Yewande 103
Alexandrina Hemsley, Yewande 103, Fountain, 2022
Founder Alexandrina Hemsley started Yewande 103 in 2020 as a container for their established creative practice and to formalise and expand their values of care, support and connection.
Yewande is Alexandrina's middle name. It means, 'mother has returned’. There is a tender determination and commitment to both uphold and further understand intergenerational, cyclical patterns of expression and repair. The company’s ethos blooms around an evolving central question of how to return to intimacy within continual, systemic harms.
Through the connective tissues of dance, writing, film, collage and poetry, Yewande 103 enables Alexandrina to resource, process, explore, share and advocate for multiple ways of embodied being. She sees her company as a canopy under which lived experience is the guide for making. There is an interdisciplinary approach that underpins what she creates, be that performances, texts, workshops or other holding spaces. Hers is a lifelong work, forever shaped by profound processing and the seeking out of reparative, embodied alternatives after/alongside violences of racism, misogyny, inadequate care and institutional failings of arts and healthcare sectors.
Alexandrina works in close partnership with Executive Producer Nancy May Roberts, Metal & Water, reflecting the sensibilities of our overlapping practices. We are driven to enliven choreographic spaces, develop discourse and create atmospheres for movement based, access-led practice across dance, arts and mental health.
Many Lifetimes
2024
Alexandrina Hemsley (Concept, choreography, direction, design), Chiron Stamp (Technical Lead and Scenography Co-Design), Abiola Onabule (Costume Design), Bianca Wilson (Sound Design & Composition), Alice Tatge, Rudzani Moleya, Rickay Hewitt-Martin (Dance Movement Collaborators), Angel Dust ( Rehearsal Director), Nancy May Roberts, Elsabet Yonas, Metal & Water (Production)
"I am offering a collective moment to witness solos pass between performers. An invitation to hold one another in our watching and our changing. To allow the detail of dancing, the hum and thud of heartbeats, the gentle transformations, the developing of constellations both bodily and cosmic.
Outside, there is a sudden, huge downpour. I am editing a poem and thinking through a new dance work. I am thinking through layers of change whether profound, minor, shocking, wanted. I am again drawn to flooding, being flooded, again sensitive and re-sensitising. I am again wondering about spilling but about gathering too.
My heart. The Ocean. Everywhere splinters.
An image I keep returning to within grief, is to hold my broken heart splinters in an expansive, new network so the task is less about mending and more about holding these pieces suspended in space, as they are; a net of grief and a net of love."
Many Lifetimes is a new live work in the round by Yewande 103 building on our body of work exploring dynamic cycles of loss and healing through watery symbolism.
All under a melting canopy.
Collage by Alexandrina Hemsley