“All art has the potential to be an act of quiet, or noisy, activism”
Janice Parker is an award-winning independent artist and choreographer, who over the past 40 years has created a vast body of work. Based in Edinburgh, Scotland, working locally and internationally, her primary passions are: to develop and strengthen each person’s innate and unique movement potential; to create art works that deepen our potential to feel, think, imagine and question; and to strive for a more just world through personal, collective and cultural change.
Starting out in the late 70’s Janice was part of the then radicle and new practice of Community Dance. She is known for her collaborations with people, of different ages and abilities, from all walks of life, many of whom are new to dance, mixing together the community and the professional dance worlds, regarding them with equal value. She became a significant driving force in the development and prominence of disability-led arts practice.
Janice brings dance and people together in different ways, spaces and places, often working outwith the main-stream developing partnerships and collaborations, with individuals and with organisations. Her way of working is responsive, co-created and collaborative. Each process is unique to the people, place and the context surrounding it. Passionate and detailed, Janice holds space for people, listens, guides and facilitates, creating agency in people as movers, thinkers and makers. The politics of care and resistance are intertwined within her art making .
Her art sits across a variety of mediums, often changes in form, is propositional and can last anything from a few minutes to a number of years. She makes live performance, film, publications, installations, text based work, gatherings and events, sometimes involving a few hundred people and sometimes only one. Her work has been on mainstages, art galleries, living rooms, museums, libraries, offices, fields, village halls, public parks, health centres, gardens, buses, factories, hotels, historic houses, canals, care homes and dance halls, and might involve a few hundred people or be an intimate solo. She also develops projects, leads workshops and residencies, hosts, is a generous teacher and mentor, gives talks and lectures, occasionally writes and has recently started to perform.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic she has worked in collaboration with the land, in particular green-space within the city that she lives. Her outdoor daily live practice, duets with nature, is open to everyone, and works to create resilience, resource, courage, sanctuary and belonging in people and communities. This quiet act of resistance against the gentrification and commodification of the ways that we’re allowed to move is, at its heart, a desire to bring people into a deeper connection with their agency and capacity for movement, with our co-existance with nature, land, weather and each other.
Her work has been recently commissioned by Neccessity Social Justice Network, The Edinburgh Art Festival, The Edinburgh International Festival, the Travelling Gallery and the Collective Gallery in Edinburgh. Janice is currently working with visual arist Emmie McLuskey to create an A-Z of Movement in book form and through a series of open workshops.
In 2005 Janice was awarded a Creative Scotland Award; in 2010 her work Private Dancer received a Herald Angel; and in 2018 she was inducted as an Outstanding Woman of Scotland by the Saltire Society. Janice was recently a Trustee of Luminate: Scotland’s Creative Ageing Organisation.
Do be in touch if you are interested in any of Janice’s work or in working together
Thank-you for visiting