A MANDALIC MOVEMENT - Camden Art Centre

with Millicent Hodson and Nissa Nishikawa

This clearing, offering, and calling activates three elements of the installation with martial and meditative movements.

‘This air moved us here
Being the space where we are
Lifting voices
Calls of relations
Seven drawings of the sword
And a serpent in tall sweet grass.
Sealing the stars
With lightning dividing our bodies
We close our eyes and watch the bolt.’

The Artists

The Artists

Millicent Hodson is a choreographer and a master of Chinese martial arts. Since 2002 she has directed her Hampstead School of Taiji, often presenting demonstrations of classic forms and weapons. Together with Kenneth Archer (Scenic Consultant and Art Historian), they reconstruct lost ballets and create new productions through Ballets Old & New, staging work worldwide with major ballet companies. Hodson and Archer write books and articles on dance/design and often collaborate on documentary dance films. One of many books, The Lost Rite, London (2014) with photographer Shira Klasmer, was translated into Russian by the Vaganova Academy, St Petersburg. She and Archer have published Balanchine’s Twenties; five bijoux books on their reconstructions of his early ballets (2019-2021). In 2022 at The Place, London, they held an exhibition and released the catalog Dance Detectives Diary: photographs by Shira Klasmer of Hodson’s sculptures on lost ballets with texts by Archer.

Hodson has received various choreography and writing grants and awards from US National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, New York University’s Center for Ballet and the Arts, BBC Music and Monaco, Biarritz and Positano Festivals, to name a few.