A Year of SENSORIA

I can’t believe it’s been a year of SENSORIA. 

I mean technically it’s been more than a year. I pitched the SENSORIA: OUR HOUSE to East London Dance, two years ago in March 2022. But ended up having to leave the country due to my health. 

But it has been an effervescent and energetic year- filled with beautiful collaborators and co-creators and radical future imaginings. Honestly, from a place of being chronically ill - housebound and almost bed-bound for 3 years; this is a reality I could’ve never imagined.

Having a dedicated creative team behind me, funding to support us and to pour into our communities. Mentors, disabled trailblazers, chronically ill art curators and neurodiverse new-wave artists all coming together to paint our wildest dreams of access and infrastructures of care to be implemented into arts spaces. 

In the conversations I’ve had this year alone. It’s been brought to my attention the ABSOLUTE necessity that IS access work in the arts. And the disparity between the worlds we’ve lived in before without care, without accommodations made for us, without any awareness of fluctuations of our mental and physical health in this incredibly unstable/turbulent world.

Never before have I seen this work as more imperative. I see it as like the revolution within film, screen and acting around intimacy coordination.

Whereas before it wasn’t even a thought process and now it’s a given. That you’ll have a whole team or a singular intimacy coordinator on a job. I hope that in a year's time, in 2-3 years time, in 5 years time. It will be a stipulation of a contract, an expectation from artists and a built-in framework to ensure the safety, freedom of expression and creativity of artists across music and dance and much more. 

Not just to ensure their safety in the moment, but ongoing practices of care within the arts to ensure the sustainability of our future as a whole, as a collective. And our ability to express, educate and exchange with each other through everything.

Where SENSORIA originally came from was a piece I spent 5 years developing from 2018-2023 which had many iterations but was eventually performed at Streatham Space Project under the title “Where does the violence go?” with a beautiful multidisciplinary creative team. And I often say, if  “Where does the violence go?” Was the question- SENSORIA is the answer. This is because our work was looking at the cycles of violence in the creative industries and how we do or do not take responsibility for breaking them and how that inhibits the revolutionary actions of our art and how it transmutes across time. SENSORIA I hope is just PART of the antidote to solving that.

I’m sure you, like many others, are tired of hearing about, let alone experiencing the consistent waves of burnout. That seems epidemic or almost commonplace as we see the degradation of workers rights, systems of care diluting and our rights being stripped away due to late stage capitalism.

So I’ve never found it more essential to create spaces for joy, connection and sensory safety. So here’s to another year of creating radical access and safe and brave spaces for the disabled community. I’M SO excited for this journey so I hope you’re along for the ride.

— Words by Saskia Horton