In 2007, Mark Edward & Company successfully applied for Research and Development funding from Edge Hill University and the Arts Council of England to promote the company and allow the artists time to explore and experiment with various arts forms and challenge perceptions around the dancing body. Previous funding has come from North West Arts Board, Dance North West (Pivot Commission) and European Regional Development Funds (ERDF), Jump Start, Creative Industries and private funding. The research and development period allowed the artists valuable creative time and space to explore new ways of moving through artistic collaboration, devising new methodologies for creating original and thought provoking works that encourage participation and cross fertilisation of art forms.

Throughout my career I have been resolutely committed to my ongoing professional development, seeking deeper understanding of the ‘landscape of my discipline’ and how best to communicate this most effectively to others. Recent professional development has been the successful award of a bursary from the Leverhulme Trust to enable me to participate in a range of dance intensives over a 12 month period. These sessions have included improvisation, contact and release based workshops, Limon techniques from the director of the Limon Centre in NY, choreographic laboratory, aerial dance with the use of harnesses and Skinner Releasing intensive course. The learned material has been further disseminated into the wider community arena.

Marks research is concerned with dancer as a whole that fully inhabits their bodies, creating a seamless whole between the dancer and the dance and debating the notion of an authentic self? Can we attribute and develop this to a kind of somatic intelligence or are the embodied forms of past dance techniques, socio cultural impact values there as a physical imprint and in some cases physical scarring?

Throughout my experience as a choreographic practitioner and dance educator I have developed a philosophy which emphasises the notion of an integrated curriculum and towards learning in a holistic fashion. Marks background in Dance, Live Art and Experimental Theatre, were He was taught by the original members of the renowned Wooster Group NY, has helped with the understanding and valued importance of a dance research that is not a stand alone (or strand alone) from other art forms. Mark favours a more hybrid or inter-disciplinary approach in order that an integrated practice can present ideas and knowledge not as isolated concepts, but rather as intertwined, contributing to all disciplines. I do not see myself as dance ‘expert’ producing body as instrument or tool. Rather, Mark prefers to assume dance ‘facilitator’ role allowing dance artists in my works to assume more active roles as co-contributors, authors and co-producers. Artists should be educated to be able to express themselves, and to use their communication skills in a variety of fields which may include professional dance but also education, social settings, health related areas, varied dancing communities and making waves in environmental settings.

From the outset, Mark strives for an ‘avoidance’ of reaching ‘goals’ preferring instead to develop appropriate materials for individual needs that raise technical and personal integrity to an art form. Such thinking reflects a deep seated belief as a dance educator that our bodies belong to us, not the dance; the body is constantly shifting and evolving through space and time.  Thus, Mark seeks to promote an environment where the notion of a lived/migrating body (of knowledge) can be explored and interrogated to allow for an individual journey that celebrates the physical and psychological marks of time. By doing so creativity is extracted out of the lived experience of people rather than from a studio based formula leading incontrovertibly towards the architecture of a perfect body as a ‘tool’ or ‘instrument’, more often than not causing long term hindrance to the individual and their progress.

In fostering connections and an awareness of the body as both a locus of change and a cultural agent which can shift its understanding in various contexts, the notions of fixed intellect, knowledge and identity and who owns these notions are also interrogated. As active listeners and participators in Marks dance sessions dance artists provide support by helping each other to clarify their understandings in the early stages of their investigations within my classes and choreographic workshops.

Changes of practice through reflection and collecting/analysing data from oneself and examining deep rooted beliefs is not always a smooth or seamless transition (Mark knows) as it requires major changes to learned theories and long standing embodied/arts/practices. In dance this is more difficult due to the physical and psychological dualism that has become embodied into the fleshy (body) agent. Hence Mark current research around the re-languaging of the body and embodied arts.

More recently I have been engaged in a series of research and professional development on a practice as research project focusing on the evolving body, becoming a figure of parody in Falling Apart at the Seams.