Another year has flown by and we are starting our DanceEast Centre for Advanced Training (CAT) students’ Spring Intensive! Over their Spring and Summer Intensives, the CAT students have the chance to work with professional companies and choreographers to develop pieces for the CAT End of Year Show, which this year takes place on Saturday 2 August 2025.
This year’s choreographers are:
- Alleyne Dance with EncoreEast
- Ceyda Tanc Dance
- Yukiko Masui
- Jess and Morgs
- Hofesh Shechter Company
- Far From the Norm
- Motionhouse
ALLEYNE DANCE WITH ENCOREEAST
Alleyne Dance are working on an intergenerational dance piece with some of our CAT students and members of EncoreEast. Dancers in this piece will range from the age of 10 to 83 years old.
Alleyne Dance is a UK based company with an international reach, founded in 2014 by award-winning dancers and twin sisters Kristina and Sadé Alleyne. The choreographic aesthetic reflects the sisters diverse background in athleticism and dance training. Within their abstract contemporary construct, Alleyne Dance blend West African, Caribbean, Hip Hop, Kathak and Circus Skills, delivered as fast paced and dynamic movement. They infuse lyrical and fluid motion, layered with rhythm and textures in physically powerful, yet graceful performances.
EncoreEast is a performance company of older dancers, dedicated to redefining ageing through dance. They create and perform in traditional and site-specific spaces for live, screen and online audiences, striving for artistic innovation and excellence. Committed to accessibility and inclusivity, they challenge perceptions of ageing whilst providing opportunities for professional artists to teach, create and exchange knowledge.
CEYDA TANC DANCE
Led by British-Turkish choreographer Ceyda Tanc, the company creates athletic contemporary dance influenced by Tanc’s Turkish heritage. Ceyda’s work seeks to challenge traditional gender representation in dance and highlight the intersection of cultures in modern Britain, embedding themes of feminism, ritual and ceremony. Ceyda Tanc Dance creates work that is accessible, enjoyable and empowering for audiences from all backgrounds.
With community and participation at the core of Ceyda’s practice, she has created numerous commissioned works for youth groups and under/post graduate companies, and delivered on CAT schemes nationally (The Place, FABRIC, DanceEast).
YUKIKO MASUI
Yukiko Masui is a Tokyo-born choreographer and movement director, blending multiple art forms and dance styles to create unique and joyful work.
Her journey began in Tokyo with Hip Hop and Ballroom Latin before moving to London in 2008 to study Contemporary Dance at Trinity Laban, where she received the Sylvia Bodmer Memorial Fund Award. She later joined Transitions Dance Company, earning an MA in Dance Performance.
A recipient of DanceXchange’s Choreography Award, Yukiko was mentored by Akram Khan Company through Sky Arts. She co-founded SAY in 2020 with Sarah Golding and is an Associate Artist at The Place and DanceEast.
JESS AND MORGS
Jessica Wright and Morgann Runacre-Temple – collectively known as JESS AND MORGS – are award-winning directors, choreographers and filmmakers, making multidisciplinary work together for over fifteen years. Their work has been programmed internationally across multiple performance venues including Edinburgh International Festival, Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Venice Biennale and has been featured on Channel 4, BBC iPlayer, Canal + and at TATE Liverpool.
Specialising in live cinematic dance, JESS AND MORGS push the boundaries of technology in live performance, offering audiences an immersive experience that blurs the lines between reality and fiction. Their productions integrate technology as both medium and subject matter, contributing to broader discussions around technology, AI, and media and the benefits and issues we face as a society with ever-advancing technological possibilities.
HOFESH SHECHTER COMPANY
Founded in 2008, Hofesh Shechter Company is a boundary-breaking dance company that produces exceptional work, created by Artistic Director Hofesh Shechter, and plays in cities all around the world. DanceEast is partnered with Hofesh Shechter Company engaging with local communities, the DanceEast CAT, and is the Dance Hub for the company’s talent development programme, Shechter II.
Hofesh Shechter Company will be working with our graduate students on a 20-minute re-staging of Grand Finale with original cast members Rachel Fallon and Erion Kruja. Grand Finale was created in 2017 by Hofesh Shechter, for his company of 10 dancers, and toured internationally for the following three years. It has been restaged on repertoire companies ever since.
FAR FROM THE NORM
Established in May 2009 in a youth club in Dagenham, Hip Hop Theatre company Far From the Norm was founded by Artistic Director Botis Seva (then 19) and is a collective of artists renowned for experimenting with Hip Hop and Contemporary practice. It was, and remains, a collective of creatives thinking about creativity and moving in a different way to what was considered the norm.
Joshua Shanny Wynters will be working with the CAT students during their intensives. He joined the Far From the Norm family in 2023, working on both touring productions of BLKDOG and Until We Sleep and continues to build his collective ‘Sansetsukon’ with two of his closest friends.
MOTIONHOUSE
Internationally renowned dance-circus company Motionhouse was founded by Louise Richards and Kevin Finnan in 1988 and is one of the UK’s busiest touring companies. Pioneers in their field, Motionhouse creates awe-inspiring dance-circus productions that tour across the globe, performing each year to over 120,000 people in theatres and at outdoor events.
Motionhouse integrates contact choreography and breath-taking dance with circus and acrobatics to create the distinctive style that they are known for. They create spectacles where emotive sound scores, incredible digital imagery, dance, and powerful physicality work together to create shows that surprise, delight and inspire audiences.
Blair Moore will be working with the CAT students during their intensives and joined Motionhouse as a full-time company member in January 2024.
If working with world-class professional dance artists sounds like something you’d like to experience, we are currently recruiting for new students to join the DanceEast CAT in September 2025. If you’d like to find out more about training on the CAT programme and to apply, visit our webpage here.
