Biography
Stuart Waters has been a successful performing artist and dance maker for 22 years working at the cutting edge of the devising processes and style of Protein Dance, Motionhouse and Wired Aerial Theatre.
As an integral member of these creative teams, he has been instrumental in realising these choreographic visions, intrinsically understanding the style and tone of each company’s work, involved in making seminal works that developed Dance Theatre and learning how to craft great theatrical works.
A key collaboration was with director Luca Silvistrini, contributing to the shows LOL and Border Tales. LOL toured worldwide, winning the National Dance Awards Best Independent Dance Company 2011 and British Council New Connections Award 2012. Border Tales toured nationally and finished at the Edinburgh Fringe where it received 5-star reviews.
Stuart was a student of Northern School of Contemporary Dance in 1998 and London School of Contemporary Dance where he studied for his MA and has been part of the One Dance UK mentorship programme. In 2011, he was awarded the Lisa Ullmann fund to travel to New York to train with Susan Klein.
In 2015 Stuart received support from Dancers’ Career Development to train as a Reiki Therapist, beginning Stuart’s journey into mental and emotional health safety. Dancers’ Career Development have since awarded Stuart further support (2020) for training in Human Givens (a model of psychotherapy) which Stuart uses as a frame work and reference for his own artistic practices.
2019 was a momentous year when, after 3 years of support from Dance East and Arts Council England, Stuart toured ROCKBOTTOM nationally. This was his first full evening work, and it had profound impact on audiences. Establishing his trademark humour and fearless storytelling, performances featured post-performance Q&A with support from local police and Samaritans as part of Stuart’s audience safeguarding practice. It was the first time he had worked with Audio Description and Captioning.
As part of this project, Stuart launched Head:On at The Place as a platform through which to discuss mental health safety within creation and performance.
In 2020 Stuart enjoyed further support from The Place when he was selected to be part of the Choreodrome programme. This research residency opportunity for established artists to explore new creative territory, with additional support from the Wellcome Collection, enabled Stuart to explore the concept ideas of A Queer Collision.
Further research was possible thanks to funding from Arts Council England which resulted in the initial draft of a duet with Audio Describer and performer Willie Elliott, in which the performers explored their personal histories within key moments in Queer history, and embedded audio description.
Stuart was awarded a Developing Your Creative Practice grant by Arts Council England in 2021, allowing time away from art-making to gain a global perspective to refining safe working practice to explore private autobiographical material with respectful curiosity. Stuart tested shareable methodologies for safe, accessible practices in studio settings with a diverse range of artists.
During this time, he worked with Viv Gordon to develop bespoke set of Head:On training which he has used to lead training with staff and students of a selection of dance colleges and conservatoires, and for mentoring artistic directors who wish to improve their creation process.
Later in 2021 Stuart worked with Unmute, the only full-time integrated company in South Africa on ‘Unmuting the Mental Health Conversation’ – funded with a British Council and Unlimited Micro Award. The latter part of 2021 was spent working on R&D for a major new project, again supported by Arts Council England.