MATTHEW HAWKINS – READY

“an intense, hour-long masterpiece of control and deep focus” 
Morning Star

Seemingly freeform but composed of subtly repetitive patterns and gestures READY is an intense hour-long solo dance of deep-focus and intimate humour.

In READY Matthew Hawkins holds his audience poised in a deceptively gentle invitational space. He needs witnesses and they, in the push and pull of his guiding of their attention, progressively come to need him.

READY is born out of strategies for survival as a dancer during lockdown – a key moment for the notion of art that, needs must, shaped-up unbidden.

“READY emerged out of a need to maintain and demonstrate good things about dancing: negotiating cherished actions across time and against perceived physical odds.  The choreography references moments from my practice, finding its form via bold gesture in busy multi-use public spaces, before being honed in intense privacy.” M H

READY has been trialled in galleries, gardens and ‘meanwhile’ spaces such as shopping malls; its soundworld comprises ten recordings of Beethoven Piano sonatas, adopted individually on a given day, thanks to a trusty boxed set of CDs. Uncovered during a break between covid lockdowns, nestling pristine in the overlooked collection of a long deceased relative, Hawkins’ integration of the discs and their story fosters undertow and poetic thinking.

“Your dancing is superb – so clear and broad and generous.  I was very moved by the exploration of the dance in your dancing and teaching body… the reality and imagination and care needed to become a dancer; the story of the exploration of the dancer and the dance.”
Siobhan Davies on READY

BIO

Matthew Hawkins is Edinburgh based. His practice includes teaching within the community programme at Dance Base and lecturing at Glasgowclyde college. As a member of In the Making collective Matthew collaborates in score-based improv performances. He performs with orchestras in a work by Peter Nelson and gives READY at The Wee Hub in Ocean Terminal.

Like his close contemporary Jonathan Burrows, Matthew trained at the Royal Ballet School and danced in The Royal Ballet. Hawkins then danced for Richard Alston/Siobhan Davies/Ian Spink in Second Stride and for Michael Clark, in his initial eponymous troupe. Matthew has shown his own work since 1980 and has been active in professional and university settings internationally.

He is a published dance-writer, currently airing articles and reviews for The Morning Star, under the byline Follow the Movement.

“Hawkins moves instinctively, a constant shapeshifter, utilising every part of his statuesque form… Elegiac or playful; prone, flexing or swaying, he’s a bewitching dancer.

Matthew Hawkins is a genius, forever dissolving form and interrogating experimentation.”
Fjord Magazine