Natifah White: Shared Shelves

Reciprocal Gestures: movement in dialogue is a two-day programme of expanded dance and movement, gathering artists and communities to explore the sustaining and transformative potential of movement-based practices.   

Artist Natifah White presents Shared Shelves, a pop-up library gathering a community-sourced collection of reading materials and (re)sources including dance/movement scores, digital works, books and more. 

Starting with the question: What does it mean to be addressed? This acts as an organising principle for the library and as a response to the festival's theme of dialogues/duets/conversation. Inspired by traditions of call and response, the materials gathered here each carry their own form(s) of address. In this way, the reading room plays with expanded forms of reading and how this could be explored across different form(at)s. 

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About the artist 

Natifah White is a Nottingham-based dance artist currently applying movement principles to reimagine archive and library systems. She describes her work as a referential web spanning performance (credits include: Seke Chimutengwende, Florence Peake, SERAFINE 1369 and Elinor Lewis/ Joe Garbett) and a personal practice based on guiding questions. 

A question anchoring her work right now is: How do we take the immaterial into the material? (ref. Joseph Zeal-Henry). She uses this to reimagine archive/library systems, thinking about how these structures might be experienced and circulated through movement and collective care. Her approach is relational - she's interested in learning from others, building on existing practices, and finding ways to carry that work forward. 

These enquiries extend into her digi-practice, 'thisishappening', which experiments with archiving as an "amplifying practice", using crediting, repeating, and sharing as "strategies of solidarity".