Alumni-led company Gracefool Collective has successfully secured a unique commission through King’s Culture, a specialist team which works across King’s College London to facilitate cultural collaborations for research, impact and education.
King’s Culture recently launched a seed fund initiative aimed at researchers across King’s College London to enable the development of creative projects in collaboration with artists.
Gracefool Collective was selected to work on a research project with Dr Andrew McWilliams, Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Researcher and Specialist Registrar. The project will explore the nuances of decision-making processes between children and adults. Through this partnership, Gracefool Collective aims to bring an artistic perspective to the research, enriching the exploration with creative insights and methodologies.
Building on Gracefool Collective’s experience, contacts and resources for creating collaborative community dance projects, an initial research and development phase will involve engaging existing community participants in a series of interviews and workshops exploring responsibility, consent and decision-making physically and creatively, through movement tasks and oral conversation.
For the 2024/25 academic year, King’s Culture is developing a season of public engagement activities centred around the theme of Sanctuary. The season will run across public-facing spaces on the Strand in central London and include creative commissions, student activity and a range of events aimed at engaging diverse communities and exploring the theme of sanctuary from multidisciplinary perspectives.
Gracefool Collective is known for its innovative and bold approach to performance art, often blending humour, debate and social commentary. Formed in 2013 by a group of five friends who met here at NSCD, the group strived to find a model of collaboration which did not rely on one person to drive the collective vision; but rather support and champion each other to follow their own path. There are currently two lead artists – Kate Cox and Rachel Fullegar, who also worked as a Lecturer in Dance at NSCD from 2015 - 2024.
Rachel Fullegar said:
“We are extremely excited about this commission as collaborating across disciplines and approaches is something that has always enriched our ideas and practice. We look forward to Dr McWilliam’s research providing a new angle into movement and co-creation, as well as encouraging us to interrogate our artistic practice from an entirely different perspective. It will also allow us to expand our own artistic research to incorporate current cultural questions being explored by society, that are relevant to the way we as Gracefool work with our community participants.”
