewer has to come close to read the descriptions. At the festival there will also be packs for viewers to take away to do their own walks and create mini artworks.

I decided to title it A Re-Search because I've found such depth in being able to re-search and re-appreciate the land around me that I wanted to be able to create this experience for others and find out if it was even interesting for other people.

The work is influenced by the writing of Guy Debord and Robert Macfarlane, who are both passionate about the importance of and the benefits of spending time in and really seeing a landscape. I feel that this is a greater challenge in a city like London, where capitalism and our 'don't fail' culture leads us to live such fast, busy, overstimulated lives that we can spend everyday just rushing from one thing to the next. You never really slow down to notice the beautiful small details and occurrences that are around you.

RR: What do you want the audience to take away from A Re-Search?
Amy: I want them to question the partial nature of the pervasive road map. It's by far the most common form of map. It's of course very useful, but I feel it's important to challenge the way that it misses out a lot of things because it has a monopoly on our perception of land. Not only do we miss out topographical details of the wildness of landscapes like tors, caves, springs etc, but it’s also interesting to ask, 'what if we were to map a landscape through its sound, or by animal tracks instead of human roads, or, as I have done in this work, through personal attractions and miniature details?'

The simplest answer to this question is that I just want to inspire the viewers to leave the building with more open eyes and ears so that we stop missing the beautiful details on our journeys.

RR: The project ends soon - what will you take away from it?
Amy: So much! It's really helped me form a practice for myself and to gain a stronger familiarity with my interests and the ideas that influence me. Before this course, I didn't have much confidence in the legitimacy of my ideas, but through the diverse range of people that have come in to give workshops and the depth of their interests, it has given me confidence that my work has a place.

I have really enjoyed meeting artists with so many different interests and expertise, like Ruth Little who is a Dramaturg, Emma Gladstone who is the Director of Dance Umbrella, and Siobhan Davies. Choreography was important common ground for each of them and their approach, and use of it has triggered me to delve into my own practice.

I'm now really determined to carry on researching and making. It's been amazing to work with Charlotte Spencer, the course leader, as we're both curious about a lot of the same things and she is a very inspiring woman for the work that she fights to make and her eagerness to involve people in a collaborative way of making a piece. In terms of longevity I think that a lot of us will stay connected to, and work with, each other and hopefully the organisation. It's been a great start to my work as an artist.

RR: Summer 2015 - you’re showing work at the home of one of the UK’s leading arts organisations, and you’re coming to the end of your training at London Contemporary Dance School. What next?
Amy: I wish I could go on a food pilgrimage around Europe and then hibernate through winter. Instead I'm moving to Copenhagen in August to study until January at the Danish National School of Performing Arts. I'm looking forward to it. Danish people seem a lot friendlier than the English - despite ‘The Killing’ - and I'm finally living the dream of living somewhere else in Europe with lots of beer.

RR: Being a dancer you must be pretty healthy - what’s your favourite recipe at the moment?
Amy: Well, I recently acquired a deep fat fryer. So, deep fried mozzarella sticks, triple cooked chips, deep fried prawns. You get the jist. Not so healthy.

Though I just found this thing called Birch Water - who even knew that it existed!? But it’s really tasty... and healthy.

RR: Could you treat our readers to a bite-sized Amy Harris 'London anecdote'?
Amy: My routes are South East London. It's epic for many reasons. For example on the bus I used to get to school, the driver would stop off to get a meal at McDonalds whilst all the passengers sat and waited! On Rye Lane we have the most wig shops and the most churches all on one street in Europe, leading to tumbleweave often getting stuck in my bike wheels. Also, I used to work at the local youth club - and what I loved about it is I'd get all these boys arriving acting tough, to then leave later all proud about the fairy cakes they'd made with me!

Next Choreography Festival
Free One-Day Festival Celebrating Choreography and the Arts
Saturday, 4 July 2015, 12–8.30PM
Siobhan Davies Studios
85 St George's Road
London SE1 6ER
siobhandavies.com
Next Choreography blog

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Images: Euan Robinson