Reflections on Returning to the Arts, July 2026

It's July 2026 and I am starting a series of monthly reflections. I hope you enjoy them.

It has been over a year since I left academia and returned to the arts industry. It has been exciting as well as overwhelming. I am not a stranger to doing many different types of work — dramaturgy, teaching, performing, consultancy, research. What is new is becoming an independent artist - Making my own performances alongside, freelancing and founding an organisation. Marketing is a new frontier as well. Working for myself now, is a very different beast to what it was before I started my M.A in the 2005 after which I worked mainly in education and consultancy for over 10 years. I worked as a freelance artist for a long time. I however am rather new as an independent artist. It feels back to front and yet the right way up.

A joy of starting this phrase is that I can return to things that I have left behind; performance poetry, storytelling, improvised dance, creative writing, journalism, reading books for the fun of it. And look into interests I never fully explored like my love for design. There is not a lot of time to try things out but there are moments the midst of things where I get to try something for pleasure, even if only for 10 minutes and it is amazing what vistas that can open up.

A high point, if not the highpoint, of the first six months of this year was making a piece I called New Season for a charity, Morphe Arts, a network for artists who are Christians. It gave me the space to create something that was personal, not about my advocacy work, which was deeply satisfying. I performed it at the organisations National conference in May.

New Season is part testimony, part physical performance, built around the idea of my personal "grace space", a metaphor for prayer. I move between spoken reflection, drama, and structured improvised dance to trace a single emotional arc: a health diagnosis forces me to reckon with stress, ageing, and mortality, which I initially try to solve practically ("lifestyle change") before realising the deeper answer is spiritual. The improvisations function as embodied thinking — the "stress loop" physicalises my rumination, while the dance sequence, triggered by putting on the dress from the suitcase, recovers a childhood memory of moving from England to Nigeria, where dance became a way for me to belong without language. That memory becomes the emotional and thematic hinge of the piece: dance is reframed not as escape but as a form of prayer and healing.

The dynamics in this piece are the dynamics shaping my approach to being a performer this time around. It has a lot to do with slowing down inside even though I moving at great speed from one location to another, one project to another, one story to another...